Although Stevenson loathes executions, he has witnessed two. Each of the condemned wanted to be sure there was one sympathetic pair of eyes. “They bring in law enforcement officers and relatives of the victims, and when they open the curtain, the prisoner is strapped into the electric chair staring at a sea of hostile faces,” he says. “But the worst part is always before that.” On the day of the execution, the convict’s body is shaved to make it a better conduit. Men with clippers erase all the hair from the tied-down body. One of the condemned, Herbert Richardson, a Vietnam veteran with psychiatric illness who was convicted for a pipe-bomb murder, asked to hold Stevenson’s hand. “There were tears running down his face,” Stevenson says. “It was like preparing an animal for slaughter.”
Death row lawyer Bryan Stevenson: ‘Hope is our superpower’
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