By Reason of Insanity (6 page)

Quinn was here as a favor to Rosemarie Mancini. She had agreed to debate the propriety of the death penalty for mentally impaired defendants but then had found out a few days ago that her testimony would be required at the same time in federal court in California. She had called and begged Quinn to take her place. She reminded him of all the flak she had taken for testifying on behalf of his sister. How could he say no?

His opponent would be a prominent young Virginia defense attorney named Marc Boland. Boland was one of the rarest of breeds--a high-profile defense lawyer who supported capital punishment. In capital cases, Boland handled only the guilt and innocence phase of the trial. For the penalty phase, he entrusted the clients to other lawyers, die-hard opponents of the death penalty. "I'm not against proportionate punishment for capital defendants," his firm's promotional brochure quoted "Bo" as saying. "I'm just against proportionate punishment for
innocent
capital defendants."

It apparently worked in the red state of Virginia. Boland, a former Richmond prosecutor, had a reputation as a top lawyer who knew how to exploit weaknesses in the system on behalf of high-profile criminal defendants.

On the way to the law school, Quinn reviewed his notes and the materials Dr. Mancini had sent him. As a Las Vegas lawyer arguing against capital punishment in a more conservative state like Virginia, he felt out of his element.

"Are there any casinos around here?" Quinn asked the driver. "Riverboat gambling? Horse tracks? Anything?"

The driver, a Pakistani man with a heavy accent, smiled and nodded. "Yes, yes," he said enthusiastically. "Beautiful day."

Catherine O'Rourke was beginning to understand how real criminals felt. Immediately upon leaving court, she called the office of Marc Boland. Catherine had been impressed with Boland when she saw him argue a few cases that she reported on for the paper. She had also called him a few times when she needed a quote from a criminal defense attorney, like the day before on the sidebar piece about the Carver law firm, and he seemed to appreciate the free publicity.
He owes me,
thought Catherine. And if anybody could talk Rosencrance into changing her mind, maybe Marc Boland could.

Unfortunately, the best lawyers were also the busiest. According to Boland's legal assistant, Boland had been in federal court all afternoon, handling some motions in a complicated criminal case.

"It's an emergency," Catherine said, emphasizing that she worked for the paper. "I've got a state court judge threatening to throw me in jail if I don't reveal a confidential source."

"I'm sorry," said the assistant. She sounded unimpressed. After all, most of Boland's clients were probably facing jail time. "They won't let him take a cell phone in court with him. I'll leave a message, and I'm sure he'll call as soon as he gets out."

"Can you give me his cell phone so I can leave a message too?"

"I'm sorry. We're not allowed to do that."

"But I need to meet with him tonight," Catherine insisted. "I have to be back in front of this judge at nine tomorrow morning. I know Marc would want to take my call."

This time the assistant sounded annoyed. "I'm sure he'll get back to you as soon as he gets out of court." She hesitated, perhaps wondering if her boss might chew her out if he missed getting in on this case. "If for some reason you don't hear from him, he's doing a presentation tonight at Regent Law School at 7:00. I'm sure you can track him down there."

Following her conversation with the legal assistant, Catherine drove from the Virginia Beach courthouse to Norfolk federal court. By the time she arrived, fighting traffic the entire thirty-five-minute drive, Marc Boland was long gone. She tried his office again but this time couldn't even reach his legal assistant. She waited for Boland to call, checking her phone at least three different times to make sure it wasn't on silent. At 6:15, she decided to head to the law school.

She arrived at 6:45 and pulled into the parking lot of the ornate, colonial-style redbrick building that housed the law school. She drove through the horseshoe-shaped lot once but couldn't find a spot. After a loop through the adjacent lot for the law school library, she still couldn't find one. She checked her watch and drove to the side of the building, where a few coned-off spots were being jealously guarded by serious-looking students.

Catherine rolled down her window and flashed her newspaper credentials. "Where do press members park?" she asked.

The student looked confused. "There are some open spots across the street," he suggested.

Cat turned in her seat and glanced at the big Amerigroup office building located on the other side of the road. She turned back to the student with a pained expression. "For the press?" she asked.

"I'm sorry, ma'am, that's all we have available."

Now he'd done it--called her "ma'am" as if she were fifty years old with gray hair in a bun. "Can I get your name?" Cat asked. She took out a pen and a little flip notebook--a prop she carried for times like this.

"Hang on a minute," the student said.

A few seconds later, the students moved one set of cones for the school's newly designated press parking spot.

Pleased with herself, Catherine walked toward a small gauntlet of protesters who had gathered outside the side entrance to the building. They held signs blasting gays and lawyers and "the sodomites in Sin City." Catherine recognized the stocky ringleader as the Reverend Harold Pryor, a notorious pastor from Kansas who ran around the country pronouncing God's judgment on everyone who didn't attend his church. Because she had parked in the VIP section, the protesters all turned toward her as she approached the side door.

"What's the matter," Cat asked, "couldn't find any military funerals to disrupt?"

Pryor stared at her with small, dark eyes that he narrowed into condemning slits. His face glistened with sweat, and his red complexion matched nicely with his auburn hair. "Woe to you experts in the law," Pryor said, "because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering."

A thought hit Catherine, chilling her even in the midst of the warm, humid air of a spring night. What was Pryor doing clear across the country at an event like this? It wasn't exactly the kind of high-profile gathering that fit his MO. How long had he been in Hampton Roads?

She made a mental note to call Jamarcus Webb once she got inside the building. Then she made a face. "You need to get some new deodorant," she said as she disappeared into the massive brick building that served as the home to Regent Law School.

