“I’m doing all right,” I said.
He leaned forward to get the lighter and slid it back into his pants. “You’re all right, relative to what?”
“Relative to the guy who shot me, for starters,” I said. “I got that son of a bitch back, and then some.”
He wrote something in his notebook with his expensive ballpoint. “And that’s a triumph for you? To outlive your enemies even as the quality of your life declines?”
“I have outlived a lot of people.”
“Yes, Dr. Mohammed told me about your son, Brian.”
“Dr. Mohammed has a pretty big goddamn mouth, doesn’t he?” I said. I remembered that I also had a notebook, which Rose kept for me in the front pocket of her purse. I grabbed it and mimicked Pincus’s thoughtful scribbling. My notebook was a cheap reporter’s pad with a cardboard cover, and my pen was a disposable that I had bought in a package of six for three dollars, but it was the same as the doctor’s Montblanc because one ballpoint pen is as good as another.
“My impression of Dr. Mohammed is that he cares a great deal about his patients,” Pincus said. “Let me tell you a little bit about myself and about why your neurologist thought it might be useful for you to come here. I specialize in helping people who have endured trauma. I’ve spent a lot of time working with veterans, soldiers who have been injured in combat—men who have seen their compatriots injured or killed, and who may be struggling to deal with things they have done.”
“Well, I ain’t got shell shock, Dr. Pink-Ass,” I told him.
“I also help survivors of violent crimes, policemen who have been involved in shoot-outs or other use-of-force incidents, and patients who are coping with grief and loss. In other words, all the bad stuff rattling around in your head is precisely my area of expertise.”
“The bad stuff in my head is Alzheimer’s-type dementia,” I said.
“Dr. Mohammed says you’ve been responding well to Aricept, and your condition has been stable, except for your complete inability to remember anything about certain subjects. That’s not a usual pattern for dementia progression, Mr. Schatz. That’s why Dr. Mohammed thinks that your situation falls within my area of expertise, rather than his.”
“He ain’t the first to wish I was somebody else’s problem,” I said.
“The mind is a versatile and complex organ. It protects itself. It blocks things it isn’t prepared to confront. Your inability to remember your wife’s illness is your mind’s way of trying to guard against further trauma, just like your refusal to talk about your son’s death.”
“I have Alzheimer’s,” I said.
He ignored me, and continued: “But even though the mind instinctively tries to protect itself by locking these things away, the only path to healing is through confronting these traumas. You will have to face these things that you cannot remember and will not talk about. They will not go away just because you shut them out. Your wife has cancer whether you remember she does or not. Your son died whether you are willing to talk about it or not.”
“I know,” I said. “I may be old, and I may be demented, but I am not stupid.”
He scribbled something in his notebook, took a moment to read over it, and then looked up at me. “Alzheimer’s is a progressive, degenerative condition. But to the extent that certain aspects of your memory disorder are psychological, that is something that is treatable and potentially reversible. I wouldn’t ask you to confront these traumas if I didn’t honestly believe there was a benefit to it. If you can summon the courage to face these demons in this safe space, with me, I think you could be living a fuller, better life.”
“Fuller?” I asked. “Better? I am ninety years old. I live in an assisted-living facility. My life is not getting better or fuller. I just sit in that place, and I wait.”
Pincus leaned forward. “For what? What are you waiting for?”
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“It’s this,” Rose said, grasping at my wrist. “We’re waiting for this. Everyone there is waiting for something to happen, and the only thing that is going to happen is the last thing that happens. And it’s happening to me now.”
“Yes,” said Pincus. “Let’s talk about Rose’s condition.”
“My wife is fine. I’m fine. Everything’s fine,” I said.
“I’m not, though,” Rose said. “And you’re not. And everything isn’t. All these years, you’ve been fearless. Until recently. You can barely walk, but all you want to do is run away. We have to talk about this.”
“Not here. Not in front of Dr. Penis,” I said.
“Then where? When?”
“Somewhere else. Some other time.”
“Buck, I don’t know where else to take you, and I don’t know how much time we have left.”
“Tonight. We will talk about it tonight. Just not here. Not with him.”
Pincus snapped his notebook shut. “That’s fine. I think this has been a productive first session.”
“I’ve had more productive sessions in the bathroom,” I said. “Longer ones, too. We’ve been here what? Fifteen minutes?”
“If you’d like to talk more, you’re welcome to stay another half hour. I just thought I’d let you go since you don’t seem to enjoy this.”
“Why not? You get paid either way, don’t you? I just want to know how much this is costing me.”
“It doesn’t cost you anything. Medicare covers this. Every week, if you’d like to return.”
“Fitting that this racket you’ve got is subsidized by government programs,” I said.
“Programs we get a great deal of use out of,” Rose reminded me.
“I think it’s important that the two of you try to have an honest conversation about the struggles you’re dealing with,” Pincus said. “If we’ve facilitated that here today, then we’ve made real progress. I want you to try to focus on confronting your problems instead of minimizing them or fleeing from them, and then we will see next week whether you start to notice improvements in memory.”
