The Last Plea Bargain

by Randy Singer

  “Attagirl.” Regina gave me a pat on the shoulder, told me to call her cell phone if I needed anything, and turned to leave. “I want you out of here in fifteen minutes,” she said over her shoulder.

  I didn’t know what to do with myself the rest of the day. I went to the gym but after a few listless exercises realized that I didn’t have much energy. So I went home and started obsessing over the online articles and television snippets covering Marshall’s scheduled execution.

  Predictably, James was making lots of noise about the fact that even the victim’s family now wanted the execution halted. He continued to talk about the polygraph and the unreliability of cross-racial eyewitness testimony. Not a word was spoken about the test Antoine had taken. It was frustrating to see the speculation about why Jamie Brock, notorious hard-nosed prosecutor, had now flipped and gone soft on the death penalty.

  I ignored the calls from reporters that flooded my cell phone. But I had to do something to clear up the confusion.

  I called LA and asked him if he could leak some information to his sources at the newspaper and TV stations. “My specialty,” he said.

  By early afternoon, the story was more complete. There were unconfirmed reports that Antoine Marshall had taken a new type of lie detector called a BEOS test and failed. His brain waves supposedly proved that he had killed Dr. Laura Brock. Unnamed sources also revealed that Antoine Marshall had written a letter after receiving the test results, apologizing to the victim’s family. The reporters now speculated that this admission of guilt had struck a chord with me and caused my about-face on the issue of whether Marshall should be executed or given life without the possibility of parole.

  I was prepared to be castigated by my colleagues, but instead I started receiving accolades from other prosecutors who defended my right to show mercy in my personal life even though I advocated for the death penalty when I represented other victims. Their praise was echoed by death-penalty opponents who welcomed me with open arms to the side of the angels. All the while, my own emotions swung desperately back and forth. Regina had been right to send me home.

  My ability to think logically and unemotionally about this matter was gone. So much so that at 5 p.m. on Monday, when the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles announced its decision to deny the petition for commutation, I went into a downward spiral. Though Mace James still had twenty-six hours to pull out a miracle, I knew that this time it wouldn’t happen.

  I felt a tsunami of guilt wash over me. Not only had I withheld information about my father’s success rate in front of Judge Snowden, but I had leaked information about Antoine Marshall’s confession. I had done so on the assumption that the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles would grant the commutation to a life sentence. I wanted everyone to know that even if they did, there was no doubt about Antoine Marshall’s guilt. But now that his execution was a certainty, I was having a hard time coming to grips with my own role in the process.

  But why was this different from four months ago?

  The answer to that question was the one reality I tried desperately to ignore. Four months ago, I had no doubt about Antoine Marshall’s guilt. But now, even with this new BEOS test, I couldn’t erase a nagging question from my mind.

  What if my father was mistaken? There was no DNA evidence. No murder weapon. No corroboration for the eyewitness testimony of a man whom I was no longer sure I really knew. If he was willing to bribe or blackmail a state court judge, would he also be willing to fudge his testimony in order to make his eyewitness identification appear more certain?

  Not my father. He had always been fair and merciful. There was no way my dad would have shaded the truth when it would put a man on death row.

  But there was no way my dad would have exercised undue influence with a judge, either. And what about those expert witnesses Snowden had kept from testifying? Dr. Rutherford had seemed pretty persuasive to me.

  And so I would be forced to watch the execution of Antoine Marshall with these doubts swirling in my head. Had my father put an innocent man on death row? And if he did, had I just taken away the last chance that man had of escape?

  63

  The news about Antoine Marshall’s execution was eclipsed on Tuesday morning by news that a plea bargain had been struck in Milton County Superior Court. A man accused of armed robbery had copped a plea in exchange for a reduced prison sentence. He had been sent to an undisclosed location in another part of the state to serve his time, and Bill Masterson held a press conference to announce that the logjam had been broken. The prisoner, whose name was Latrell Hampton, still had eighteen months left to serve on his reduced sentence, and the question on everyone’s mind was whether he would survive long enough to experience the daylight of freedom.

