Navigating Life and Loss in the Shadow of Justice
Reflections of a Lawyer-Mom
On the day Kenny died, after saying goodbye for the last time, I walked alone to the gravel parking lot of the prison and thought how this day, April twelfth, would be ruined for me forever.
I paused outside the car, reacquainting myself with the sun overhead, gulping the fresh air. Feeling gratitude for both after the hours I’d spent inside the prison, where sunshine and fresh air ceased to exist.
Climbing into the driver’s side, I was hit by the chemical sweetness of the air freshener that all rental car companies conspire to use, and which always made me suspicious of the smells that lay beneath. I freed my phone from the glove box and checked my messages. Office number, two unknowns (press?), and a just-missed call from my son’s school back in California. Shit.
“Southport Elementary, how can I help you?”
“Yeah, this is Lindsay Bennett. My son, Max, is a kindergartner there. It looks like y’all just tried to call me?”
“Oh, yes, Mrs. Bennett.”
“It’s Ms.”
“Ms. Bennett. We were calling because Max hasn’t been picked up yet. We’ve tried your husband, but we can’t seem to get ahold of him. Max is sitting in the front office. Can you come pick him up?”
“No, I cannot. I am 2,500 miles away in Georgia.”
“Oh. No, I guess you can’t. Do you know where Max’s father might be? Why we can’t reach him?
“I have a guess.”
“Well . . . what do you suggest we do?”
“Let me try his grandparents. They’re not far. I’ll call you back.”
“Ok. We’ll wait to hear from you, then.”
I hung up the phone and hung my head. God damn you, Jeff. Today, of all days? You couldn’t keep it together just for this day?
It wasn’t as though my soon-to-be-ex didn’t know or understand what I was dealing with there. Jeff had followed me to Georgia a dozen years earlier after I’d accepted a fellowship to come work as a death penalty lawyer. He’d been proud of the work I did, defending me to his conservative midwestern relatives. He’d understood about my constant canceling of personal plans and my late nights at the office. He’d embraced becoming a stay-at-home dad, first to one, then two sons, while I crisscrossed the country several days a month. This was all made possible, it turned out, because he’d been sober.
A lot had changed. Still, some part of me had believed he’d pulled it together for this last push. After all, Kenny was the only client I had left in Georgia. The others were already dead, those calendar dates already ruined.
During the decade I lived in Georgia, the state took the lives of twenty-two men. At some point, I stopped measuring time in days, weeks, or years, instead marking its passing in relation to the body count. This or that event happening after one death, before the next, and so on.
My own pangs of mom guilt, fueled by my frequent absence, felt insignificant when I imagined the pain of the mothers of those twenty-two sons. Sometimes, perspective can be useful. Other times, it will have you rationalizing every ounce of the neglect of your own family, every missed milestone, as small but necessary sacrifices in the name of saving the life of some other mother’s son.
In any event, that much death has a way of casting shadows on the lives that are happening around it. Even those happening in utero. When I was pregnant with Max, I lost three clients, one each trimester. In between choking down prenatal vitamins and attending birthing classes, I found myself boxing up client files and coordinating funeral details with the families. When I was pregnant with Leo two years later, working around the clock on an execution warrant, we won a clemency grant, tipping the scale toward life that year.
As I watched my sons grow from newborns to toddlers, I couldn’t help but wonder whether all the death surrounding my pregnancy with Max would hamper him somehow. Would he be plagued with a sadness he could never explain? And would Leo, born in the wake of a clemency miracle, walk through life expecting things to work out?
Over the years, I’d watched as my colleagues and clients’ families struggled to find their way out from under the shadows imposed by so much death, searching for the sun. My own struggle to do the same eventually led me back to California, where I’d grown up. Where we had family. And where they hadn’t executed anyone in years.
After this, after Kenny, I’d be done with Georgia for good, I told myself. Leaving me free to focus on my California cases. And my boys, then three and six. And the sorting out of what was beginning to look like a messy divorce.
Kenny was going to die. Of that, I was sure. For starters, he was a black man who killed a white woman — in the South. We had exhausted every legal avenue and been denied by every court. Hail Marys were all we had left, and those rarely did any good in Georgia, the buckle of the death belt. These are ugly calculations, I know, but it goes with the territory of being a death penalty lawyer. You learn to read the tea leaves as they are, not as you wish they were.
A week before Kenny’s execution, I’d tried to explain the necessity of what I was doing, futile though it may have been, as I prepared to leave for Atlanta and fought with my father. He’d been watching the boys for me while I worked late.
I was still living part-time with my ex post-split so that our boys wouldn’t have to be shuffled back and forth after our separation. I had the idea after reading about the concept of “bird’s nest co-parenting,” where parents who were no longer together would swoop in and out of a family home, leaving their children in their “nest.” It sounded so gentle and evolved. But we were not gentle or evolved then.
