October 15, 2025 • 26 mins
Defending “the worst of the worst” can take a sizable emotional toll–but it also reinforces a sense of shared humanity.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
So my friend worked at the Public Defender and said,
you should look into that. These are interesting people. So
I interviewed and I was asked how I felt about
the death penalty, And at that point I didn't know
much about the death penalty, but I said, it seems
like a human rights violation to me.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
This is Kelly Gleeson, one of Krista Pike's attorneys. Her
very first death penalty case was the absolutely brutal murder
of a six year old woman in a laundromat in Appalachia.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
I'm at the quiet he was one year younger than
me and one year older than my brother. Learned about
his life and came to the conclusion, I think the
best way to phrase it is, but for the sake
of God, there go I this could have been my brother.
He looked a little bit there. He's a tall, gangly,
(00:49):
skinny guy. But he happened to have schizophrenia. He happened
to have had a horrific history of sexual abuse, abandonment
by his mother, mental illness in the family. And it
seemed important to me that somebody should be advocating for
people like that. There's a reason this happened. It's not
an excuse. There's a reason it happened. I see you
(01:12):
as a human being. I see what you'd have alleged
to have done, and if you did it, that doesn't
matter to me. I still care about you, and I
will fight for you, and we will get the best
outcome possible. It's very rewarding to me because it's asking
people to trust to reveal the darkest, hardest secrets, the
(01:32):
scratches on their heart.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
In stories involving violent crime, we're accustomed to seeing things
through the eyes of a victim, and we give tremendous
space to the people who warn them. It's an understandable
way of centering the harm that has been done. But
the lawyers for people on death row focus on a
different main character. They take a wider perspective, insisting that
their clients are entitled to their own narrative bibs and
(02:00):
that empathy isn't a zero sum game. For most. It
starts with developing a kind of intimacy with people who
are broadly considered to be the worst of the worst,
and being there for them as they inch towards the
very final moments of their lives.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
I've been at the prison for four hours before. I
visit certain members of her family quite frequently, so if
I've had contact with them, or she's had contact with them,
we talk about what those conversations have been like, how
they seem to be doing.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
This is an assent. She's an investigator working on Christa's case.
She's tasked with digging up further mitigation evidence, reinterviewing witnesses,
and gathering evidence for Christa's clemency petition in the hope
that Christa's death sentence can be commuted to life in prison.
She also frequently visits with Christa.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
We talk about current events, we talk about things on TV.
We've recently talked a lot about fruit. Her sister has
an orchard and picks a lot of fruit, and Christa
hears about fruits she never had the opportunity to try
on the outside. So the other day we had a
conversation about cotton candy grapes because they're one of those
weird kind of hybrid fruits. I don't really know how
(03:08):
they work, but she'd never heard of them before.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
It's almost like you're explaining really mundane elements of everyday
life that most of us take for granted.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
It's hard to explain She's never known a life with
social media, with TikTok or with Instagram, So trying to
just translate these experiences. Yeah, very much that I take
for granted. She was telling me one time about a
mouse that was in her room and what it was
like to feed the mouse Reese's cups. So thinking about
that and kind of contrasting that with my day to
day life where I have a mouse in my apartment
(03:41):
and I'm freaked out and it's terrifying, and she has
this immense joy around getting to feed this little pit mouse.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Anna sometimes goes to visit Krista with Randy Spivey, one
of Krista's lawyers.
Speaker 4 (03:56):
We'll talk about TV.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
She loves Gray's Anatomy and they talked to aout Gray's
Anatomy all the time, and.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
I hated going on those visits because I don't want
to watch that show. She shares her life with us.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
This is Steve Ferrell, another of Christa's lawyers.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
I see all that her intelligence, her social skills, her insight,
and I'm just amazed at how that developed in prison,
And what I often think about is how that could
have been something really effective in her life whatever life
(04:32):
she chose to have, and that this whole thing is
a tragedy. And I see the lack of parenting, the
shuffling back and forth, and say, you lost a diamond.
I mean you let something go that could have really
been a positive thing in this world.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Yeah, I mean it sounds like what you're describing as
a convicted murderer who's also a people person, which I
think is a contradiction that most people would not believe possible.
Speaker 4 (05:02):
Yes, although I have to say that over the years
I've met a lot of them, and it's a cliche,
but when we judge someone's humanity based on one awful
thing that they did and throw away the rest, sometimes
you throw away, you know, something really valuable.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
I'm Sarah Trelevan and this is Unrestorable, Season two Proof
of Life, an original podcast from Anonymous Content and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 5 (05:39):
There is a dehumanization that takes place in the cases
of all capital defendants.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Sandra Babcock, a law professor at Cornell University and expert
in women and the death penalty, says that most people
who end up on death row undergo a process of
dehumanization by the community, in the media and in the
core room.