  Masterson sounded certain that he would: “I can assure you that he is safe in solitary confinement. He will not be a part of the general inmate population at any time during the remainder of his prison term. While we cannot do this for every inmate who pleads guilty, we are making special arrangements for those who are brave enough to be the first ones to break ranks.”

  I was intrigued by Hampton’s guilty plea, but my mind was elsewhere. I checked the court filings throughout the morning, actually hoping Mace James and his Knight and Joyner counterparts might somehow pull it off. But by the time Chris picked me up at the house at 1 p.m., three different courts had already issued opinions denying new requests from Antoine Marshall’s lawyers. There was one chance left—the US Supreme Court—but there wasn’t anything new to make the justices there take notice.

  A session with Dr. Gillespie on Monday had helped me work through some of my guilt. He had also changed my sleep medication to Lunexor, which he said would provide a sense of deep relaxation leading to better REM sleep and also create an improved feeling of well-being. Whether or not the medication was helping, I was less jittery on Tuesday than I had been the day before. But I still couldn’t get any peace about what I was going to witness.

  On the way to Jackson, Chris tried to assure me that we had done everything we could to avoid this moment and that God would provide a reprieve if Antoine Marshall was not supposed to die. I admired my brother’s blind faith in God’s intervention, but he didn’t know the things I knew. The manipulations behind the scenes were ugly and made a mockery of the naive notion of justice I had embraced when I first came to the DA’s office.

  This time, there were no traffic jams, and Chris and I arrived in Jackson two and a half hours early. We sat in a McDonald’s and nursed Diet Cokes for an hour, each deep in our own thoughts.

  “You ready?” Chris finally said to me.

  “I guess so.”

  We made it to the prison parking lot a few minutes later, and the protesters stopped to stare. Television cameras swung our way. Chris left the car running so we could enjoy our last few seconds in the air-conditioning. He took my hand and suggested we pray.

  “Good idea,” I said.

  I bowed my head as Chris prayed for Antoine Marshall with the same earnestness I remembered from when Dad first went into the hospital. He ended with a request that God would have mercy on Antoine Marshall’s soul. I murmured an amen and opened my eyes.

  I touched my mother’s necklace and felt my eyes brim with tears. “I never thought this day would come,” I said. “And now that it’s here, I wish it hadn’t.”

  “It’s out of our hands now,” Chris said. “It always has been.”

  We got out of the car, and I kept my eyes straight ahead, ignoring the small crowd of protesters as I walked next to Chris. To my surprise, the protesters started clapping. First just a few, and then they all joined in—a respectful applause as they lined up to face us and show their appreciation for the fact that two innocent victims had advocated to save a man’s life. Even the television crews, though they followed us with their cameras, refrained from shouting questions at us.

  Chris nodded at the protesters and thanked them, but I didn’t say a word. I just wanted
to get into the relative obscurity of the building and get this over with.

  We went through five levels of security—the guard at the barbed-wired gate, the metal detector and second set of guards, two sets of hydraulically controlled doors, and a final pat-down—before we were ushered into the waiting room. Bill Masterson arrived a few minutes later, followed by the sheriff who had led the investigation into my mom’s murder. I gave them both a hug and thanked them for coming.

  In a few minutes, we would be taken by van to the small white building at the edge of the property that housed the execution chamber. We would be joined in the observation room by Mace James, the prison chaplain, and five reporters. Caleb Tate would not be there. He was too much of a coward to attend.

  At 6:19 p.m., sitting next to his client in a small cell, Mace James received the text message from an attorney at Knight and Joyner. The Supreme Court had denied their final plea for a stay of execution. This time, there would be no last-minute drama.

