Word: working
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Georgia's Patsy Morris and others work to save the condemned...
...turned down 21 consecutive times. But Patsy Morris is not one to take rejection personally, and she finally got an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer to say yes. Small wonder she runs into resistance: what she wants is 200 to 400 hours of someone's time and work for no pay. The people she is telephoning are lawyers; her "clients" have all been condemned to death. Thanks in large part to Morris' more than two years of dedicated work, only three of Georgia's 89 death row inmates lack a lawyer, at the moment, to help pursue...
Morris begins her quest by asking the trial lawyer to remain with the case. If that fails, she calls attorneys who are her personal friends, then friends of friends. "Literally every attorney I know in Georgia who does any criminal work at all has a death case," she says. Usually Morris is forced to seek out-of-state lawyers for petitions to the U.S. Supreme Court, often with the help of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund, the New York City-based civil rights group that has led the legal assault against capital punishment since the mid-'60s. The fund...
Morris' work on a case does not end when a lawyer agrees to take it. Checking off a master list on which she keeps track of the 89 Georgia cases, she regularly calls each attorney to update her records and offer encouragement. Since some of her recruits are not well versed in death penalty work and related issues of constitutional law, Morris, though no lawyer herself, also provides assistance by collecting documents and asking leading questions. She reproduces and mails relevant material to the lawyers and continuously monitors cases in which the state seeks the death penalty and fails...
Less flamboyant than Farmer, Morris is no less intense. Before her 8:15 a.m. arrival at her Atlanta office, she puts in an hour on the telephone at home; most weeks she works six days. Her commitment to the struggle against capital punishment is a natural outgrowth of years spent in the civil rights movement with her husband John, an Episcopal, priest who works for the U.S. Health and Welfare Department. Those familiar with her work insist that she plays a unique role in the death penalty fight. Says Jack Boger, an L.D.F. staff attorney, "I wish there were someone...