Speaker 5 (06:01):
There is an effort by the prosecution to rupture that
human bond that we feel with other members of our species.
I think the idea of being party to the intentional
taking of human life is very difficult for many people.
And to get jurors on board with the idea that
(06:25):
they are responsible for taking human life, prosecutors have to
convince them that the person who's sitting in front of
them isn't truly fully human the way they are.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
With women, that narrative often takes on additional meaning.
Speaker 5 (06:39):
It's not just that they aren't fully human, they aren't
fully women. They don't possess the characteristics that are stereotypically
associated with women, passivity, a peaceable nature, empathy, care for
their children and for other people in their lives. Prosecutors,
(07:03):
in addition to dehumanizing women, they try to defeminize them.
Usually they do it by injecting gendered tropes and stereotypes.
So a lot of times they will talk about how
they are unnaturally violent. Sometimes they will talk about their
sexual nature and that they have you know, multiple partners,
(07:27):
or that they are you know, sexually promiscuous. In the
case of you know, young women that they're manipulative, that
they're scheming, that they're devious. These are all very highly
sort of gendered stereotypes about women that harken back for centuries,
and they're still used today.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Over the years, podcasts, books, and TV shows about Christa
have had titles like She Devil and Satanic Betrayal. Earlier
this year, Krista was featured on an episode of the
series Mean Girl Murders. Part of the job of a
capital defense lawyer is to rewrite that story, to grab
control of a client's narrative and try to cast them
(08:15):
in a different light. That process can be formal and deliberate.
When I first reached out to Christa's legal team, I
did it through a website, Mercyforkrista dot org. It was
created in partnership with a PR firm in Tennessee, part
of a communication strategy to try to influence public opinion
about who Christa is and what she deserves. Some capital
(08:38):
lawyers even hire filmmakers to create short videos about their
clients in a bid to demonstrate that they're deserving of mercy,
but much of the process also seems to develop organically
and highly personally, as capital defenders spend time getting to
know their clients, often over a period of years, seeing
in them a goodness or at least complexity that few
(09:00):
others can or want to see.
Speaker 6 (09:05):
On this particular picture, the one I'm looking at, or
the one Molly has up is the first one to
the left, which is former clients?
Speaker 4 (09:15):
Or would you rather talk about current clients as opposed
to former or go ahead? Sorry, I was just going to.
Speaker 7 (09:21):
Say, should we also start with an overview of like
this is our wall of clients that we represent in.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
This is Steve Ferrell and Molly Kincaid, Christa's Knoxville based attorneys.
When Beth Carris and I visited Knoxville in August twenty
twenty four, I was drawn to three corkboards mounted on
the wall of their office. They're lined with polaroids of
thirty eight of their current and former clients, most smiling
and wearing an institutional blue uniform or white T shirt,
(09:53):
all convicted of awful things. Christa is the only woman.
Speaker 4 (09:59):
We generally represent these people for long periods of time,
and often intense periods of time, so there are very
few of them that we forget, you know, and that's
why it's good to have their picture up because we
think of them and we talk about their cases. I mean,
just looking at these pictures, I do think it's just
really interesting to get to know these people as complex
(10:21):
human beings. Because there is that whole idea of good
versus evil, which is what death row is based on.
It you're so evil, you don't deserve to be in
this world is so inaccurate, because every one of these people,
even if we assume they did the act that they did,
and that is certainly not always true, but even if
(10:44):
you assume that they are complex individuals, particularly those that
have been on death row some of them. I can
see one who's been on death throw for almost forty years.
You can't put his entire existence down to one bad act.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
I asked them to tell me some of the stories
of the other people they represent.
Speaker 7 (11:07):
So I represent Isaiah Patterson, who's on the bottom row
in the middle, and he's on death row in Arizona.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Isaiah Patterson was sentenced to death in two thousand and
nine for the fatal stabbing of his girlfriend, Consquelo Barker.
Speaker 7 (11:25):
He's seventy eight years old and he's in pretty good health.
He's a very jovial client to be around. He gets
along with everybody on the team. He also works really
hard at his job cleaning showers in the prison.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
He's very religious.
Speaker 7 (11:49):
What's interesting about his background is because of his age
and growing up in Mississippi. It was actually during the
Jim Crow era and he was raised sharecropping. He did
share cropping picking cotton, and you know, in this environment
of racial discrimination that was extremely terrorizing to black people
(12:14):
in Mississippi at the time. He also had very serious
mental illness in his family. His mother was schizophrenic and
committed to the Mississippi State Hospital.
Speaker 4 (12:26):
So he grew up with.
Speaker 7 (12:27):
A lot of abandonment. He had a lot of odds
stacked against him as a young person. I mean almost
none of that was presented at his trial, and so
the jury did not get a real.
