Scharlette came to us from the South in the early 1990s, and forever changed not just the way death penalty cases were litigated but for those lucky to work with and be mentored by her, how to confront injustice in all its forms while showing compassion for, as former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart put it, "the diverse frailties of humankind."
When challenging death penalty cases back then, we mostly poured over the thousands of pages of trial transcripts and made hyper-technical arguments about the trial judge's errors and the unfairness of the capital trial. Our focus was primarily on fashioning legal challenges to the sloppily-crafted death penalty statute (the Briggs Voter Initiative) that, together with misleading arguments by prosecutors, was confounding jurors who were charged with the impossible task of determining whether the death penalty was the appropriate penalty in a given case. But these efforts, which had been successful before a once open-minded California Supreme Court, were being met with increasing skepticism from an increasingly conservative Court. Then along came Scharlette.
She taught us to get out from behind our desks and to get into the field -- to sift through every piece of evidence with great skepticism and to challenge every aspect of the case -- even those (particularly those) that seemed iron clad and beyond dispute.
She taught us how to see each and every one of our clients as individuals, as human beings who were never the sum total of the worst things they had ever done. She demonstrated how we could not convey their humanity and convince judges and jurors to see them as uniquely individual people deserving of sympathy and mercy if we didn't see them that way ourselves.
She taught us the critical importance of story telling -- about changing the narrative that put these men and women on death row, to tell their compelling life stories not to provide an excuse but to provide an explanation for how they ended up where they did. And she taught us that these stories needed to be told not only with compassion but, more importantly, backed by facts -- through the exhaustive gathering and development of their family's history of poverty, discrimination, trauma, mental illness, and substance abuse -- and supported by experts in a wide and ever-evolving variety of disciplines.
She taught us to be humbled by the awesomeness of our task in fighting the seeming impregnable power of the state to kill. But, at the same time, and in stark contrast to the tenderness she exhibited towards her clients, she was brutally unforgiving of and contemptuous towards the prosecutors, judges, and compromised defense lawyers who as she put it, were trying to kill our clients.
And she taught us to never give up. Even when, especially when, a case was at its end, she would creatively find one more avenue that might conceivably garner a stay of execution, and she didn't stop until that horrible phone call came from the prison telling us it was over. And after absorbing the body blow of such an excruciatingly painful loss -- the loss of a truly loved client, the loss of a righteous and hard-fought legal case, and the loss of humanity -- she moved on to the next case and next client with the same relentless dedication and compassion but with new insights gained from the last one.
I'm no longer a full-time death penalty lawyer but the lessons I learned from Scharlette go well beyond litigating death penalty cases. Her irreverence, self-effacing humor, brilliance, sensitivity, empathy, fearlessness and dedication should serve as a model for all who strive for social justice.
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