Next of Kin

by L. F. Robertson

  Carey had tried to present testimony from a psychologist who had studied victims of long-term abuse, explaining how a woman could be changed by constant terror and helplessness, could come to believe that her abuser was all-powerful against the efforts of anyone to help her, could become hypersensitive to her abuser’s shifts of mood. The expert could explain that Betty’s belief that Ray had crossed some line and was really about to kill her was honest and deeply held, as was her conviction that, once awake, he was unstoppable; so that her decision to kill him at the one point when he could not overpower her was motivated by a genuine, even reasonable belief that this was the only way she could save her own life.

  Now, of course, the psychological effects of domestic violence on its victims are the stuff of talk shows and police dramas, but at the time of Betty Mateski’s case, Carey’s defense fell on unsympathetic ears. The prosecutor argued that the psychologist’s evidence was incredible and, moreover, irrelevant, because Ray wasn’t threatening to kill Betty at the moment when she killed him, and she could have escaped from the house while he slept. Ray’s earlier threats didn’t excuse her killing him when she did; the law was clear that a person could kill in self-defense only when she reasonably believed she was threatened with imminent death. The judge excluded the psychologist’s testimony and refused to instruct the jury that they could consider whether Betty had killed Ray in self-defense.

  The prosecutor argued to the jury that what motivated Betty to kill Ray wasn’t terror but anger. The jury found Betty guilty of first-degree murder.

  Betty’s case got a lot of publicity and made Carey, indignant at the judge’s rulings and the verdict, an activist for the rights of abused women. She left the public defender’s office and started a public interest law firm that specialized in defending victims of domestic violence and advocating for changes in the law. Inevitably, some of those cases involved women charged with murdering their husbands, and eventually Carey also became involved in a couple of habeas corpus cases for women sentenced to death. She also got Betty Mateski a new trial and acquittal, after a law was passed allowing accused women to present evidence of domestic violence and its psychological effects in their trials.

  Still I wondered why she had chosen Sunny’s case. “But,” I said, “there wasn’t any evidence presented that Greg Ferrante was abusing Sunny.”

  “Yes, I know. This seems more like an innocent woman sentenced to death by male stereotyping—‘hell hath no fury’ and so on.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “There wasn’t really much evidence against Sunny except that ‘woman scorned’ motive and a story told by a snitch. The district attorney’s theory was that she killed Greg for his money and life insurance—so she could inherit from him before he divorced her.”

  “Oh, right, the gold-digging wife,” Carey said with a sigh. “I’d like you to come with me when I meet her. I think it’ll be easier for her to have someone she knows there, too.”

  We raced through the arrangements. Pulled along by Carey’s near-breathless enthusiasm, I had already offered to file a discovery motion. “We’re on a tight timeline,” I’d said. “I can finish one by next week.”

  “Great!”

  We had hung up before I realised what had just happened. I’d started work on another death-penalty case, almost without thinking about it.

  3

  The Central California Women’s Facility is farther north than Harrison, but still in the Central Valley. It’s about a mile from the nearest town, in a landscape a lot like that around Harrison—a flat grid of country roads enmeshing orchards of peaches, pistachios, almonds, and lemons. CCWF contains the death row for women, the counterpart of the much more populous men’s death row at San Quentin. But for the substantial sign in sober beige and brown identifying it at the head of the access road, it could almost be an office park, a campus of one-story stucco buildings and parking lots surrounded by lawns and landscape trees.

  At a kiosk a little down the road into the complex, I showed my driver’s license and bar card to a uniformed guard. When I told him I was coming for a legal visit, he pointed out the visitor center and the fork in the road that led to its parking lot.

  The lot was huge and nearly full; I finally found a space fairly far from the building and, afraid I might be late, hurried across the blacktop and up the wide steps to the entrance. The air was bright and fresh, and the leaves on the trees were still a bright spring green. In the late morning sun, the buildings shone with the clear neutral light of a Diebenkorn landscape.