Speaker 4 (12:40):
Impression of who he was as a person.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
In general, when you go in to meet clients, do
you find it's fairly easy to build a rapport?
Speaker 7 (12:53):
I think a lot of times by the time people
get Habe as counsel, they can be under standably very
tired of talking to lawyers who haven't been able to
help them. It's one of those things where it's a
lot of social work in addition to legal work, dealing
with a family communication, like getting family photos for them.
(13:18):
They really appreciate things like that, and in fact, sometimes
that's more powerful to them than the actual legal work
that you're doing on their case.
Speaker 4 (13:28):
When you work with somebody for almost twenty years, you
can't have conversations where I pretend that I am lawyer
and that is it. I feel like you can't expect
your clients to be sharing lots of intimate information if
you're not willing to share the basics that everyone in
this office knows about me. You know, kind of where
(13:51):
I live, in, what kind of my family situation, Who
are some of my friends. Steve West always wanted me
to send him a postcard everywhere I went on vacation.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Stephen Michael West was executed in the electric chair in
twenty nineteen for torturing and murdering a woman and her
teenage daughter.
Speaker 4 (14:07):
I thought, well, what does that hurt for him to
kind of think about what it would be like to
go to this place. I've known a number of clients
who became model citizens. I think in particular of Nick Sutton.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Nick Sutton is on the bottom row of one of
the corkboards, third from the right. He has short hair
and a gray and goatee. In his picture, he looks
genuinely happy. Nick was incarcerated for triple homicide at eighteen,
but he wasn't on death row, and then at twenty one,
someone inside sold him some bad weed, so.
Speaker 4 (14:45):
He asked for a refund on his bad weed. In response,
the seller issued a death threat, said he was going
to kill Nick Sutton, and on the day Nick Sutton
actually killed him. The prison was so understaffed there wasn't
even a guard on the pod, no one. The inmates
were literally in charge. He should not have been sentenced
(15:07):
to death and he should have been granted habeas relief.
But the hard thing with him was that he had
committed three murders before going to death row, so that
was probably what was working against him. Like forty nine,
I think he had become the model inmate.
Speaker 7 (15:27):
You know, he.
Speaker 4 (15:29):
Was the prison handyman, so he used to go around
with tools and had just an impeccable prison record. He
had completely reformed himself from his youthful days. He finds spirituality.
(15:52):
He gets married to a woman on the outside who's
very religious, and it seemed to have a very strong bond.
If Nick said don't do such and such, I think
most people didn't do it. And he didn't use his
influence in negative ways. He used it to keep order.
He saved the life of a guard during a riot,
(16:15):
and yet we executed him.
Speaker 5 (16:17):
That's not how I thought that story was going to end.
I thought you were going to say he got clemency
for saving the guard's life.
Speaker 4 (16:23):
No. No, Nick got the electric chair.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Because of the protracted appeals process, inmates can spend decades
on death row. It's not uncommon for the state to
ultimately issue a death warrant long after someone has reached
their senior years, their body ravaged by the impacts of
long term incarceration. Kelly Gleeson says that she sometimes has
to lead clients through grim motions as an execution date approaches.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
You know, around the thirty day mark, the warden will
want to meet with the client with you present and
have the client choose a method of execution, so waive
their right to die in one way and choose the
other way. So the choice that Lee had was the
electric chair or lethal injection.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
Lee Hall spent almost twenty years in prison, from murdering
his estranged girlfriend, and death row inmates who were sentenced
up to a certain point in the late nineties get
to choose their manner of death.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
When we first started representing him, he could walk on
his own. By this time he had to have an
escort because he could not see. And my co counselor
and I went to the prison with the form to
meet with Lee, the warden and several other people. We
go and sit down with Lee. The current warden was
(17:57):
wearing a suit, and you know, mister Hall, we're here
for this purpose. Your lawyers are going to go over
the form. I was having a very hard time with
the whole situation and was looking around at these people
and I'm hoping I could associate. And my co counsel
read the form to Lee, and then he had to
(18:21):
take his hand and move it to where the signature
line was, you know, to place it correctly, and he
placed it slightly wrong, so we kind of had to
start over. And a blind man signed his name poorly
because he couldn't see very well that he wanted to
die in the electric chair. He wanted to waive his
(18:43):
right to die by lethal injection, and he died in
the electric chair.
Speaker 4 (18:51):
One of the worst moments that I have to go
through is to tell somebody it's over. You are going
to die in a short of some miracle or God
forbid a botch. You are going to die in a
couple hours.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Right up until those two hours, you are looking for
any possible legal exit to what is it that to happen.
