"To be fair to Monk," Terri said, "many of the retarded can do a lot of the things anyone else can—drive, hold a job, make friends, talk sports, join the military, keep secrets, read the news, and even sound knowledgeable about one thing or another. It'd be easy for Charles Monk to meet someone like that and just write him off as 'no genius.' But what's missing is far more profound: the ability to understand and process information, to engage in logical reasoning, and to appreciate the nature of his dilemma, or respond appropriately."
"What causes all that?" Carlo asked.
Dinner arrived: chateaubriand with béarnaise sauce for Terri and Carlo; prime rib for Johnny Moore; strip steaks for Tammy Mattox and Anthony Lane. Lane hoisted his bowl-shaped glass. "Maybe this," he answered. "Alcohol—if Mom drinks enough while the kid's in utero. Or crack, or even prescription drugs pregnant women shouldn't take. There's also hereditary retardation, genetically transmitted. Sometimes you get a process of downward natural selection: inbreeding among the less gifted, which creates a smaller and smaller gene pool, so that the genetics for impaired intelligence predominates. And as the gene pool becomes more marginal, aggravating factors like fetal alcohol syndrome tend to increase—the mother's far more likely to be unaware of risks."
"Like in the Bayview," Mattox said flatly. "Part of my job is to gather up Rennell's school records, teachers' observations, medical and psychiatric records, and then interview people who knew Rennell—and Payton—from the beginning."
"Then I'll evaluate all that," Lane went on, "and meet with Rennell. That'll include testing for lesions on the brain, organic brain syndrome, head injuries, and, of course, IQ."
Carlo sat back, momentarily savoring the wine. It struck him that the warmth of their environment—red-flocked wallpaper, leather cushions, the familiar, dim-lit comfort—might represent the last relaxed moments he would enjoy in weeks. "I've read the Supreme Court opinion in Atkins," he told Lane. "It bars executing the retarded without ever defining what retardation is."
"That's up to us." Lane cut a bite of steak. "There are three standard criteria. First, significantly subaverage intellectual functioning—there's no hard and fast IQ, but seventy is generally considered the cutoff point."
"Seventy," Carlo repeated. "Isn't that awfully low?"
"In a word, yes," Mattox said sardonically. "But why make it easy."
"Second," Lane continued, "are significant limitations in what's called adaptive functioning, found in at least two of the areas we need to get along in life—such as communication, social skills, academic ability, use of community services, conformity to law, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. In the case of a black kid from the Bayview, we can expect to see shortfalls like these aggravated by a chaotic and maybe abusive family, lousy social services, poor health care, poverty, low employment, and the like."
"The third criteron," Mattox finished, "is that these problems have been visible before eighteen. Otherwise, think of all the death row inmates who'll start faking retardation. Like a high school production of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest."
Johnny Moore emitted a short laugh. "One thing you can be sure of," he told Carlo. "Give me a group of people charged with the same crime, and it's the retarded guy who's most likely to get the death penalty. Unlike our friend Eddie Fleet, he won't be smart enough to cut a deal, or navigate the system."
"I keep coming back to seventy," Carlo told Lane.
"So will the Attorney General. He'll want seventy to be the absolute ceiling. And he'll play into all the lay conceptions of the retarded—they slobber, they drool, they walk stooped, they talk funny, they've got Down syndrome." Lane glanced at Moore and Mattox. "Our job's harder. Not only do we have to show how Rennell got to be who he is—his entire life—but how he coped with the cops, the trial, and the justice system . . ."
"Let's get back to testing," Carlo said. "What kinds of tests?"
"Tests that measure performance—how well and quickly the brain functions. For example, if I blindfold you, then give you blocks with various shapes—squares, triangles, and circles—I'm betting you could put the right shapes in a board with the same shapes cut out. If you're retarded, believe it or not, that may not be so easy."
Carlo tried to imagine the brooding thug of Laura Finney's description wearing a blindfold and putting shapes in a board, like a kid at a kindergartner's birthday party. Shaking his head, he said, "What if Rennell doesn't want to do it?"