  Inside, the visitor center was air-conditioned, and bright with light through windows that showed nothing more inspiring than the parking lot. Carey was inside, standing at the counter and talking to a uniformed woman.

  “Oh, good,” she said when she saw me, “you’re here.” She was wearing a gray pencil skirt and jacket, with a cream-colored silk shirt open at the collar. Her suit could have used a pressing, and her short dark hair was a little windblown. It was the look of a working lawyer; only on TV do we have perfect hair and designer clothes.

  I walked over to the counter and took my driver’s license and bar card out of my jacket pocket. Purses were not allowed inside, and I’d left mine in my car. “Good morning,” I replied, with mock cheerfulness. “How was your drive?”

  “Not bad—the usual collection of semis and a lot of maniacs in pickups. How about you?”

  I made a grunt of sympathy. “The same,” I said, and we turned to the business of getting cleared to go into the prison, signing the register and inventorying our possessions—pens, paper, money, jewelry—for the desk clerk. We took off our shoes for long enough to walk through a metal detector, and were handed plastic visitor ID cards to clip to our lapels. One of the guards, a round-faced fortyish man who had been chatting idly behind the counter, was drafted to escort us to the attorney visiting area.

  We walked out a back door into the more familiar prison landscape invisible from the highway —a big cage surrounded by a tall metal mesh fence topped with coils of barbed wire.

  “Where did you ladies come here from?” our escort asked, as we waited for the door behind us to close and the barred metal gate at the far end to open for us.

  Carey gave him an appraising look out of the corner of her eye before answering, “Ventura.”

  “Corbin’s Landing,” I said.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Up on the Sonoma Coast.”

  “Oh, nice.”

  His attention was diverted by the clank of the opening gate and a couple of prison staffers coming into the cage. “Have you had lunch yet?” one of them asked him. “We ordered pizza.”

  “Sounds good,” he said. “Can you wait ten or fifteen minutes?”

  “Sure,” they said, and moved on.

  Carey and I together, and the guard a little ahead, we walked out of the cage and down a concrete pathway across a lawn dotted with trees. The path was bordered with rose bushes blooming with red and pink flowers. Rose bushes are ubiquitous in prisons; San Quentin has them in rows along the approach to the gate and in beds outside the buildings, and so does Folsom. I’d tried growing them once, in a brief lapse into domesticity, when I lived in Berkeley, but I gave up after a year or two. They were too much work, between deadheading the old flowers, fertilizing, and pruning, and spraying for the myriad of pests that seem to live to eat or disfigure them. I suppose prisons have an ample supply of inmates happy to help maintain them, just to get outdoors and have something useful to do.

  “Nice roses,” I said.

  “Oh, right.” The guard sounded bemused, as if he’d forgotten they were there.

  The light stucco building at the end of the path, with its roofed terrace and double door, was like something you might see on a state college campus. The guard selected a large key from a set at his waist, unlocked the door, and let us into a lobby with pale gray walls and a dark polished floor of some indestructible-looking aggregate. “Over here.” He unlocked a second do
or and held it as we walked through.

  The room beyond the door was auditorium-sized, with a high ceiling, an expanse of the same shiny floor, and metal tables, each with chairs around it, arranged in the space as if for a banquet. The tables were empty. At the opposite end of the room was a wall of windows with a view of a patio dotted with more tables. Inside the room, in front of the windows, stood a sort of dais with a counter, occupied by a female guard. Behind us was a row of interview rooms with glass-paned doors. Our steps echoed as we walked inside.

  The guard who had escorted us crossed the room, spoke with the guard at the counter, and then returned. “She’s on her way down,” he said. “They’ll be here in a few minutes. When you leave, you need to get your paperwork from the sergeant over there.” He gave a nod toward the counter. “I’m going back up front, if everything is okay.”

  We thanked him and reassured him that we were all right.

  While we waited, Carey checked out a bank of vending machines. I could see through the window into one of the interview rooms. It was pretty standard-issue: an office-sized space painted an institutional off-white with brown trim, with a vinyl-topped wood table and wooden chairs in the middle and an empty bookshelf against the far wall.