  Antoine looked at Mace with expectant eyes, a last glimmer of hope, and Mace simply shook his head. Antoine nodded and looked down, and the tears began to flow. After a few minutes, he wiped his eyes and raised his head. He put his hand on Mace’s shoulder. “You’ve done one heckuva job. I don’t deserve a lawyer like you.”

  Mace felt a lump in his throat, and he had a hard time speaking. “What you deserve is a lawyer who could put a stop to this.”

  “Nah.” Antoine shook his head. “What I deserve is exactly what I’m going to get.”

  Mace cursed himself for the umpteenth time for setting up that BEOS test. He had been shocked when he saw the results. Afterward, Mace began doubting the reliability of the technique. He’d talked to experts who questioned the test’s trustworthiness, experts he had ignored in his earlier crusade to get the test authorized. But even when he explained all this to Antoine, his client wouldn’t believe him. Antoine became convinced that he had been fooling himself all along and that he must have killed Laura Brock in a drug-induced state. And now, rather than freeing his client, Mace had only managed to send him to the grave with an overwhelming burden of guilt.

  The men sat there in silence for another five minutes until the chaplain showed up for a final prayer. The prison pastor was big and soft-spoken and had taken a particular liking to Antoine. The two men hugged and then knelt together on the floor. Mace joined them on his knees. He felt like his heart would rip out of his chest when Antoine began to pray for Chris and Jamie Brock but couldn’t finish his thoughts. The chaplain stepped in and prayed while Antoine cried unashamedly.

  Mace wondered whether his client would be able to compose himself in the thirty minutes he had left before the scheduled execution.

  When they pulled the curtains back at precisely 7 p.m., Antoine Marshall was already strapped to the gurney located just a few feet away on the other side of the window. The room was clean and clinical with white walls, a tile floor, and the single gurney in the middle. Four deputies stood next to the prisoner, and I knew that one of the deputies was a trained medical technician. I’d been told that doctors would not participate in the procedure because of their pledge to do no harm to their patients.

  Chris and I were sitting in the front row, along with Masterson and the sheriff. Mace James and the prison chaplain sat behind us, and five reporters occupied the last row. A few prison guards kept an eye on everyone.

  The warden who pulled the curtain back moved to Antoine’s side and read the execution order. He then asked the prisoner if he had any final words. Chris reached out and took my hand.

  I was shocked at how helpless and frail Antoine Marshall looked. I remembered him from the trial and expected a man more surly, with more swagger. But the man in front of me had bleary red eyes that darted back and forth from one observer to the next. in abject fear. He appeared smaller and thinner than I remembered. In fact, he seemed nearly anorexic, dwarfed by his orange jumpsuit. Only later would I learn that he had been fasting for forty days.

  “I just . . . want to say,” he stammered, “that I am so very sorry. Jamie and Chris Brock—” his lip began to quiver, and I could see tears rolling down his cheeks as he looked at Chris and me—“thank you for trying to save my life even though I took your mother’s. I have been praying for you every day, and if you can find it in your heart to somehow forgive me, please pray that God will have mercy on my soul. My only hope now is in Jesus.”

  He closed his eyes, and I wanted to look away. The medical technician swabbed his arm with alcohol, found a vein, and punctured it with a needle. The man then hooked up an IV, which ran through a hole in the wall to an adjacent room. He did the same thing with Antoine’s other arm—a backup IV in case the primary line failed.

  The warden took out his cell phone to check one last time, just to make sure no miracle had occurred in any of the appellate courts or at the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles. He announced that there had been no stay granted and signaled that the execution should continue.

  I had done my homework and knew that in the room behind the prisoner, two staff members would take three syringes and empty them sequentially into the IVs. The first would contain the drug sodium thiopental, a quick-acting barbiturate, which would induce a coma within thirty seconds of injection. The second drug, pancuronium bromide, was a muscle relaxant that would cause paralysis of the respiratory muscles. The third drug, potassium chloride, would stop the heart.

  Antoine was hooked up to a heart monitor, and I watched his chest rise and fall. I knew death could occur anywhere between five and twenty minutes after the drugs were injected.

