Conviction

ONE

IT WAS THAT KIND OF SAN FRANCISCO MORNING WHEN DRIZZLE spattered through a mistlike fog which clung chill and close to the slick pavement. As Carlo drove, Terri sipped coffee from a porcelain mug, warming her cupped hands. The breath of the defroster cleared circles on the windshield of her cluttered Jeep.

Carlo turned down Pine Street toward Laurel Heights. "So tell me about Laura Finney," he said.

"Until a few weeks ago she was a senior counsel at Kenyon and Walker. She's the only lawyer who worked on Rennell's appeal from the start." Pausing, Terri sipped her coffee. "In theory, Kenyon and Walker's as different from Yancey James as you can get—six hundred lawyers from top-tier law schools, the elite of their profession, with resources to burn. More help than most would think Rennell deserved."

"You don't sound impressed."

"We'll see," Terri answered with a shrug. "What struck me about their filings was how neatly prepared they were. Perfect margins—not a typo I could find. The only thing missing was Rennell."

* * *

Laura Finney snatched at a stray hair which had eluded the rubber band pulling her brown curls back in a bun.

Dressed in blue jeans, she was slender and pale, her eyes unsmiling behind wire-rim glasses. In the living room of her one-story stucco bungalow a toddler girl watched Sesame Street while an infant boy writhed in a playpen, vainly attempting to master the art of flipping on his stomach. The circles beneath her eyes made Finney look so tired that Carlo could imagine her on the treadmill of new motherhood.

"The second baby got to be too much," she told them. "I took maternity leave one month before the Supreme Court turned down Rennell's habeas corpus petition. By then I was the senior lawyer on the case—the only one who had been there since Rennell's direct appeal got assigned to us, when I was just out of law school." Pausing, she added in a tone Carlo heard as bemusement. "That was fourteen years ago."

"Why so long?" he asked.

Finney shot a glance of wan amusement at Terri, sitting beside her stepson on the gray wool couch. "Bureaucracy," she told Carlo. "Inertia. Despite all the right-wing politicians bleating about tricky lawyers abusing the system to put years between our death row clients and the needle, thus extending the agony of people like Thuy Sen's parents.

"Truth is, it's the process that's excruciating, and all we needed to invoke it was show up." Leaning forward in her chair toward Carlo, she began ticking off its stages on her fingers. "Let's review the stations of the cross. First three were the so-called direct appeal of Rennell's conviction to the California Supreme Court. The Court hears only about twenty or so direct appeals a year. And direct appeals include only issues which are presented by the record of the trial itself. That made our direct appeal pretty close to worthless when it came to whether 'Lawyer James' greased the wheels of death for his own client."

"Why? You can see that much from the trial transcript."

"All you can see," Finney rejoined, "is that James was a crummy lawyer with terrible judgment. The courtrooms of America are crawling with those. What you can't tell is whether he's what the Sixth Amendment right to counsel supposedly guarantees: a lawyer who investigates, with at least minimal competence, all the options for sparing his client death."

"Or," Terri interjected pointedly, "whether his lawyer had a coke habit?"

The inquiry, cutting off Finney's clipped, ironic narrative, induced a look of doubt and surprise. "Why do you think that?"

"Just surmise. You interview the grandmother?"

"I didn't." The hint of doubt in Finney's manner became defensiveness. "A junior associate did, I think. There was a lot to do, and so a lot of us worked this case."

Carlo could read in Terri's skepticism her imaginings of some rookie lawyer, too lightly supervised, interviewing an elderly woman from the Bayview across the gap of race and age and culture—though Carlo himself had adduced from Eula Price the telling detail of James's runny nose. But then his life until age seven had given him a preternatural sense of people, and what was left unsaid.

"Who was the partner in charge?" Terri asked.

"Which year?" Finney's tone retrieved its irony. "The direct appeal took seven years by itself, and the habeas corpus petition—the first time we could present facts outside the record—was decided seven years after that. About halfway through, the first partner, Frank Goldmark, died of a massive coronary at a 49ers game. The next one, Leslie Keller, left to become General Counsel of an Internet start-up in return for stock options which became worthless once the company crashed and burned. I guess you could say Rennell Price was a real killer."

Terri did not smile. "After Keller left," she asked, "who took over the case?"

Finney glanced at her daughter. In a corner of the living room, the child watched a purple puppet chirp at her from the television. Turning, Finney answered, "I did. After all those years, the case was too attenuated to explain to another partner, and would have required too much learning the law for him to get a grip on. After all," she added sardonically, "we were doing this for free."

This time Terri's expression was so polite that only Carlo might read it as a mask. "I guess that's why they call it pro bono," she answered, and the baby in the playpen began to whimper.

* * *

They waited in the living room while Finney took twenty minutes to breast-feed her son. "What's wrong?" Carlo asked.

Terri looked at him in surprise. Softly, she answered, "To me, it's classic—the intellectual severity, the unearned cynicism, the ability to see every irony but how badly they served Rennell. Sometimes I'm not sure what makes me crazier—smug big-firm lawyers, or privileged white women."

Carlo looked at the plastic kids' toys scattered across the carpet. "This is privilege?"

"To a mother." Terri's smile was sour. "She's home, isn't she? Rennell Price is about to die."

* * *

When Finney returned without the baby, she began speaking as if she'd never left. "The problem with the direct appeal was that the record was so clear.

"Mauriani played it straight. No racial bias in jury selection. No withholding of exculpatory evidence. If his witnesses gave answers which were objectionable and James failed to object, Mauriani would caution them and then rephrase the questions . . ."