Lane shrugged. "If he's retarded, he won't. I guarantee you that much."
"To me," Tammy said, looking to Lane for agreement, "showing limitations in adaptive behavior is the most important. No one spends their entire life faking being slow in school, lousy with girls, and short of walking-around sense."
"That's why Tammy will construct a social history," Terri added. "From prenatal care to parenting, relatives, peer relationships, school performance, mental health, substance abuse, bizarre behavior, problems with juvenile authorities, and well before all that—the same work-up for every member of his family. Plus all the records we can find—for sheer credibility, paper trumps everything, particularly with judges who don't trust us . . ."
"All the stuff no one ever bothered with." Mattox jabbed the table for emphasis. "No one who represented Rennell Price knows who this man really is. Probably no one in his life does—excepting Payton, maybe. But six weeks from now, we will.
"A social history is like a novel—rich in characters and incident. But the tragic aspects tend to be numbingly the same: mental problems in the family, parental substance abuse, prenatal risk factors, nightmare childhood." She paused, her southern drawl deepening. "Honey, you just won't believe what we're gonna find out. It's so goddam baroque some judges hate us for making them confront it—they don't ever want to know. Like it's their mission to kill somebody, but confronting the life of the guy they're executing will offend their sensibilities.
"And this stuff is common—it's common. I remember one mama telling me our client wasn't bad like her other kids—she'd never had to stick his hand over the hot stove. Like I was a mom, too, so I'd get what she meant."
Carlo put down his fork. "Which brings us to the heart of things," Terri said softly.
"Yup," Mattox said. "Abuse."
"Hard to get at sometimes," Lane observed. "If it exists, trauma like that can be painful to open up. Families guard their secrets—fiercely so, the more dysfunctional they are. And no one else may know. Society does a rotten job with at-risk kids."
Terri sipped her wine. "Rennell Price is on death row because Monk, Mauriani, and twelve jurors all believed he was a party to a child sexual abuse. Was he abused? Conversely, is there any evidence that he was predisposed to be an abuser?
"There's no direct evidence of guilt. No witnesses; no physical evidence of sexual contact between Rennell and Thuy Sen. What we're left with is a damning but wholly circumstantial case. Which Rennell denies."
"He's got a real investment in denial," Lane observed. "But if you're right—that he's a wobbler, borderline retarded—he might not be a very good liar. To me that lends his denial a certain credence."
Listening, Carlo felt himself being drawn into a complex world—equal parts psychodrama, mystery, and horror story. It gave him a new appreciation of the mettle, and complexity, of his young stepmother's character, complicated still further by the deep ambivalence which this case surely must create. "There's a lot to consider," Terri was saying. "Start with Rennell's relationship to Payton. Could Payton lead him into an act he wouldn't do on his own?"
Lane fiddled with his salad. "At eighteen, Rennell would have been ragingly hormonal. And if he was retarded, he might have been more comfortable with children than with female peers. But he'd need a real antisocial component in his makeup for him to force a nine-year-old into oral copulation. Unless he was high on crack."
Cocking her head, Mattox looked across the table at Lane. "Isn't there a contraption called a pleathysmograph, or something—measures penile activit
y in response to visual cues, like naked women or little girls in tutus?"
"There is, actually. If you like that sort of thing."
"Too demeaning," Terri said firmly. "We're trying to build a relationship with this man, not turn him into a lab experiment from Krafft-Ebing." She drained her glass. "Still, I'd give a lot to know what really happened fifteen years ago."
Carlo gave her a quizzical smile. Would you? he wondered in silence.
But it was only as they left, and he and Terri stood in a dense fog waiting for the valet to bring their cars, that she asked, "How was dinner with Elena?"
"Good," Carlo answered, then added quietly, "I'm pretty sure she doesn't know, Terri. There's been nothing in the news, after all. Our client's sliding toward death without a ripple."
FIVE
IT WAS ON TERRI'S FOURTH VISIT TO RENNELL PRICE, WITH forty-one days before his execution, that she first took Carlo with her.
