Highlights: Death on Appeal

A little over a week ago I went to see Frederick Evins' death penalty appealed in the SC Supreme Ct. After hearing the argument and talking to my teacher and classmates, I'm pretty sure the judges will affirm.

On Thursday morning I woke up early, since I had never been to the Supreme Court and only had a little idea of where I was headed. Fighting traffic into the city, I finally found my way down Gervais street and saw the small, sqaure court house sitting on the corner of Sumter street. It is a smooth beige building, with four flags flying on the shallow front lawn.

As I walked inside, the notoriously mean security guard approached me. "Put your purse on the tray and walk through." After following his directions, I signed my name and asked him if he minded if I sat down at the round wooden table in the lobby while waiting on my classmates. He said that was fine. Then he asked me why I had come, and I told him that I was there to watch the appellate argument. "Young lady," he spat out in a rough and important voice, "this is the Supreme Court." Quickly realizing he had no clue what an appellate argument is, I replied "I know, I am here to see the death penalty on appeal." He then understood my reason, and showed me the doors I would enter.

I sat down at the wooden table and looked around the room. The table was a beautiful design; it held many different types and stains of wood, cut and laid flesh against the next in an ornate arrangement. The floors were white marble, and on top of them was a white rug with a blue border and yellow flowers. There were large frames with lights above them holding paintings of Chief Justices; except for a black male Chief Justice whose piece stood out, all of the portraits were of white, elderly men . There was a dark stained wooden bench beside the double entrance doors in the middle of the room. The walls were covered in a light blue woven cloth, which had the SC Justice symbol embroidered in gold on it (which I later found out was designed and specially made for the Supreme Court). The only thing that clashed with the design was the security metal detector and large plastic baggage x-ray machine, which stood on wheels beside the doors.

Trying to be friendly, I told the man that the building was beautiful and that this was my first visit. He really opened up, and started telling me how the building was once the old post office, and he got excited when, like a kid with a fanciful secret, he told me about how some of the back rooms still resembled a post office. Soon after I had made friends with the notoriously mean security officer, my friends walked in, and he gave them a hard time. He even made one of my classmates go through extra security measures.

Once everyone passed the security check, and spent some time chatting in the lobby about Sex and the City (for some reason, only the girls in my class showed up), we all assembled in the court room. In a short period of time, our legal writing professor showed up, and other people began to filter in. Eventually, from the back of the room, and elderly black man wearing a navy blue suit and matching rimmed hat, who cheerily had greeted us as we entered, stood up and announced "Here ye, here ye. All rise."

As we all stood up, the judges entered the room in order of their authority, and each took a seat in one of the large black leather overstuffed chairs, which sit behind the long, dark stained, wooden bench. The walls in the room are painted dark, and even with the lights, the room has a shadowy but important feeling. The petitioner was not present, but his one attorney sat alone at one of the desks in front of the bench. He began the argument.

The petitioner's counsel seemed to be grasping at air to save his client's life. Some of his arguments made no sense, and began to annoy the Chief Justice. At first I imagined the petitioner, sitting in prison full of hope that his attorney was, at that moment, saving him from a death sentence. I am opposed to the death penatly, but even after hearing the petitioner's attorney give his argument, I began to feel that for this case, the death penalty was not too unjust.

The more details of the case that were revealed in the argument (so disturbing I will not repeat), the more monsterous the creature inside the cage seemed. The point where I lost all sympathy for the murderer was when the attorneys and judges began graphically depicting the crime scene, and the pictures that were taken at it. I had two distinct reactions to the graphic details. First, during the initial descriptions, I began to have a shortness of breath and started to panic, the classic symptoms of an anxiety attack. After I calmed myself down, and started to listen to the discussion again, the morbid report of the crime scene made me think of the victim, and I had to divert my attention at times to keep myself from crying.

While that part of the argument was the most intense, the rest of the argument, mainly dealing with jury selection, had me half-asleep.

At the end of the argument we all gathered in the lobby to discuss what we had just witnessed. The first question my classmate asked my teacher was "What do you think the judges will do?" Our professor looked at us, still smiling, and clearly let us know "They'll most likely affirm."

After witnessing this case, I think I'll stay away from criminal law and stick to real-estate.