She found Marc Boland in the front of the lecture hall and pulled him aside, rapidly explaining her dilemma. He apologized for not calling her back. "I haven't even had time to check my messages," he said. "Twenty-two e-mails and six phone messages just from the time I spent in court."

They agreed to meet as soon as the seminar was over.

12

Quinn Newberg sat at a table in front of the standing-room-only crowd in the expansive moot courtroom that doubled as an auditorium. He listened as Marc Boland gave a stirring defense of capital punishment. Bo, as the moderator referred to him, was tall, maybe six-four or so, and big boned, but with a soft-edged baby face that looked like it only required shaving once or twice a week. He had short blond hair and an engaging way with the audience--the style of a Southern gentleman that belied the killer instinct Quinn had already heard about. Bo had played linebacker at Virginia Tech before a torn ACL short-circuited his senior season.

Bo looked impressive in a tailored blue suit and bright tie with bold crimson and yellow horizontal stripes. Quinn had dressed in Vegas casual--khaki slacks, a blue blazer, an open-necked shirt. The event coordinators weren't paying him enough to sport a tie.

Boland didn't spare any of the gory details when he described the crimes committed by those who claimed mental illness. His word pictures of rape, murder, and mayhem would have made Stephen King proud. "These types of crimes are not committed by ordinary citizens," Boland said. "The grotesque nature of these crimes serves as Exhibit A for the defendants' mental imbalance."

Quinn noticed some heads nodding as Boland continued. He had stepped out from behind the podium and was partway up the middle aisle. "If we adopt the philosophy of people like Mr. Newberg, death penalty jurisprudence would be flipped on its head. The more grotesque the crime, the more likely a defendant can make a case that he was mentally impaired, thus avoiding the death penalty. What kind of system is that? If you're going to shoot them, you might as well slice them up and maybe eat a bite or two of your victim." Boland shook his head at the absurdity of it. "That way you can claim the devil made you do it."

As Boland took his seat, all eyes turned toward Quinn. Though Quinn hadn't wanted to be here in the first place, this smooth-talking Southerner had just thrown down the gauntlet. Sure, this was a law-and-order state. But these folks had hearts, didn't they?

Quinn stood behind the podium, just in case.

"In 1986, the Supreme Court barred execution of the mentally insane. But that ruling only protects those without the capacity to understand they are about to be put to death. Or why."

Quinn surveyed the skeptics in the room, mostly lawyers and law students parsing each word, along with the Reverend Harold Pryor and a few members of his church who had slithered into the auditorium and were lined up along the back wall. Quinn liked juries better, especially Vegas juries--average folks who appreciated a little showmanship and common sense. But he did notice some sympathetic looks from a few of the female law students. Something about his sister's trial had made Quinn a hero for many women who suffered abuse or shuddered at the prospect of it. He had received several unsolicited e-mails from women telling their stories and thanking him for what he had done at trial.

"What about a man like Scott Louis Panetti, who claims he was drowned and electrocuted as a child and recently stabbed in the eye in his death row cell by the devil? He has wounds that he swears were inflicted by demons and healed by JFK. And in case you're worried that he's making this up just to avoid the death penalty, you should know that he was hospitalized fourteen separate times and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia on eight different occasions before he shot his in-laws in 1991.

"He defended himself at trial, flipped a coin to determine whether or not to strike jurors during jury selection, and wore a purple cowboy outfit, complete with a cowboy hat dangling around his neck. Even though it was Texas, this probably wasn't a good idea. It would be like a lawyer lecturing at tonight's debate without a tie."

Quinn's quip fell flat, except for a courtesy chuckle from a few of the women.

"He was judged competent to stand trial," Quinn continued, "competent to defend himself, and not insane at the time of the murders. Because he understands what it means to be put to death, he doesn't fit within the narrow category of insane inmates protected from the death penalty."

Quinn paused. He thought about the dozen or so cases he had accepted since his sister's trial. Mental incapacity was not a
choice
these people made. He couldn't help but get a little passionate defending them. "Is this really the kind of person we want to put to death?"

Quinn could read body language with the best of them, and most of the audience was saying
heck yes.

"Mr. Boland worries that allowing mentally impaired defendants to escape the needle might gut the death penalty," Quinn continued, more animated now. "Good. A study published in the
Stanford Law Review
documents more than 350 capital convictions in this century in which it was later proven, by DNA evidence or otherwise, that the convict did not commit the crime. In Georgia, a study showed that when African-Americans killed whites, they were four times more likely to be sentenced to death than were convicted killers of nonwhites."

Quinn gave them a chance to digest this information and took a deep breath. The more skeptical the audience, the more Quinn would usually pour on the passion. Weak point, talk louder. He was already out on the limb. Might as well saw away. "Capital punishment is a barbaric remnant of an uncivilized society. Why do you think they use a three-drug cocktail for lethal injection? The sodium thiopental, administered first, is an anesthetic. Then they give the condemned person pancuronium bromide, a paralyzing agent, to put them in a chemical straitjacket. That way they can't squirm around and cry out in pain as the heart is squeezed to a stop from the injection of the potassium chloride. How could any court, much less the Supreme Court, say this is not cruel and unusual punishment?

"As for me, I share the sentiments of former Supreme Court justice Harry Blackmun, a man who grew weary quibbling about the proper guidelines for the death penalty. In a 1994 case, he concluded that the death penalty experiment had failed and stated that he would no longer tinker with the machinery of death. In my view, the death penalty is immoral, unfair, and discriminatory. It ought to be abolished in total or at least prohibited when it comes to the mentally impaired."

A few people clapped and a handful of others joined them in order to be polite. But the real indication of how well his talk was received could be measured by the numerous hands shooting up to ask Quinn a question. Judging by the disapproving looks on their faces, it was going to be a long night.