  A door past the attorney rooms opened, and Sunny Ferrante and a guard came into the echoing space of the visiting area. Sunny seemed heavier than when I’d last seen her, though it was hard to tell in her prison uniform of baggy blue pants and shirt. She spotted us in the gloom, and her face brightened. We walked over in their direction. The guard nodded toward one of the interview rooms. “I’ll just put you all in here, if that’s all right.”

  “We’d like to get some food and drinks,” I said. Buying a meal or snack for your client on a legal visit is a sort of ritual. Not only does it give your client a taste of something different from prison food; it creates a relaxed environment, which encourages conversation and softens the tone of what can be a dry and even grim discussion of the law and your client’s case. In the service of my chosen field I have eaten what seems like mountains of vendingmachine chips and cookies and drunk seas of terrible coffee.

  “That’s fine.”

  “Hi, Sunny,” I said. “What can I get you?”

  “Hi, girl,” she answered brightly. “Long time no see. Some kind of salad and a diet Dr. Pepper would be great.”

  “You got it.”

  As the guard took Sunny into the interview room, Carey and I hurried to the vending machines and began easing dollar bills into their cash slots. After a few minutes, we returned, laden with trays of salads, drinks, chips, napkins, plastic forks, and a small bag of chocolate chip cookies I tossed onto the pile at the last minute. Sunny’s escort, who had been waiting by the door, let us in and pointed out the button for the buzzer that would call the guard on duty when we wanted to leave, then went out, locking the door behind him.

  Sunny was standing next to the table. She came over and hugged me and then backed up and gave me a smile. She had a great smile, lively and contagious. “You’re looking really good,” she said. I doubted that, but I thanked her anyway.

  She turned to Carey and held out a hand, saying, “You must be Ms. Bergmann. It’s really nice to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you, too. Please, call me Carey.”

  When I’d last seen Sunny, seven or eight years ago, she’d been in her mid-forties, growing a little plump, but still lively and very attractive, with red-brown hair and the creamy complexion that so often goes with it. She moved a little more heavily now, and her hair was cut short and lightened by silvery strands. There were smile lines around her eyes and mouth, and she was still attractive, her face and eyes lit, as I remembered, by that dazzling smile. She was evolving, I thought, from a former beauty to a fairy godmother. What she didn’t look like was someone who had hired her daughter’s boyfriend to kill her husband.

  She had one hand braced on the table as if to help hold her, and I saw a cane, which I hadn’t noticed when she first came in, propped against a chair. She saw my glance toward it and explained, “Bad knee. I need a replacement and to lose about twenty pounds.”

  “Are you going to be able to get a knee replacement here?” Carey asked as we sat down.

  “Eventually. They know it needs to be done.”

  “How are you doing otherwise?” I asked.

  “Not bad. I’m kind of one of the old-timers here now. Though there are women who’ve been up here a lot longer. I don’t know if you know, but I’m a grandmother, too. Brittany’s married, and they have two little ones, a boy and a girl. She brings them to see me a couple times a year. Kyle is five and Brianna is three, and they’re both cute as can be. Britt sends me pictures of the family. I’ve got a really cute one of the kids around the Christmas tree at home.” She sighed. “I wish I’d remembered to bring them down.”

  Going to visit your grandmother in prison was hardly a typical family activity, I thought, though sadly all too common. We ate our salads, with more small talk about the food and prison life, and then turned to the business of our visit.

  “So you’re going to be my habeas corpus lawyers,” Sunny said. I’d emptied the little cookies onto a paper towel, so that we could share them, and she picked one up and contemplated it. “Just one,” she said, and took a delicate bite, then turned to me. “Ms. Jackson came to see me and talked to me about the conflict of interest thing. I signed all the papers; I trust you.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll do my best to deserve it.”

  She smiled. “Some of the girls are really surprised I have a habeas lawyer already,” she said. “One of them says she’s been up here for twenty-two years with no habeas. Her appeal was denied, like, ten years ago, and mine isn’t even over yet.”

