The crime of Wyatt Matthews

Part of the responsibility for the current impasse, of course, lies with the lawyers. I am not well acquainted with any of the small platoon of attorneys who defended Wyatt Matthews, but I doubt that any of them was personally committed to him. The civilian who defended him at trial (and who spent the first 15 minutes of the final appellate argument apologizing for his own performance at trial--a novel approach to trying to obtain a reversal for incompetency of counsel) stayed on the case, and I doubt that he was paid much, if anything. The public-interest lawyers were being faithful to their muses, trying to convince us that when a black is executed it is only because he is black; or that the military-justice system is corrupt; or that capital punishment is an abomination in a society as highly evolved as ours; or that the statute under which Matthews was sentenced is technically unconstitutional; or that we didn't do it right the first time at trial and so we have to be made to do it all over again. The military attorneys assigned to work on Matthews's behalf did their jobs to the best of their abilities, and were thus being true to their oaths as attorneys and officers. All of Matthews's lawyers--retained, pro bono, and military--were of course aware that this is a landmark case, and that having worked on it would enhance their professional reputations regardless of whether he lived or died. The opportunity to work on a case of this sort, in or out of the military and regardless of the outcome, is a thing to be cherished. However, at the end of the well-traveled road of judicial process, there comes a division. On one side stand attorneys who are guided by the law; on the other are those whose abhorrence of capital punishment is so strong, for whatever reason, that they are willing to engage in "the now familiar abuse of process" described by Justice Powell.

But why does it word? Because judges are lawyers and among them is a contingent whose reluctance to impose the death penalty is equal to that of the defendant's lawyers. We now have a federal judiciary that is more than 50 per cent Carter appointees, a group of modernist jurists disproportionately liberal and anti-capital-punishment. Regardless of the forum or the merits of the case, it is not difficult to find a federal judge who does not want to be the last person to say No to a condemned prisoner, and who will assume jurisdiction--or pretend that he has it--so that he can grant a stay that brings the machinery of justice to a grinding halt just long enough to allow the death warrant to expire, so that a new one will have to be applied for and obtained from the governor, a new date will have to be set, witnesses will have to be screened and renotified . . . And while all that is going on there are still other forums where photocopies of rejected briefs can be filed. In the world of legal practitioners who believe that the law is, or should be, whatever feels good, it is easy to find someone who believes that saving a life--even the life of someone as dangerous to others as Matthews--is a noble cause.