There was my ex, who seemed to be manifesting his heartbreak in the form of a steady drip of vodka and destroying our house in between blackouts. And then there was me. On the nights I stayed at the house with the boys, I’d sweep them into my room when I’d arrive, conjuring a campout of sorts, complete with sleeping bags and lanterns. My pitiful attempt to transform avoidance into adventure.
When I got to the house that night, the boys already asleep upstairs, I could feel my father’s judgment looming large in the room.
“How does this seem like it’s working to you? Because I look around this house, the boys, their father, and it doesn’t seem like it’s working to me.”
He wasn’t wrong. A quick survey of the rubble surrounding us spoke to the sad state of things. The mountain of dirty laundry, the stench of dog urine, the piled-up dishes drying in the rack told me Dad had begun cleaning up because he couldn’t stand not to. The question hung in the air between us: how could you let things get this bad, Lindsay?
“I know, Dad. Ok? Things are a mess — I get it. But it’s nine at night, and I have an early flight I still need to pack for. And my client will be dead in a week. So maybe you could save the lecture about what a bad wife and mother and housekeeper I am until I get back,” I snapped.
“Yeah, alright, kiddo.”
As I readied for another return to Atlanta, it hit me that I hadn’t finished unpacking from the last trip I’d taken. It was hard to believe that just two weeks earlier, I’d been attending a yoga retreat in Bali. Bali. A trip driven by desperation to get away from all the things in my life that were going wrong, which seemed to be most of them.
Despite the beauty of Bali, with its tiered rice fields and warm, smiling people, I could feel the cortisol coursing through me, keeping me edgy and sleep-starved. It seemed that even having chosen “flight,” my body was still preparing for a “fight.” A week into the trip, my hyper-vigilance found validation in the form of a long-distance phone call from Georgia alerting me to a warrant for my client’s execution.
My final few days in Indonesia were a mash-up of meditation and temple treks, along with outlining legal strategies and talking to Kenny. The twelve-hour time difference and prison bureaucracy being what it was meant talking to him at 1:00 AM Bali time.
Even now, years later, if I close my eyes, I am back in the fever sleep that followed our conversations in the dark. Conversations about eleventh-hour litigation, clemency procedures, and execution protocols.
After excavating my suitcase from my closet, I pulled out the items that ceased to make sense for my Georgia trip: beachy sundresses, Balinese prayer beads, books on meditation, and yoga tights. I traded these things for canary-yellow legal pads, a laptop, jeans and t-shirts, a suit for court, a bottle of Tums, and some zinc to boost my immune system.
I knew, from prior experience, that my body would quit on me after the upcoming days. Last time, I’d ended up with pneumonia. The time before that, bronchitis. Before that, shingles. My body always kept the score.
Much of the week that followed in Georgia remains a blur. Trauma chooses what we remember and what we forget.
April twelfth, I remember, though. The last visit with Kenny. The downcast eyes of the guards I passed as I made my way through the prison maze on my way back out. Georgia’s maximum-security prison was never what you’d call upbeat, but the execution days carried a special pall that permeated the place.
I remember Kenny sitting across from me in his crisp white uniform and his pristine Timberland boots that must’ve been a gift from his family. Something of the outside world, something to help him keep his chin up. I remember the promises I made to him in our final moments together. I remember his grace and gratitude.
Our twin resignation. One last hug. The feel of his gaze as I passed through the iron gate, the free world awaiting me on the other side.
I remember the stretch and strain of the hours that followed. The jarring call from my son’s school in California alerted me that things were falling apart in multiple time zones.
I return to the office, discarding my briefcase on the floor, kicking off my shoes, curling up on a colleague’s couch, legs tucked, fetal feeling. The soft murmur of the group gathered in the conference room down the hall. The room transformed into a “war room” during warrants. I knew that if I wandered down the hall, I’d be met with sympathetic gazes, pats on the back—platitudes about how I’d fought the good fight.
And the food, there was always so much food. Bowls of chips and pretzels, a crock pot of comfort, an arsenal of beer and wine. Props while we waited.
The waiting was always the worst. You hoped for some hook, some justification for a last-minute court filing. Anything to occupy you, to drown out the deafening silence of nothing. Nothing left to file, no one left to listen.
I wasn’t ready for the war room. I wasn’t ready for comfort or sympathy. Not knowing that Kenny was, at that same moment, talking to his family on the phone for the last time. Telling stories and trading words just as long as they could. Until that last, official word came crashing into their conversation, alerting Kenny that it was time to head to the execution chamber.
Weeks earlier, as we’d waded through the execution paperwork together, a macabre exercise if ever there was, Kenny made a choice. List up to 2 people you wish to be in the gallery for support. The gallery would include members of the press and, more than likely, members of the prosecution team and the victim’s family members.