  “I lobbied the court to get your case,” Carey said.

  “Really? Why?” Sunny took another small bite of the cookie.

  “Well, I’d heard about it, and I feel strongly about women in the justice system.”

  “Hmm.” She finished the cookie. “One of the other girls here, Maureen O’Donnell, told me you’re her lawyer. She said good things about you.”

  Word gets around here, I thought, especially with so few women on the row. The last I’d heard, there were only about twenty. Carey, pleased by the endorsement, said, “I’m glad of that.”

  Sunny’s smile dimmed to a look of concern. “You must be awfully busy.”

  “We should be fine,” Carey answered. “We have a year to file a habeas petition, and I made sure my schedule was clear enough before taking the appointment.”

  “Oh, good.” Sunny started to reach for the little stack of cookies, then shook her head. “No more,” she said firmly. “I really do have to lose weight.” She sat up straighter and gave a brisk nod, and glanced at Carey, then me. “So, where do we start?”

  “With you. You and I talked a bit about your life years ago, but Ms. Bergmann—Carey—doesn’t know much beyond what was presented at your trial. So,” I said, “tell us everything.”

  “Hoo!” Sunny gave a little laugh. “I don’t think my memory’s that good. Not that there’s much to tell. Born and raised in Sparksville. Not a lot happened before I met Greg.”

  “Your mother grew up there, too, right?”

  “Yep. My grandparents came from Oklahoma with their parents when they were kids. My grandpa’s people settled around Salinas. He met Nana while he was in the Navy in World War II, and they moved here near her family after he got out. Linda was born in 1947.” I remembered that Sunny always called her mother by her given name.

  “They were real Okies, Nana used to say,” Sunny went on. “But not back then. When I was little, being an Okie was something people looked down on you for.”

  “Did you feel that growing up?”

  “Not too much. I think Sparksville was kind of settled by Okies. Lot of the kids were, or Mexican. I heard about it more than I actually saw it. I think Grandpa and Nana felt the discrimination more. And
Linda did, when she got pregnant.”

  “How was that?” I asked.

  “Well, she had to get married right after high school, because she was pregnant with me. She said it was a shotgun wedding. She and my dad were going steady in high school, but he tried to break up with her when he found out she was expecting. She didn’t want to marry him, either, after that, but their parents made them. Nana said his parents were pretty full of themselves—they had a big ranch outside of town. They called Linda white trash and as much as said they didn’t think I was his baby.”

  “Wow,” Carey said.

  “Yeah. Linda said it was really hurtful. Grandpa and Nana never spoke to my father’s parents after the wedding. Never forgave them for what they’d said about Linda.”

  “I don’t blame them; I’d feel the same way,” Carey said. “What about your parents? Did they stay married?”

  “I don’t think they ever even lived together. My father went and enlisted in the Marines. Kind of a stupid thing to do because it was the middle of the Vietnam War, but Linda said he did it to spite her and his parents. Anyhow, he was sent over to Vietnam and got killed there. The military gave Linda some kind of pension for her and me, so I guess some good came out of it.”

  “How did you get nicknamed Sunny?” Carey asked.

  “I don’t know—maybe my grandma and grandpa called me that first. I just know I’ve been Sunny as long as I can remember. No one I knew ever called me Cheryl—it’s still true, even here.”

  “So did Linda raise you alone?”

  “No—my grandparents brought me up. I guess someone told Linda she ought to think about being in movies—she was really beautiful, like a model or something; she’d been the prom queen at Sparksville High. So she left me with my grandma and grandpa and went to LA to try her luck. She was supposed to send for me when she got settled and was making money, but I guess that never worked out. But she stayed there, and she did get parts on TV shows and commercials; I remember seeing her in one or two. She came and saw us on holidays and stuff, and when I was old enough, I used to get to visit her in LA in the summer. I loved it.” Sunny smiled at the memory. “She always seemed to live someplace with a swimming pool, and sometimes we’d go to the beach and have a picnic or walk around the pier, or even go to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. I wanted to live in LA when I grew up.”