Pioneers in Efforts to Defend Death-Penalty Cases, End Capital Punishment Remembered in New Book, Obituary

The lega­cies of Scharlette Holdman (pic­tured) and Marie Deans—two women who changed the land­scape of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the United States — are memo­ri­al­ized in a recent sto­ry in the Marshall Project and a new book sched­uled for release in August. 

Maurice Chammah’s arti­cle, We Saw Monsters. She Saw Humans, marks the July 12, 2017 pass­ing of mit­i­ga­tion pio­neer Scharlette Holdman and tells the sto­ry of her forty-year fight on behalf of cap­i­tal defen­dants and death-row pris­on­ers. The forth­com­ing book by Todd Peppers and Margaret Anderson, A Courageous Fool, tells the sto­ry of a sim­i­lar­ly pio­neer­ing woman, Marie Deans, who long worked to save defen­dants and pris­on­ers fac­ing the death penal­ty and whose efforts to give voice to fam­i­ly mem­bers, like her­self, whose rel­a­tives had been mur­dered, led to the cre­ation of Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation. 

Holdman used her back­ground in anthro­pol­o­gy to devel­op the prac­tice of death-penal­ty mit­i­ga­tion — con­duct­ing a mul­ti-gen­er­a­tional social his­to­ry inves­ti­ga­tion to tell the sto­ry of a clien­t’s life in a way that would human­ize him or her to a jury or a judge. ​“What she saw is that killers are not just born,” said lawyer George Kendall, who rep­re­sents death-row pris­on­ers. ​“They have had unbe­liev­ably abused and neglect­ful lives, and that his­to­ry is rel­e­vant. You become your client’s biog­ra­ph­er, you speak to the 60 most impor­tant peo­ple in that person’s life — friend and foe.” 

She approached this dif­fi­cult work with cre­ativ­i­ty and humor. In one case, she attempt­ed to dis­cred­it a psy­chi­a­trist’s tes­ti­mo­ny that a severe­ly impaired defen­dant was com­pe­tent to be exe­cut­ed because he had beat­en the doc­tor at tic-tac-toe, by locat­ing a tic-tac-toe play­ing chick­en to present in court. The judge ​“felt that bring­ing the chick­en into the court­room to play tic-tac-toe would degrade the dig­ni­ty of the court,” Holdman lat­er told This American Life. ​“I thought that the dig­ni­ty of the court was degrad­ed by exe­cut­ing a men­tal­ly retard­ed, men­tal­ly ill person.” 

In 2011, she described mit­i­ga­tion inves­ti­ga­tions, say­ing, ​“As we in local com­mu­ni­ties began to look for mit­i­ga­tion, we saw it as pre­sent­ing the nar­ra­tive of someone’s life, and we became acute­ly aware that it was a very spe­cial­ized, com­plex under­tak­ing. That nar­ra­tive is not there for the ask­ing. It requires not just knowl­edge and skill but expe­ri­ence in how you search for, iden­ti­fy, locate, rec­og­nize, and pre­serve the infor­ma­tion.” Her work was pro­filed in the book Among the Lowest of the Dead, an account of Florida’s rein­state­ment of the death penalty. 

A Courageous Fool describes the work of mit­i­ga­tion expert and anti-death penal­ty activist Marie Deans to defend death-sen­tenced pris­on­ers, to free the wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed — includ­ing Virginia death-row exoneree Earl Washington—and to try to end the death penal­ty. Virginia Senator Mark Warner called A Courageous Fool, ​“A pow­er­ful sto­ry of a Virginia hero­ine.” Deans passed away in 2011.