Dead Men Walking

Saturday July 29th 2006

Back From The Dead By Joan M Cheever
Wiley, st£16.99

Michael Feeney Callan

There was a clear moment when I decided not to be a crime writer. I had written RTE’s first crime series, The Burke Enigma, and was reaping the benefits working on BBC police shows and writing The Professionals at LWT.

In the escalating way of things, I was meeting more and more crime figures and senior law enforcers. There were many scary and impressive characters but an instance of enlightenment researching the activities of Special Forces soured me. Hanging out with a much esteemed squaddie, I suddenly observed that not only were his tactics morally shameful but his nature was evil.

The more I dug, the less an anomaly this seemed. The deal with the devil was institutionally deep-rooted, and apparently defensible by the adage of the ends justifying the means. I found him - and it - obnoxious: a code of ethics based on a fundamental anarchy that copper-fastens the gap between justice and the law, and emphasises how small our intellectual evolution has been. We are rooted, it seems, in the small-minded tribal idiocy of an eye for an eye.

Joan M Cheever, a young Texan journalist and lawyer, encountered a similar soul-jolting moment defending a convicted murderer on Death Row in the early ‘90s. Cheever had gone through the conventional hoops, earning her Masters in journalism at Columbia and her law degree at St Marys University before doggedly pursuing the American Way.

Capital punishment, she knew, was part of the deal: it is enforced in three quarters of the States and there are currently - typically - 3,400 prisoners awaiting execution. But Cheever wasn’t prepared for the impact of losing a client to the death penalty.

Walter Williams, a 19-year-old hood convicted of killing a clerk in a convenience store robbery, happened to be from her own hometown of San Antonio - and happened to be misadvised to plead guilty to murder when, he claimed, he never intended to kill. Cheever joined the 13-year-long fight to have his sentence commuted, but lost the case in 1994.

In the absence of his mother, Williams requested Cheever to oversee his execution. The trauma of witnessing a supervised death by lethal injection changed Cheever: in her view she had witnessed government-endorsed murder. Cheever pledged to do something about it.

Doing something, for Cheever, involved revisiting the landmark 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in 1972 that temporarily deemed the death penalty unconstitutional and gave reprieve to 587 men and two women. The Furman case, as it became known, was an issue of hot debate in the early ‘70s but was almost forgotten 20 years later. Cheever saw its merits not in moral, but in practical, terms. By monitoring the demographics of Furman, an assessment could be made of the underlying assumptions about homicidal deviants. In fact, of the men and women whose sentences were commuted, 322, she learned, have been paroled; 75 returned to prison for technical violations; 32 committed crimes and just five parolees killed again.

The recidivism rate, Cheever discovered, was considerably less than that of the general prison population. Interpreting the statistics, for Cheever, necessitated her own manhunt. The experience of befriending Williams had irreversibly humanised the process and set her on a trek to trace down and interview the Furman survivors. Newly married, with new children in tow, Cheever crisscrossed America, often spending time alone in backwoods homes and motel rooms with some of America’s recent Most Wanteds. The object of Cheever’s search is proven in the meticulous log of adventures that spans several years.

One-time murderers and rapists who are now church workers and businessmen-truckers meld with tragic figures whose cases have since been overturned as mistaken identities. Facts flicker and fail, and apparent hopeless losers find redemption again and again in second chances.

The extraordinary achievement of Cheever’s book is the courage that underlies its vision. Whether or not at physical risk, Cheever pledged herself to unbiased investigation, and never wavered. No call went unanswered, no confrontation was avoided. The bittersweet aftertaste of this powerful book takes us back to Furman and that brief redemptive moment in the liberal ‘70s when America questioned itself with an authentic courage and integrity to match Cheevers.

Michael Feeney Callan’s biography of Sean Connery is now available in paperback from Virgin Books

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