"Why not?" Terri observed mildly. "When you're getting away with murder, why not wrap it with a bow?"

"The point is," Finney retorted, "that all the record left us was to argue that, on its face, James was so incompetent as to effectively deny Rennell Price his right to counsel. The Attorney General's Office argued that there might be strategic reasons for even his worst lapses. Though no one could guess what they were . . ."

"What did James tell you?" Carlo asked.

"Nothing," Finney responded in an arid tone. "He was in the middle of disbarment proceedings, so his lawyer advised him not to meet with us." She glanced at Terri. "All he told me on the phone was that Rennell's case was so hopeless that nothing he did, or didn't do, would have made any difference. Lest that sound too self-serving, the California Supreme Court read the record, and agreed." Pausing, she smiled thinly. "For that meager result, we bought Rennell Price seven more years on death row. Clever lawyering, don't you think?"

* * *

Turning from the screen, the little girl pronounced herself hungry. A look of martyred patience crossed Finney's face, and she invited Terri and Carlo to the kitchen while she made a peanut butter sandwich and cut it into bite-size squares. Placing this offering before her daughter, she said with a faint smile, "Here you are, sweetie. Quicker than you can say 'paternity leave.' "

The little girl looked up at her, uncomprehending, then slipped the first brown and white square into her mouth. "Not that I blame my husband," Finney remarked. "Our firm's got upward of three hundred male lawyers, and not one has taken the six-month leave we offer. Its mere existence is enough to make them paragons of feminism."

The bitterness beneath this observation made Carlo imagine a disenchanted and, perhaps, no longer quite attentive lawyer left by attrition to deal with a hopeless client.

"At least that's something," Terri answered. "My first husband was just a deadbeat." But, of course, Ricardo Arias had been so much more than that.

* * *

As they went back to the living room, Terri turned to Carlo. "Once Rennell lost his direct appeal," she explained, "the next step was habeas corpus. Basically, you claim that a prisoner is being imprisoned in violation of his constitutional rights, and then try to get him out by proving it.

"In Rennell's case, that enabled Kenyon and Walker to file a separate petition, also before the California Supreme Court, presenting evidence outside the record—maybe of innocence, or factors which might cut against a death sentence. As well as why James might have failed to uncover evidence of either." Of Finney, she inquired, "Who looked into Rennell's school or medical records?"

Finney settled back in her chair. "That part got assigned to another associate, I can't remember who. What comes to me is a lot of truancy, and a couple of accidents—things like falls and broken bones."

Terri studied her. "Kid stuff?" she asked softly.

"I guess so, yeah."

Carlo glanced at Terri. "What about Rennell's IQ?" he asked.

"I remember he was no genius," Finney said reluctantly. "But if you're talking about retardation, that became more critical after I left the firm. By the time the Atkins case came down, it was too late for us to use it—our habeas corpus petition had already been shot down by the State Supreme Court, the Federal District Court, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supremes had declined to review. So raising retardation falls to you."

No problem, Carlo thought. We've got seven weeks. It struck him that Terri's face was never more arresting than when her green-flecked brown eyes betrayed the swiftness of her thoughts. "Did you try to interview Rennell's teachers?" she asked.

"I think so. But I don't recall anything coming of it."

"What about the family?"

"Not much there. Mom killed Dad, Grandmother's literally sick and tired, and his brother, Payton, hasn't opened his mouth for a decade and a half. All we got from any of them was the grandma saying that the Rennell who came to live with her was a sweet and gentle boy. I guess that's what she had to cling to."

Terri's features suddenly lacked all expression—a sign, Carlo guessed, of how hard she was working to conceal her impatience with Laura Finney. "What about the mother?" she asked.

"We tried," Finney answered. "But the woman's crazy. Talking to her was like listening to some street person jabber to herself."

"No doubt," Terri responded. "But tell me about it, anyway."

* * *

What Laura Finney remembered was eyes like burn holes.

She sat with Athalie Price in a mental institution so grim that it could have been nothing else. The woman's processed hair was hacked off, her face gaunt, her body as stringy as beef jerky. But it was the eyes—to Finney, they spat madness.

"Fool," Athalie Price muttered with contempt. "And he thought that boy was stupid 'cause I was. That made him the stupidest of us all."

When Laura asked if she meant Rennell's father, Athalie leaned back, head against the wall, and started laughing to herself, a hiss of rage escaping from her lips. She refused to speak another word.

* * *

"All I came away with," Finney said now, "is this wasn't the Cleaver family. That much I already knew."

"What about Thuy Sen's family?" Terri asked. "Ever talk to them?"

"No." Finney's face registered palpable surprise. "What could they tell me that wouldn't add to their misery? Even before having my own daughter, I wouldn't have wanted to remind them all over again of how theirs died. Not unless it did some good."

Carlo glanced at Terri and saw nothing in her eyes about Elena. But, uncharacteristically, she seemed to have no follow-up question. "What about DNA?" he asked Finney.

"We tried every test there was. But Thuy Sen had been floating for two days before they found her. The semen samples from her mouth and throat were too degraded to show whose sperm it was." Pausing, Finney drew a breath. "To tell the truth, part of me was relieved. I was too afraid of knowing."

Terri stared at her. "Knowing what?" she quietly asked. "That Rennell was guilty, or that he might not be? Only the latter scares me."

Still watching Terri, Carlo wondered if this were true.