Speaker 4 (19:15):
Yes, and there's someone at the US Supreme Court that
we call the death clerk. I'm sure they have some
other title, but as you're going through and you're exhausting
these claims, this death clerk will be communicating with you
and what they want. I remember the last one. She said,
(19:36):
can you have that to me within a half an hour,
because if you get it to me within a half
an hour, everyone who needs to get it will get it.
We were getting near rush hour, and she was afraid
that if I didn't get it to her within a
half an hour, some of these people might be stuck
in traffic or something.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
And that paperwork getting it in before the justices get
in their cars for a rush hour, that is can
be the line between life and death.
Speaker 4 (20:02):
Yes, when I'm talking to a judge or a governor,
I try to convey that humanity, and all they're looking
at is some awful set of facts that may or
may not be accurate. But even if accurate, and even
if as bad as you think, that's still a person
(20:27):
that you are going to execute, and their humanity is
manifest when you talk to them, when you deal with them,
even in difficult moments. It's in moments like that that
I wish people that say you deserve to die could see.
(20:49):
I wish they could see that because no one deserves
to die. We all have to die, but no one
deserves to be told you'll be dead in two hours,
without exception. They comfort me, without exception. At the very
(21:11):
moment we are denying their humanity, they are showing humanity.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
You've attended executions previously, yes, can you tell me what
those final moments are like?
Speaker 4 (21:30):
So the first one was in Ohio. It was a
lethal injection, and it was back in two thousand and four.
Some journalists had litigated the right to access to see
the strapping down and the insertion of the needle, and
(21:53):
so we were seeing on a screen. Those of us
in the witness room were seeing that happening on a screen,
and particular client fought and screamed. We had no audio,
but I could see he was screaming and fighting, and
then suddenly it just stopped because the drugs went in.
I assume it's the paralytic, and then suddenly it was over.
(22:17):
And then the other one was in Tennessee Nick Sutton,
and it was the electric chair. I knew what to
look for, and I was transfixed on watching for those things.
It should be maybe a metaphysical moment where I'm seeing
the actual death of someone, but I'm watching for a
botched execution. And it's only afterwards that I kind of think, wow,
(22:40):
I just saw that.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Steve says that the most challenging execution of a client
was one he couldn't attend because of COVID.
Speaker 4 (22:48):
So I'm alone up in my son's bedroom, which has
become my office, and he was supposed to be executed
at three pm, and there was a delay that we
don't know why, and my co counsel and I were
on the phone together with him making small talk for
an hour and a half and I kept thinking, God,
(23:09):
I want this call to end, and then I'd say, no,
when this call ends, it's because it's over. And so
we talked, and we talked, and some friends from the
office came over with beer and pizza when they thought
it was going to be and I'm like, you know,
go out on the.
Speaker 5 (23:30):
Deck wait for me.
Speaker 4 (23:31):
I don't know how long it'll be. And then finally
he just said, oh, they're here. I guess this is goodbye,
and that was it. And stuff like that to me
is much more traumatic than sitting in the witness room.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
I do think secondary trauma's a very real in this job.
Folks can do this for a year or less and
realize it's not for them, and it does take a lot.
That's why I go traveling. I went to Portugal last
year for three weeks, my first time there. I loved
it absolutely. Self care is very important when you're doing
(24:14):
this work. Self awareness, managing boundaries with people who are
very damaged at times could become an issue. So it's
not easy sometimes, but I have the strength to do
it and my clients mean the world to me, and
so it is such a privilege and an honor to
be able to be an advocate for Krista. It really is.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
If Krista is executed, will you be there?
Speaker 1 (24:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (24:42):
I mean I think that's part of our job to
be there if they want us there, if that's of
a benefit, and if we're not prevented by some other obligation,
and by that it's usually litigating something were them that
you can't be in the prison and typing on your
(25:03):
computer at the same time. And so for Christa, I
don't think about it because to me, that's a question
that would happen at that time, if it happened, and
would depend on what she wanted and what was best
for her.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
If Krista wanted me there for some reason, I think
she probably would never ask me. I'd have to seriously
consider it. But in my mind, it is a murder.
It's the worst kind of premeditated murder.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
As Christa's lawyers press on in their efforts to overturn
her death sentence to explain to the world that she
does not deserve to die, they face an uphill battle,
and not just in the courts, many still see her
execution as the ultimate form of justice.
Speaker 4 (25:51):
Actually, to be honest, I wanted to just go ahead
and kill her like she did my daughter.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
That's next time on Proof of Life. Unrestorable is executive
produced and hosted by me Sarah Tulevin and Beth Carris,
Mixing and sound design by Reza Daiya for Anonymous content.