“What a treat,” I said. “If I make myself miserable, I might get better at remembering how bad things are.”
TRANSCRIPT: AMERICAN JUSTICE
CARLOS WATKINS (NARRATION): The entire Western world has abolished the practice of capital punishment with the exception of the United States. As a nation that executes its convicts, we are in the company of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China, and Iran.
In the last thirty years, 159 convicted and condemned men have been exonerated by the discovery of new DNA or other forensic evidence. And those are just the ones who were able to prove themselves innocent. We will never know how many falsely accused people have died at the hands of the state, convicted on the testimony of lying witnesses or on the strength of dubious proof.
So why are we still doing it? Why are we still killing people and calling it American Justice?
I asked Ed Heffernan, the Vanderbilt professor who is representing Chester in his appeals, and he suggested I should talk to one of his colleagues.
PROFESSOR RUPERT FIELDS: There are three rationales underlying all penalties handed down by the criminal justice system. The first is containment: the public interest in neutralizing individuals with known propensities for criminal activity and mitigating the danger they may pose to the innocent. The second is deterrence: the idea that a rational actor considering committing a crime might decide that the risk of suffering a severe punishment outweighs the benefit he will accrue from committing the act and that he may, therefore, abstain.
CARLOS WATKINS: And the third rationale?
FIELDS: Retribution. I think that one’s pretty self-explanatory.
WATKINS (NARRATION): This is Professor Rupert Fields, an expert on the subjects of criminal justice and comparative law. He is a graduate of Yale Law School, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and he now teaches at the University of Virginia. He has written friend-of-the-court briefs supporting the government in several death
penalty cases. If anyone can explain to me how state-sanctioned murder can be justified, it’s this guy.
FIELDS: Now, when we’re talking about the death penalty, we can take containment off the table. Capital punishment doesn’t do a much better job of protecting the public from the offender than life in prison.
Deterrence is a more interesting question, because it’s impossible to prove. In theory, there may very well be a person out there who didn’t commit a murder because he feared the death penalty. But you can never know how many murders were deterred, and that number might be zero. A lot of the really heinous crimes—those serial killings you love to cover on your true-crime broadcasts—are committed by people with personality disorders that alter the way they perceive risk. And when jurisdictions abolish or suspend capital punishment, we do not see a resulting rise in murders. Over the past couple of decades, the number of executions has declined, and the murder rate has declined as well. If you believe capital punishment deters murder, these phenomena are difficult to explain.
And you have to weigh the theoretical deaths prevented by deterrence against the measurable number of deaths that result from capital punishment. You could argue that killers have so debased and devalued themselves that even an unproven, theoretical innocent life is worth a significant number of actual lives of convicted murderers, but there is a nonzero possibility that our procedural safeguards could fail and that we might wrongfully convict and execute an innocent person, so there is a risk to a theoretical innocent life on both sides of that equation.
WATKINS: But despite all that, you still support the death penalty?
FIELDS: I believe in retribution. I believe extreme violence deserves to be punished in kind. I believe some people are so vile that the world is made worse off by their continued existence, even if they are confined. As Justice Potter Stewart wrote in Gregg v. Georgia, which reinstated the death penalty in 1976, “certain crimes are themselves so grievous an affront to humanity that the only adequate response may be the penalty of death.”
WATKINS: Explain that to me.
FIELDS: Sometimes you will hear about some particularly heinous crime—an act of terrorism, or a killing motivated by racial animus, or a murder in which someone tortured and raped a child—and you’ll think, “I don’t support the death penalty, but maybe this guy deserves it.”
WATKINS: I have never thought anything like that.
FIELDS: Well, maybe you haven’t, but a lot of people have. Most people probably have. Sentiment is divided on the death penalty in this country. Something like 55 percent of Americans favor capital punishment, and 45 percent oppose it. But you’ve got to get unanimity in a jury room to sentence somebody to death. If people voted on juries the way they respond to opinion polls, we’d never execute anybody.
When you show people what some of these killers have done to their victims, when you show them photographs of the mangled bodies and you hear the coroner describe the extent of the violence these defendants have inflicted, those things will sway a lot of people who would tell you that they oppose the death penalty. When prosecutors present testimony from the family members of the victim, you’ll see these compassionate folks crying in the jury box. And, at the end of all that, a lot of good, progressive jurors find that they are prepared to make an exception to their general opposition to the death penalty. The calculus just changes when it’s a personal issue rather than a policy issue.
WATKINS: It becomes a personal issue for me when I meet people who are caught up in the machinery of the prison-industrial complex. It’s personal to me when I meet folks from marginalized backgrounds who have survived abusive families, worthless, broken schools, and the depredations of thuggish, brutal police, only to find that their opportunities are limited by dense networks of privilege that funnel university admissions and top jobs to a favored elite. It’s personal to me when I meet good people who have been rendered unemployable by nonsense criminal convictions, people whose very existence is criminalized by a racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic justice system that offers no leniency or second chances to poor people and people of color.