Kenny chose no one. No member of his legal team. No family member. No friend. A categorical refusal to subject any of us to the spectacle of state-sponsored murder. A big brother by birthright, that protective instinct governed his decisions from early on and continued to the end.
Knowing how little was in his control, I’d wanted to respect what little agency he had left, so I didn’t fight him on it. But as the time drew near, my chest tightened. I felt panic, regret, guilt.
Strapped down, facing the onlookers, he’d have no one who knew him or cared for him on the other side of the glass. If he searched the eyes of those across from him, there would be no compassion found, only gazes hungry for a headline or thirsty for vengeance. I should have insisted. Lobbied for one kind face in a sea of hate. I’d wanted to honor his choice, but in doing so, had I betrayed my own moral code?
The experience of seeing someone for what you know will be the last time because you know that person will die that day, not just die — but be murdered — is a uniquely awful thing.
It is a goodbye to someone society has cast out but who you have come to care deeply for. Someone you know as much more than the worst thing he ever did. Someone who loved basketball and who laughed with his whole body. Someone who gifted you with sweet sketches for your babies when they were born. Mickey Mouse for Max, a proud lion for Leo.
You’ve been led to believe if you cast the right spell, you might be able to prevent this outcome. But it turns out you’re mediocre at magic, so he’ll die despite your efforts.
Afterward, you’ll be tasked with calling the family to tell them he’s gone. You’ll tell them he knew how much they loved him. You’ll tell them to be tender with themselves, knowing this brand of grief has a way of resurfacing over and over again. You tell them they must find a way to go on, for him and for them. They don’t hear anything you say after “it’s over,” but you say it all anyway.
When it is over, you head back out West. You barely sleep those first weeks following your California homecoming. You spend your days wandering the halls at work, there but not there, maneuvering around people who don’t know what to say to you, who look at you like the broken thing you are.
You don’t belong there. Your people, the ones whose wounds match yours, are far away in Georgia, in Mississippi. The nights feel more honest. Back in that fever sleep, your only company the questions that creep up in the dark. What could you have done differently? What issues might you have missed? Was Kenny in pain when they pushed the poison into his veins? How much pain? For how long?
Every next morning, you emerge to the wreckage that waits your repair. The house, the husband, your sons. You consider the possibility that the sacrifices your family made weren’t so small after all. You’ll begin to pick up the pieces of your life scattered like so many of your sons’ Legos.
Within three months of Kenny’s execution, you’ll remove your sons from the home where their father is drinking himself to death. He’ll offer no resistance. He’ll have lost his job. Totaled the car with the kids in it. Abandoned any attempt to disguise his daily intake of screwdrivers.
A few months after that, he’ll land in the hospital after a neighbor finds him on the sidewalk, seizing and babbling incoherently. It takes the doctors a week to detox him. Another week to resuscitate his liver, his kidneys, and his spleen. Then, two weeks of physical therapy to ready his body for rehab. He’ll spend a month there, learning about his addiction, but the lessons won’t stick.
When you visit the house after, you’ll flash on the crime scene photos you’ve seen over the years. The blood-streaked floors, the hole in the wall, the flies buzzing around the decay will all feel so familiar, except now it’s your house. Your crime scene.
Your ex will survive, but barely. After rehab, there will be a relapse, but he’ll survive again. So will you, and so will your boys. The life you’d built before is buried beneath his addiction, your inattention. Atop the ruins, you will build a new one for you and your hearts.
You harbor hopes that their father stays sober, stays alive, doesn’t ruin a date forever for them. But you’ve raised them to survive whatever comes. They are their mother’s sons.
When you pull your boys close these days, inhaling the sweet scent of sunshine, you think of all the clients you’ve lost. You think of them when they were little and still smelled of sunshine.
In the years since that awful April day when Georgia killed Kenny, you’ll begin to heal. You’ll no longer have to hide away on the anniversary of his execution. You’ll have fewer crying jags in public places when a sound or scent raises the dead in your memory.
You’ll store your joy like pennies in a jar. You’ll add to the jar: lost teeth and first loves, birthday parties, graduations, college aspirations.
And along with your grief, you’ll carry the lessons it’s given you. The voices of lost sons will pipe up as you navigate life with Max and Leo. Your boys will luck into the occasional second cookie when you feel Kenny nudging you with a “Come on, Momma, let them boys have their sweets.”
You’ll make sure the boys stay on top of their schoolwork, even when they plead for more playtime, your commitment fortified with the help of another client who you know would say, “Stay strong, girl. Those boys need you to keep them accountable, even when they’re fussing at you.”
And they’ll get more than their fair share of trips to the California coast over the years, thanks in part to another client who’d always dreamt of visiting the ocean but never got a chance to go.
You’ll stare out at the Pacific, and when you find the point where it meets the horizon, you’ll swear you can hear him saying, “Damn, ain’t that something?”