Jessica Grimshaw is our executive producer, Jennifer Sears is our
(26:17):
executive in charge of production, and Nicole Pronk is our
legal counsel. For iHeart executive producer Christina Everett and supervising
producer Abu Zafar
So my friend worked at the Public Defender and said,
you should look into that. These are interesting people. So
I interviewed and I was asked how I felt about
the death penalty, And at that point I didn't know
much about the death penalty, but I said, it seems
like a human rights violation to me.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
This is Kelly Gleeson, one of Krista Pike's attorneys. Her
very first death penalty case was the absolutely brutal murder
of a six year old woman in a laundromat in Appalachia.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
I'm at the quiet he was one year younger than
me and one year older than my brother. Learned about
his life and came to the conclusion, I think the
best way to phrase it is, but for the sake
of God, there go I this could have been my brother.
He looked a little bit there. He's a tall, gangly,
(00:49):
skinny guy. But he happened to have schizophrenia. He happened
to have had a horrific history of sexual abuse, abandonment
by his mother, mental illness in the family. And it
seemed important to me that somebody should be advocating for
people like that. There's a reason this happened. It's not
an excuse. There's a reason it happened. I see you
(01:12):
as a human being. I see what you'd have alleged
to have done, and if you did it, that doesn't
matter to me. I still care about you, and I
will fight for you, and we will get the best
outcome possible. It's very rewarding to me because it's asking
people to trust to reveal the darkest, hardest secrets, the
(01:32):
scratches on their heart.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
In stories involving violent crime, we're accustomed to seeing things
through the eyes of a victim, and we give tremendous
space to the people who warn them. It's an understandable
way of centering the harm that has been done. But
the lawyers for people on death row focus on a
different main character. They take a wider perspective, insisting that
their clients are entitled to their own narrative bibs and
(02:00):
that empathy isn't a zero sum game. For most. It
starts with developing a kind of intimacy with people who
are broadly considered to be the worst of the worst,
and being there for them as they inch towards the
very final moments of their lives.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
I've been at the prison for four hours before. I
visit certain members of her family quite frequently, so if
I've had contact with them, or she's had contact with them,
we talk about what those conversations have been like, how
they seem to be doing.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
This is an assent. She's an investigator working on Christa's case.
She's tasked with digging up further mitigation evidence, reinterviewing witnesses,
and gathering evidence for Christa's clemency petition in the hope
that Christa's death sentence can be commuted to life in prison.
She also frequently visits with Christa.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
We talk about current events, we talk about things on TV.
We've recently talked a lot about fruit. Her sister has
an orchard and picks a lot of fruit, and Christa
hears about fruits she never had the opportunity to try
on the outside. So the other day we had a
conversation about cotton candy grapes because they're one of those
weird kind of hybrid fruits. I don't really know how
(03:08):
they work, but she'd never heard of them before.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
It's almost like you're explaining really mundane elements of everyday
life that most of us take for granted.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
It's hard to explain She's never known a life with
social media, with TikTok or with Instagram, So trying to
just translate these experiences. Yeah, very much that I take
for granted. She was telling me one time about a
mouse that was in her room and what it was
like to feed the mouse Reese's cups. So thinking about
that and kind of contrasting that with my day to
day life where I have a mouse in my apartment
(03:41):
and I'm freaked out and it's terrifying, and she has
this immense joy around getting to feed this little pit mouse.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Anna sometimes goes to visit Krista with Randy Spivey, one
of Krista's lawyers.
Speaker 4 (03:56):
We'll talk about TV.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
She loves Gray's Anatomy and they talked to aout Gray's
Anatomy all the time, and.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
I hated going on those visits because I don't want
to watch that show. She shares her life with us.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
This is Steve Ferrell, another of Christa's lawyers.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
I see all that her intelligence, her social skills, her insight,
and I'm just amazed at how that developed in prison,
And what I often think about is how that could
have been something really effective in her life whatever life
(04:32):
she chose to have, and that this whole thing is
a tragedy. And I see the lack of parenting, the
shuffling back and forth, and say, you lost a diamond.
I mean you let something go that could have really
been a positive thing in this world.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Yeah, I mean it sounds like what you're describing as
a convicted murderer who's also a people person, which I
think is a contradiction that most people would not believe possible.
Speaker 4 (05:02):
Yes, although I have to say that over the years
I've met a lot of them, and it's a cliche,
but when we judge someone's humanity based on one awful
thing that they did and throw away the rest, sometimes
you throw away, you know, something really valuable.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
I'm Sarah Trelevan and this is Unrestorable, Season two Proof
of Life, an original podcast from Anonymous Content and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 5 (05:39):
There is a dehumanization that takes place in the cases
of all capital defendants.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Sandra Babcock, a law professor at Cornell University and expert
in women and the death penalty, says that most people
who end up on death row undergo a process of
dehumanization by the community, in the media and in the
core room.
