Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [218]
Snyder and Esplin had a couple of postmortems with Noall Wootton over the case. They would run into each other in the corridors or the coffee shop, and sometimes bring up questions they had about the other side's strategy: having won, Wootton did needle them a little, but didn't think he was too bad about it. His tone went: "Are you sure you suckers got all the cooperation you could from your client?" Or, "Why in Christ didn't you put his girl friend up there?" "He wouldn't let us,' they would answer. All agreed it was quite a question. As long as a defendant was sane and competent, he probably had the right to run his defense.
Since Gary had been at Utah State, Snyder and Esplin had had little communication. They talked to him on the phone a couple of times, and in the beginning, made arrangements for Nicole to get in, but they didn't actually go themselves until a couple of days before the Appeal Hearing on November 1. That day, however, they were given physical contact in the visitors' room at Maximum. Enough space to pace the floor, maybe 15 by 20 feet.
They were coming as the bearers of good tidings. Their chances of getting the death sentence reduced to life were, they thought, pretty nimble. Number one, as they laid it out for him, the Utah statute on the death penalty passed by the last Legislature did not provide for mandatory review of a death sentence. That was serious.
Probably, it was constitutionally defective. This criticism, "constitutionally defective," was about as strong as you could get in such areas of the law. A lot of lawyers felt the Utah statute was almost certainly going to be overthrown by the U.S. Supreme Court. So it was Snyder and Esplin's opinion the Utah Supreme Court would now be very hesitant about enforcing a death sentence on November 15th. That Utah Supreme Court would certainly look bad if shortly after they let a man be executed the Supreme Court came down against them.
Besides, they had another good legal vein to work. During the Mitigation Hearing, Judge Bullock had admitted evidence of the Orem murder. That had to have a big effect on the Jury. It certainly was easier to vote for a man's death if you heard about an additional murder he had committed, therefore, Snyder and Esplin were feeling optimistic. The brunt of their defense had been to maneuver onto these good appeal grounds. Now, they were feeling, in fact, a little excited. Some of this would be brand-new legal stuff for Utah County.
Gary listened. Then he said, "I've been here for three weeks, and I don't know that I want to live here for the rest of my life." He shook his head. "I came with the idea that maybe I could work it out, but the lights are on 24 hours a day and the noise is too much for me."
The lawyers kept talking about their grounds for appeal. Wootton's closing argument with his comments on the suffering of Debbie Bushnell could easily be called prejudicial to Gary. The prospects were good, even excellent.
Gary paced back and forth, and looked a little nervous. He repeated the difficulties he felt with living in Maximum. Finally, he said quietly, "Can I fire you?"
They replied that they guessed he could. However, they said, they thought they might have to go ahead with the appeal anyway. It was their duty.
Gilmore said, "Now, don't I have the right to die?" He stared at them. "Can't I accept my punishment?"
Gary told them of his belief that he had been executed once before, in eighteenth-century England. He said, "I feel I've been here before. There is some crime from my past." He got quiet, and said, "I feel I have to atone for the thing I did then." Esplin couldn't help thinking that this stuff about eighteenth-century England would sure have made a difference with the psychiatrists if they had heard it.
Gilmore now began to say that his life wouldn't end with this life.