  He closed his eyes, and his lips started moving as if in prayer.

  My mother’s killer never opened his eyes again. His chest rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and fell. Chris squeezed my hand harder. Antoine’s lips stopped moving, his heart rate began to slow, and within a few minutes, almost imperceptibly, the chest stopped expanding. The heart monitor flatlined. And just like that, it was over.

  I closed my own eyes and said a silent prayer.

  God, have mercy on this man. And, Lord, forgive me for allowing this to happen.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw two doctors enter the room wearing long white coats. One at a time they checked the prisoner’s pulse and put a stethoscope on his chest. They looked at each other and nodded.

  The warden pronounced Antoine Marshall dead at 7:07 p.m. I felt myself getting dizzy, my knees starting to buckle, but I somehow held it together long enough to walk out of that room under my own power.

  I left the facility in a daze. After we cleared the prison walls, Bill Masterson talked to the press while I walked somberly to the car. Chris drove home; I stared out the side window, trying to come to terms with what I had just witnessed.

  64

  Chris asked me if I wanted him to stay with me Tuesday night, but I lied and said I would be fine. I had always thought that once Antoine Marshall was executed, I would experience a sense of closure and be ready to move on to the next phase of my life. But on the way back from Jackson, I realized how much this struggle had defined me. Now that he was dead, now that the fight was over, I felt like a big part of me had died as well. What made it worse was the convoluted way it had all ended. Antoine Marshall had stepped up and done the right thing, taking responsibility for his actions. But I had dodged my responsibility to the justice system, finding ways to keep harmful information secret—an approach that had sealed Antoine Marshall’s fate.

  It was over so abruptly. And the image of Antoine Marshall strapped to the gurney, eyes closed and the IVs in both arms, was seared into my memory. That night I took the Lunexor that Gillespie had prescribed but didn’t experience the same type of high I had experienced before. It did help me sleep, but the next day I couldn’t force myself out of bed before eleven. I just wanted to stay in a fetal position under the blankets until the pain went away, until my mother and father came back and the ache in my heart disappeared.

  For two da
ys I stayed in my sleep clothes until the afternoon hours and seldom ventured outside my house. I had a session with Gillespie on Thursday night, and he tried to walk me through some relaxation techniques, but nothing worked. With the death of Antoine Marshall, and especially the circumstances surrounding his death, I had lost my zeal for being a prosecutor. Without that, I wasn’t even sure who Jamie Brock was anymore.

  I spent most of Friday going through old scrapbooks and memorabilia that reminded me of my mom. When I was a teenager, I hadn’t been that interested in her work as a forensic psychiatrist. But now, as I read some of the newspaper clippings she and my dad had saved, I gained a new appreciation for what a powerful witness she must have been. She testified all over the country against defendants who claimed insanity through irresistible impulse. She had apparently developed a subspecialty in what it took for somebody to be brainwashed and was the psychiatrist of choice for many high-profile cases when prosecutors were debunking that defense.

  Out of all the articles I read, it seemed that she lost only once. The defense lawyer was a young showboat from Las Vegas named Quinn Newberg.

  But my mom testified for the defense side as well. On that side, she specialized in cases involving alleged sexual abuse when the victims claimed to recall the abuse under hypnosis. My mom was apparently a national leader in showing how persons who were susceptible to hypnosis were equally susceptible to the power of suggestion from the person who had hypnotized them. Oftentimes the counselor or psychiatrist would help the “victim” create a detailed account of sexual abuses that never actually occurred.

  It was such a tragic waste that my mom had been cut down in the prime of her professional career, not to mention at a time when her daughter needed her most.

  I called Chris a few times, and he seemed to be moving on better than me. But then again, he didn’t have to live with the secrets I did. I had decided that I would never tell him. I felt I was already paying a high price to protect my father’s reputation. There was no sense destroying Chris’s memories as well.