Speaker 5 (06:01):
There is an effort by the prosecution to rupture that
human bond that we feel with other members of our species.
I think the idea of being party to the intentional
taking of human life is very difficult for many people.
And to get jurors on board with the idea that
(06:25):
they are responsible for taking human life, prosecutors have to
convince them that the person who's sitting in front of
them isn't truly fully human the way they are.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
With women, that narrative often takes on additional meaning.
Speaker 5 (06:39):
It's not just that they aren't fully human, they aren't
fully women. They don't possess the characteristics that are stereotypically
associated with women, passivity, a peaceable nature, empathy, care for
their children and for other people in their lives. Prosecutors,
(07:03):
in addition to dehumanizing women, they try to defeminize them.
Usually they do it by injecting gendered tropes and stereotypes.
So a lot of times they will talk about how
they are unnaturally violent. Sometimes they will talk about their
sexual nature and that they have you know, multiple partners,
(07:27):
or that they are you know, sexually promiscuous. In the
case of you know, young women that they're manipulative, that
they're scheming, that they're devious. These are all very highly
sort of gendered stereotypes about women that harken back for centuries,
and they're still used today.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Over the years, podcasts, books, and TV shows about Christa
have had titles like She Devil and Satanic Betrayal. Earlier
this year, Krista was featured on an episode of the
series Mean Girl Murders. Part of the job of a
capital defense lawyer is to rewrite that story, to grab
control of a client's narrative and try to cast them
(08:15):
in a different light. That process can be formal and deliberate.
When I first reached out to Christa's legal team, I
did it through a website, Mercyforkrista dot org. It was
created in partnership with a PR firm in Tennessee, part
of a communication strategy to try to influence public opinion
about who Christa is and what she deserves. Some capital
(08:38):
lawyers even hire filmmakers to create short videos about their
clients in a bid to demonstrate that they're deserving of mercy,
but much of the process also seems to develop organically
and highly personally, as capital defenders spend time getting to
know their clients, often over a period of years, seeing
in them a goodness or at least complexity that few
(09:00):
others can or want to see.
Speaker 6 (09:05):
On this particular picture, the one I'm looking at, or
the one Molly has up is the first one to
the left, which is former clients?
Speaker 4 (09:15):
Or would you rather talk about current clients as opposed
to former or go ahead? Sorry, I was just going to.
Speaker 7 (09:21):
Say, should we also start with an overview of like
this is our wall of clients that we represent in.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
This is Steve Ferrell and Molly Kincaid, Christa's Knoxville based attorneys.
When Beth Carris and I visited Knoxville in August twenty
twenty four, I was drawn to three corkboards mounted on
the wall of their office. They're lined with polaroids of
thirty eight of their current and former clients, most smiling
and wearing an institutional blue uniform or white T shirt,
(09:53):
all convicted of awful things. Christa is the only woman.
Speaker 4 (09:59):
We generally represent these people for long periods of time,
and often intense periods of time, so there are very
few of them that we forget, you know, and that's
why it's good to have their picture up because we
think of them and we talk about their cases. I mean,
just looking at these pictures, I do think it's just
really interesting to get to know these people as complex
(10:21):
human beings. Because there is that whole idea of good
versus evil, which is what death row is based on.
It you're so evil, you don't deserve to be in
this world is so inaccurate, because every one of these people,
even if we assume they did the act that they did,
and that is certainly not always true, but even if
(10:44):
you assume that they are complex individuals, particularly those that
have been on death row some of them. I can
see one who's been on death throw for almost forty years.
You can't put his entire existence down to one bad act.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
I asked them to tell me some of the stories
of the other people they represent.
Speaker 7 (11:07):
So I represent Isaiah Patterson, who's on the bottom row
in the middle, and he's on death row in Arizona.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Isaiah Patterson was sentenced to death in two thousand and
nine for the fatal stabbing of his girlfriend, Consquelo Barker.
Speaker 7 (11:25):
He's seventy eight years old and he's in pretty good health.
He's a very jovial client to be around. He gets
along with everybody on the team. He also works really
hard at his job cleaning showers in the prison.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
He's very religious.
Speaker 7 (11:49):
What's interesting about his background is because of his age
and growing up in Mississippi. It was actually during the
Jim Crow era and he was raised sharecropping. He did
share cropping picking cotton, and you know, in this environment
of racial discrimination that was extremely terrorizing to black people
(12:14):
in Mississippi at the time. He also had very serious
mental illness in his family. His mother was schizophrenic and
committed to the Mississippi State Hospital.
Speaker 4 (12:26):
So he grew up with.
Speaker 7 (12:27):
A lot of abandonment. He had a lot of odds
stacked against him as a young person. I mean almost
none of that was presented at his trial, and so
the jury did not get a real.