They crossed the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County, the city behind them a mirage seen in glimpses through a low, swirling fog, the point of the Transamerica Pyramid piercing its highest wisps. On the far side of the bridge the parched, brown hills of Marin were like another country, bathed in the sun of a clear fall day. As they sped up Highway 101, Terri described Rennell's life.
"San Quentin has roughly six hundred prisoners on death row," she told Carlo. "More than anywhere in America. Rennell's in East Block, where most of them are—five rows of cages stacked in tiers. Each cell is six feet by six, with a bunk, a stainless steel toilet and sink, a maximum of six cubic feet for possessions, one small shelf, and maybe a TV with headphones to cut down the noise.
"There's a lot of shouting—conversations about sports, or people calling out chess moves, or just screaming for no reason. East Block's also where they put prisoners with things like psychosis, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder. Which makes it worse for Rennell—most of the death row population is sort of dulled down, just resigned. But the mentals are loud—"
"Can Rennell see anyone?" Carlo interjected.
"Only the guards. The walls to each side are concrete—you can only look out the front, and that has bars which are crosshatched to keep the prisoners from pelting guards with urine or feces. They can peer in at you, of course—whether you're sitting on the toilet or just lying on your bunk. Otherwise there's just noise bouncing off concrete and metal."
"Does Rennell get out for meals?"
Terri shook her head. "They prepare the food in the main kitchen. Then guards push it over on carts, raise it on a mini-elevator to the tier—Rennell's on the fourth tier up—and slide it through a food slot built into the bars. The hot breakfast comes with a box lunch for later, a sandwich with peanut butter or mystery meat and maybe some fruit and a couple of cookies. Then there's another hot meal for dinner. After a time, the guards pick up the trays." Glancing at her watch, Terri stamped down on the gas pedal. "From the standpoint of the prison administration, cell feedings take up a lot of time and labor. But letting this crowd eat together would be worse. Especially with all the crazies."
Carlo had never thought to visualize Rennell Price's day. Now he imagined himself stuck in a cage amidst five tiers of cages housing people he could only hear; the endless, dissociated sameness of waiting for trays to materialize through a slot, bringing much the same meals you'd had the day before. "What about showers?" he asked.
"Showers you get three times a week. But the showers are converted cells, which never seem to work that well. Best not to expect warm water." Squinting, Terri took her sunglasses off the dashboard and slid them on. "Or to smell very good. That's one of the prices of exercising daily."
"Where do they do that?"
Terri jerked down the sun visor. "Exercise? There are six exercise yards, each with a basketball hoop and a toilet, each surrounded by concrete walls and partially covered with a metal roof in case it's raining out. On a catwalk above the roof are guards with rifles—to quell riots or, in theory, to keep some prisoners from getting killed by others. San Quentin's a dangerous place—a lot of prisoners refuse to exercise for fear of getting killed by other inmates, or maybe just because the yards are crowded and there's nothing much to do . . ."
"Can't they segregate the worst ones?"
"Actually, they try." Turning on the right blinker, Terri glanced over her shoulder and changed lanes, exiting the highway at the sign for San Quentin State Prison. "They divide prisoners into categories," she continued. "Grade A's, the supposedly well-behaved ones, can exercise together up to five hours a day. Grade B's—psychotics and gang members and the obviously violent—don't get out much at all. And then there are the 'walk-alones,' like Rennell and Payton.
"Walk-alone is the name for at-risk inmates: snitches, or prisoners whose crimes are so low status that other prisoners think they don't deserve to live." Terri smiled faintly. "I guess they don't see the irony."
"Where do Rennell and Payton fit in?"
"Child sex criminals. From top to bottom, the hierarchy goes from rage killings—some guy catches his girlfriend with someone else—to someone convicted of killing a child in the course of sex. That's the Price brothers.
"In a way, they're lucky. Snitches can't go in the yard. But sex offenders get to exercise with their own kind, several hours a day." Turning down a two-lane road toward the prison, Terri added softly, "Rennell gets to see his older brother almost every day. So they get to go through life together, just like before."
