Silver Dollar

ROSEMARY was led into the room. She was a Black woman in her mid-fifties with a trudging, labored gait. She lowered herself slowly onto the chair opposite me and seemed to drink in the quietness of the space. “It's so loud here,” she said. “I just want some peace.”

She didn't remember the events leading to her arrest. The police report said she had stabbed the victim over sixty times with a seven-inch butcher knife. Bloodstain analysis painted a gruesome picture of a fight that went from the kitchen, down the hall, into the man's bedroom. She looked frail.

Although capital cases take at least three years to go to trial, Rosemary ended up spending six years in Cook County Jail. Over the years I worked there, the feeling of terror as I crossed through locked doors never left me. Yet, during the hours Rosemary and I spent together, I felt fully present in a way that was rare for me.

I've always been against the death penalty. It's racially biased and inhumane. Too many innocent people have been executed by the state—a mistake that can never be undone. When I heard there was a way to fight back, I signed up immediately. I began training as a Capital Case Mitigator as a student of the Clarence Darrow Death Penalty Defense College. I was awed by our renowned instructor, Andrea Lyon, whom the Chicago Tribune dubbed “The Angel of Death Row.” Our work involved sitting with clients and family members, drawing out their stories, listening for trauma, scrutinizing school, work, and health records, and ultimately weaving a narrative with a human face for the jury. A second goal was to make the state spend as much as possible so that even staunch believers in the death penalty would find it too expensive to impose. One colleague traveled to Okinawa to interview her client's father. The state had to foot the bill. These costs were a form of guerrilla warfare in the fight to end executions. It was a protest I wholly signed on for.

Rosemary's police report said that a trail of blood