Speaker 4 (12:40):
Impression of who he was as a person.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
In general, when you go in to meet clients, do
you find it's fairly easy to build a rapport?
Speaker 7 (12:53):
I think a lot of times by the time people
get Habe as counsel, they can be under standably very
tired of talking to lawyers who haven't been able to
help them. It's one of those things where it's a
lot of social work in addition to legal work, dealing
with a family communication, like getting family photos for them.
(13:18):
They really appreciate things like that, and in fact, sometimes
that's more powerful to them than the actual legal work
that you're doing on their case.
Speaker 4 (13:28):
When you work with somebody for almost twenty years, you
can't have conversations where I pretend that I am lawyer
and that is it. I feel like you can't expect
your clients to be sharing lots of intimate information if
you're not willing to share the basics that everyone in
this office knows about me. You know, kind of where
(13:51):
I live, in, what kind of my family situation, Who
are some of my friends. Steve West always wanted me
to send him a postcard everywhere I went on vacation.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Stephen Michael West was executed in the electric chair in
twenty nineteen for torturing and murdering a woman and her
teenage daughter.
Speaker 4 (14:07):
I thought, well, what does that hurt for him to
kind of think about what it would be like to
go to this place. I've known a number of clients
who became model citizens. I think in particular of Nick Sutton.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Nick Sutton is on the bottom row of one of
the corkboards, third from the right. He has short hair
and a gray and goatee. In his picture, he looks
genuinely happy. Nick was incarcerated for triple homicide at eighteen,
but he wasn't on death row, and then at twenty one,
someone inside sold him some bad weed, so.
Speaker 4 (14:45):
He asked for a refund on his bad weed. In response,
the seller issued a death threat, said he was going
to kill Nick Sutton, and on the day Nick Sutton
actually killed him. The prison was so understaffed there wasn't
even a guard on the pod, no one. The inmates
were literally in charge. He should not have been sentenced
(15:07):
to death and he should have been granted habeas relief.
But the hard thing with him was that he had
committed three murders before going to death row, so that
was probably what was working against him. Like forty nine,
I think he had become the model inmate.
Speaker 7 (15:27):
You know, he.
Speaker 4 (15:29):
Was the prison handyman, so he used to go around
with tools and had just an impeccable prison record. He
had completely reformed himself from his youthful days. He finds spirituality.
(15:52):
He gets married to a woman on the outside who's
very religious, and it seemed to have a very strong bond.
If Nick said don't do such and such, I think
most people didn't do it. And he didn't use his
influence in negative ways. He used it to keep order.
He saved the life of a guard during a riot,
(16:15):
and yet we executed him.
Speaker 5 (16:17):
That's not how I thought that story was going to end.
I thought you were going to say he got clemency
for saving the guard's life.
Speaker 4 (16:23):
No. No, Nick got the electric chair.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Because of the protracted appeals process, inmates can spend decades
on death row. It's not uncommon for the state to
ultimately issue a death warrant long after someone has reached
their senior years, their body ravaged by the impacts of
long term incarceration. Kelly Gleeson says that she sometimes has
to lead clients through grim motions as an execution date approaches.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
You know, around the thirty day mark, the warden will
want to meet with the client with you present and
have the client choose a method of execution, so waive
their right to die in one way and choose the
other way. So the choice that Lee had was the
electric chair or lethal injection.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
Lee Hall spent almost twenty years in prison, from murdering
his estranged girlfriend, and death row inmates who were sentenced
up to a certain point in the late nineties get
to choose their manner of death.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
When we first started representing him, he could walk on
his own. By this time he had to have an
escort because he could not see. And my co counselor
and I went to the prison with the form to
meet with Lee, the warden and several other people. We
go and sit down with Lee. The current warden was
(17:57):
wearing a suit, and you know, mister Hall, we're here
for this purpose. Your lawyers are going to go over
the form. I was having a very hard time with
the whole situation and was looking around at these people
and I'm hoping I could associate. And my co counsel
read the form to Lee, and then he had to
(18:21):
take his hand and move it to where the signature
line was, you know, to place it correctly, and he
placed it slightly wrong, so we kind of had to
start over. And a blind man signed his name poorly
because he couldn't see very well that he wanted to
die in the electric chair. He wanted to waive his
(18:43):
right to die by lethal injection, and he died in
the electric chair.
Speaker 4 (18:51):
One of the worst moments that I have to go
through is to tell somebody it's over. You are going
to die in a short of some miracle or God
forbid a botch. You are going to die in a
couple hours.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Right up until those two hours, you are looking for
any possible legal exit to what is it that to happen.
Speaker 4 (19:15):
Yes, and there's someone at the US Supreme Court that
we call the death clerk. I'm sure they have some
other title, but as you're going through and you're exhausting
these claims, this death clerk will be communicating with you
and what they want. I remember the last one. She said,
(19:36):
can you have that to me within a half an hour,
because if you get it to me within a half
an hour, everyone who needs to get it will get it.