* * *
San Quentin sprawled across an isolated finger of land. Parking in the lot below the guardhouse, Terri and Carlo got out.
She had schooled him in the rules. They both wore gray suits to differentiate themselves from the prison population—blue or denim was forbidden. They locked all their possessions in the Jeep except for a notepad, pen, their drivers' licenses, Terri's State Bar ID, and the clear plastic bag filled with quarters, which—on Terri's instructions—Carlo carried so that they could get Rennell food from the vending machine. Then they headed for the guardhouse which screened all visiting lawyers.
"We're the privileged visitors," Terri remarked. "Nonlawyer visits are a bitch."
"How so?"
"People like Rennell's grandmother can only call a few hours every week to schedule visits. And the phones are so busy you have to keep hitting the rep dial and hope that you'll get through.
"Often, you won't. That means no visit. If you get lucky, then you go to the general visiting area and sit in a cage with your prisoner, surrounded by more cages holding other prisoners and their visitors. It's been like that ever since members of a rival gang got into a fight—what had been an open room became a zoo." Terri opened the door to the guardhouse, a one-story wooden structure that resembled a cheap trailer. "To the authorities, visitation is just another problem they'd sooner be without. So they make it as hard as possible for someone like Eula Price to even schedule a visit. But then running death row's no picnic, I suppose."
At the desk inside, a somewhat chatty guard—happy to be working outside the prison walls, Carlo assumed—waited while they filled out a visitor form before shooing them through security. Carlo stripped off his belt and shoes and watch and passed through a metal detector; retrieving them, he emerged from the building with Terri to find himself inside San Quentin State Prison.
To his right were mock Tudor homes, housing for prison staff; ahead, looming above the sprawling stucco prison, was a tower manned by guards with rifles. To the left was death row, next to a ventilator shaft jutting from the prison's roof.
Terri followed his gaze. "The gas chamber," she told him. "It's still available for occupancy. But lethal injection's now the death of choice."
"Who decides?"
"Rennell." Her tone was clipped. "A bullet in the brain seems more humane than either. But that's too up close and personal."
They passed through a second security station with a guardhouse and metal detector. Beyond that a neatly tended square of grass surrounded a
marker engraved with the names of murdered prison guards. "You mentioned gangs?" Carlo said. "You'd think they'd keep a pretty tight lid on this place."
"They do. But somehow the folks inside come up with knives and makeshift weapons. And there's still an underground economy: people making 'pruno'—alcohol fermented from fruit—or getting drugs, maybe through employees gone bad. There's everything from weed to crack and black tar heroin." Stopping at an iron gate, the entry to death row, Terri added, "As for gangs, it's a veritable United Nations. You've got the Bloods, the Crips, the Skinheads, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Mexican Mafia, and the North and South Mexicans. There's even alliances: at the moment, the North Mexicans and the Bloods are united against the South Mexicans and, of all people, the Aryans. Go figure. I guess it's a case of self-protection over principle."
"What about our guys?"
"They're just survivors." She paused. "I've never met Payton. But I hear he's spent the last fifteen years becoming a real badass—abs of steel, two hundred push-ups at a crack. He's made himself mean enough to live, and maybe for Rennell to live, too."
The gate buzzed open. Inside a cramped space a guard in a plastic booth took their visitor forms. Then they passed through a door composed of iron bars into the visiting area.
It was as Terri had described it—two parallel rows of Plexiglas booths encased in wire. One row had views of the bay through high windows; the second, which did not, included "Visitors' Booth 4." The guard opened its metal doors and locked them inside.
"Too bad," Terri remarked. "Rennell likes the view. But this way he'll focus better."
As they settled in two plastic chairs on one side of the small wooden table, Carlo prepared himself to meet his new client. "Building a relationship," he remembered Terri saying, "is the only way to pose hard questions and deal with hard subjects—like abuse. And we need to prepare Rennell to meet with Tony Lane." Then she had paused, and her green-flecked eyes had become more distant. "We also have to prepare him to die. That's not a job for strangers."
Conviction Page 14
