Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [388]
So Athay had embarked on a crusade. In fact it had cost the full price of a crusade. When he ran for Attorney General in the last election, Bob Hansen, his opponent, had made Dale Pierre one of his most powerful talking points and won by a good margin. Would-you-want-this-man-who-defends-clients-who-stick-ball-point-pens-in-middle-aged-women's-ears-to-be-your-next-Attorney-General had been the whispered theme of the campaign. Nothing Athay could do. You couldn't tell every voter that he had been made Pierre's lawyer by Court appointment, nor that in the beginning, in fact, he had seen it as an unpleasant duty, and only later had become convinced of Pierre's innocence. You couldn't tell the voters that Dale Pierre was a complex man, a difficult man, but now, to Gil Athay, rather a beautiful black man, and besides, Athay had always hated capital punishment.
He was ready to argue there was no rational way you could justify the death penalty, except to admit it was absolute revenge. If that, he would say, was the foundation of the criminal justice system, then we had a pretty sick system.
So he had worked with the ACLU on this Gilmore business, and today had entered an appeal which had been audacious in the extreme.
After standard opening remarks that the lack of mandatory appeal in the Utah statute was unconstitutional, Athay had introduced his legal novelty. Let one execution be carried out under a defective law, he argued, and it would be hard in the future to find a higher Court ready to declare that same statute unconstitutional. No Judge would want to say to a fellow Judge, "You know, you executed that man in error." Gary Gilmore's death threatened, therefore, the life of Dale Pierre. An interesting argument, but difficult. To get the Court's attention, you had to make your language virtually insulting.
In the meeting on January 10, the ACLU therefore put Athay's venture next to last on their list. But by Friday afternoon, with the sad word coming from Giauque that Mikal Gilmore was not signing any papers, Gil Athay went to Judge Anderson's Court. Anderson was a rigid Mormon, but he was also the only Judge available at that hour. While there was hardly any realistic hope, Athay got caught up, nonetheless, in his own reasoning, and came to feel he had a good shot. Judge Anderson had listened carefully. The basic problem, however, remained. Nobody wanted to face the sinister merits of the argument. Judge Anderson turned him down.
Having failed there, Athay had gone to Judge Lewis on Saturday afternoon, but by now, the legal weakness of his case was apparent.
He had no statistics to offer. He couldn't show that 50 percent of the state population, say, had once thought Dale Pierre should be executed, but now because of the emotionalism of the Gilmore case, the figure had gone up to 90 percent. Nothing to muster but logic.
So Athay lost again in Judge Lewis's Court, and knew as he fought his way past the press in the corridor, that one way or another, he would try to get to the U.S. Supreme Court tomorrow.
4
The Utah Coalition Against the Death Penalty held its meeting in the State Office Building auditorium on Saturday afternoon and Julie Jacoby thought it was all rather decorous. The only outsider who got up to speak was Henry Schwarzschild, and he didn't go on for long. It was best if locals did the talking. Professor Wilford Smith, a bona fide Mormon from BYU, was a true catch, and there was Frances Farley, who was not only a Utah State Senator but a woman, and Professor Jefferson Fordham from the University of Utah Law School, then James Doobye, President of the Salt Lake City chapter of the NAACP. Buttons were available at the door-WHY DO WE KILL PEOPLE WHO KILL PEOPLE TO SHOW THAT KILLING PEOPLE IS WRONG?-and the program said, "Your donations are greatly appreciated."
Hoyle counted the house at 175, a decent turnout. There were men and women present that Julie didn't know, plus all the ACLU folk she could recognize.