We were getting near rush hour, and she was afraid
that if I didn't get it to her within a
half an hour, some of these people might be stuck
in traffic or something.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
And that paperwork getting it in before the justices get
in their cars for a rush hour, that is can
be the line between life and death.
Speaker 4 (20:02):
Yes, when I'm talking to a judge or a governor,
I try to convey that humanity, and all they're looking
at is some awful set of facts that may or
may not be accurate. But even if accurate, and even
if as bad as you think, that's still a person
(20:27):
that you are going to execute, and their humanity is
manifest when you talk to them, when you deal with them,
even in difficult moments. It's in moments like that that
I wish people that say you deserve to die could see.
(20:49):
I wish they could see that because no one deserves
to die. We all have to die, but no one
deserves to be told you'll be dead in two hours,
without exception. They comfort me, without exception. At the very
(21:11):
moment we are denying their humanity, they are showing humanity.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
You've attended executions previously, yes, can you tell me what
those final moments are like?
Speaker 4 (21:30):
So the first one was in Ohio. It was a
lethal injection, and it was back in two thousand and four.
Some journalists had litigated the right to access to see
the strapping down and the insertion of the needle, and
(21:53):
so we were seeing on a screen. Those of us
in the witness room were seeing that happening on a screen,
and particular client fought and screamed. We had no audio,
but I could see he was screaming and fighting, and
then suddenly it just stopped because the drugs went in.
I assume it's the paralytic, and then suddenly it was over.
(22:17):
And then the other one was in Tennessee Nick Sutton,
and it was the electric chair. I knew what to
look for, and I was transfixed on watching for those things.
It should be maybe a metaphysical moment where I'm seeing
the actual death of someone, but I'm watching for a
botched execution. And it's only afterwards that I kind of think, wow,
(22:40):
I just saw that.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Steve says that the most challenging execution of a client
was one he couldn't attend because of COVID.
Speaker 4 (22:48):
So I'm alone up in my son's bedroom, which has
become my office, and he was supposed to be executed
at three pm, and there was a delay that we
don't know why, and my co counsel and I were
on the phone together with him making small talk for
an hour and a half and I kept thinking, God,
(23:09):
I want this call to end, and then I'd say, no,
when this call ends, it's because it's over. And so
we talked, and we talked, and some friends from the
office came over with beer and pizza when they thought
it was going to be and I'm like, you know,
go out on the.
Speaker 5 (23:30):
Deck wait for me.
Speaker 4 (23:31):
I don't know how long it'll be. And then finally
he just said, oh, they're here. I guess this is goodbye,
and that was it. And stuff like that to me
is much more traumatic than sitting in the witness room.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
I do think secondary trauma's a very real in this job.
Folks can do this for a year or less and
realize it's not for them, and it does take a lot.
That's why I go traveling. I went to Portugal last
year for three weeks, my first time there. I loved
it absolutely. Self care is very important when you're doing
(24:14):
this work. Self awareness, managing boundaries with people who are
very damaged at times could become an issue. So it's
not easy sometimes, but I have the strength to do
it and my clients mean the world to me, and
so it is such a privilege and an honor to
be able to be an advocate for Krista. It really is.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
If Krista is executed, will you be there?
Speaker 1 (24:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (24:42):
I mean I think that's part of our job to
be there if they want us there, if that's of
a benefit, and if we're not prevented by some other obligation,
and by that it's usually litigating something were them that
you can't be in the prison and typing on your
(25:03):
computer at the same time. And so for Christa, I
don't think about it because to me, that's a question
that would happen at that time, if it happened, and
would depend on what she wanted and what was best
for her.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
If Krista wanted me there for some reason, I think
she probably would never ask me. I'd have to seriously
consider it. But in my mind, it is a murder.
It's the worst kind of premeditated murder.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
As Christa's lawyers press on in their efforts to overturn
her death sentence to explain to the world that she
does not deserve to die, they face an uphill battle,
and not just in the courts, many still see her
execution as the ultimate form of justice.
Speaker 4 (25:51):
Actually, to be honest, I wanted to just go ahead
and kill her like she did my daughter.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
That's next time on Proof of Life. Unrestorable is executive
produced and hosted by me Sarah Tulevin and Beth Carris,
Mixing and sound design by Reza Daiya for Anonymous content.
Jessica Grimshaw is our executive producer, Jennifer Sears is our
(26:17):
executive in charge of production, and Nicole Pronk is our
legal counsel. For iHeart executive producer Christina Everett and supervising
producer Abu Zafar
Hosts And Creators
Beth Karas
Sarah Treleaven
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