Word: take
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There was one case, she remembers well, when she was turned down 21 consecutive times. But Patsy Morris is not one to take rejection personally, and she finally got an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer to say yes. Small wonder she runs into resistance: what she wants is 200 to 400 hours of someone's time and work for no pay. The people she is telephoning are lawyers; her "clients" have all been condemned to death. Thanks in large part to Morris' more than two years of dedicated work, only three of Georgia's 89 death...
...provide a lawyer, leaving most of the condemned on their own if they wish to seek post-conviction remedies in state and federal courts; most lack the money to hire their own attorneys. If the prisoner pursues the entire series of possible petitions, appeals and rehearings, the process can take anywhere from five to six years...
Persuading capable lawyers to go along on so lengthy a legal journey-an "exhausting, self-lacerating investment of time and energy," as the A.C.L.U.'S Henry Schwarzschild describes it-is no easy task. "It's so desperate you take whom you can get," explains Morris. Indeed, the shortage of qualified attorneys threatens to overwhelm Morris and others like her because the nation's death row population, now totaling some 570, is climbing by almost 100 people a year.* Eighty percent of the prisoners mark their time in the states of the Old Confederacy; Georgia has the largest...
Morris' work on a case does not end when a lawyer agrees to take it. Checking off a master list on which she keeps track of the 89 Georgia cases, she regularly calls each attorney to update her records and offer encouragement. Since some of her recruits are not well versed in death penalty work and related issues of constitutional law, Morris, though no lawyer herself, also provides assistance by collecting documents and asking leading questions. She reproduces and mails relevant material to the lawyers and continuously monitors cases in which the state seeks the death penalty and fails...
...intriguing little book on preaching, Telling the Truth, Novelist and sometime Preacher Frederick Buechner describes the magic moment when the minister steps into the pulpit. In the pews sit a college student there against his will, a banker who twice contemplated suicide that week, a contractor on the take, a pregnant girl who feels life stir within her, a teacher hiding his homosexuality. "The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on the lectern light and deals out his note cards like a riverboat gambler. The stakes have never been higher. Two minutes from now he may have lost...