When you say these people deserve to be punished by these systems, it’s like saying a steer deserves the abattoir, as if he’s had a choice in anything that has ever happened to him.
FIELDS: Well, it’s easy to take that view when you frame the narratives of these cases in a way that makes the condemned individual the protagonist of the story, with the state as an oppressive force mobilized to destroy him. Often, these stories are told years—maybe decades—after the crime has occurred, and the victim is a dim memory. The killer looks small and pathetic in his baggy prison jumpsuit, shivering like a scared dog. He is easy to frame as a sympathetic figure.
I’ve read articles about death penalty cases—articles thousands of words long—which never mention the victims’ names and never describe the circumstances of their deaths. But people start to view these situations differently when you tell them a tragic horror story in which the victim is the protagonist and the killer is a monster lying in wait for them. That’s not a story you read in most media accounts surrounding executions, but it is the story jurors hear.
WATKINS (NARRATION): I understand what Professor Fields is saying, but in the American criminal justice system, there are horror stories all around, and folks like those nice progressive jurors who are voting to kill people are more sympathetic to some of those stories than they are to others. I was pretty upset after this conversation, so I went back to Ed and played the audio you just heard for him. He told me some things that made me feel better.
ED HEFFERNAN: It may be true that judges and juries are willing to set aside their general opposition to the needless taking of human life after hearing inflammatory details from the prosecution in a murder trial or a sentencing hearing. But it’s less true than it used to be. The number of death sentences has fallen to near zero in most states, even where the death penalty hasn’t been banned by legislation or placed on moratorium by executive decree. Prosecutors rarely even ask for capital punishment anymore. And a big part of the reason for that is that nobody wants to actually carry out the death sentences after we condemn people.
Defense lawyers file endless appeals for decades and file for delays and continuances that drag out the proceedings. And prosecutors and judges and policymakers and voters all allow it, because, while people like the catharsis that comes with sentencing someone to death, they are deeply ambivalent about executing people. The state of California has nearly 750 condemned people on death row and has carried out only 13 executions since 1977, and zero since 2006. In the meantime, nearly ten times as many people have died of other causes while awaiting execution—some of them have died of old age, although, after years or decades of solitary confinement, a lot of people commit suicide.
And while governors still face political blowback for granting clemency to individual killers, because doing so seems like endorsement of the crimes they committed or an indifference to the victims, there is actually less backlash to simply suspending capital punishment entirely. That is how we got rid of the death penalty in Illinois and New York.
The Supreme Court has already found that it is cruel and unusual—and therefore unconstitutional—to execute offenders who committed their crimes when they were minors, and for similar reasons, that it is unconstitutional to execute offenders with mental disabilities. We are chipping away at it, and sometime pretty soon, the only states that will be executing people will be Texas and maybe Florida and Alabama, and then, in the face of widespread rejection of capital punishment, the Court will find that evolving moral standards can no longer countenance the death penalty. It’s not a matter of “if,” it’s a matter of “when.” The end of this story is already written.
WATKINS: Then why are you still fighting?
HEFFERNAN: I’m fighting to save Chester March and people like him, whose fates are still hanging in the balance under this zombie policy. And I will keep
fighting until we put an end to the death penalty, and until we get rid of solitary confinement and the other barbarities of our deeply broken criminal justice system.
17
I was sitting in my easy chair, one of the few things I brought over from the old house. We’d had an estate sale when we moved in here, and got rid of most of what we owned: our wedding china, all Rose’s kitchen things, and the furniture we inherited from Mother. All told, the accumulated possessions of our long lives didn’t amount to much; the lot of it was worth less than what it cost to live in a tiny room at Valhalla for two months.
Rose was sitting across from me on the bed, looking at me like she expected me to say something.
I used to keep the chair in front of the television, but with my hearing fading and my memory going, I rarely turned that on anymore. Instead, we’d had the staff move the chair next to the window, so I could blow my cigarette smoke outside, and that was what I was doing. I had my ashtray sitting on the end table next to me, and there were four spent butts in it already, so I knew we had been here for a while.
I stubbed the fifth one out and reached for the next. This comforted me: the automatic motion of tapping the pack against the palm of my hand, plucking a cigarette between my fingers, flicking the same gold lighter I’d had for decades, inhaling. I could have been doing this in 1950 or 1970, and it would have felt the same and smelled the same and tasted the same. Everything else was falling apart or changing in incomprehensible ways. The only thing that could withstand the onslaught of time was smoke.
“How much do you remember?” she asked me.
“I always feel like I am just waking up from a bad dream,” I said. “I’ve got a sense of dread; I know something is wrong. But I can just let it fade into the background of all the things that are wrong. This place is wrong. Our lives here are wrong. It’s all wrong.”
She rested her arms on her knees, and her whole body seemed to sag and deflate. “But not wrong like this is wrong.”
Running Out of Road Page 12