By: Marie Dienhart
After interning with Justice Parker for five weeks, I spent five weeks still living in Montgomery, but working for the Alabama Attorney General’s Office. Although very different from my time at the Alabama Supreme Court, this experience was equally challenging.
The AG’s Office has multiple divisions, and I requested and was assigned to the Capital Litigation Division, which handles all capital punishment appeals for the State of Alabama. This position forced me to confront two of my biggest biases. The first was my general pro-defense stance, especially in criminal cases. Most of my experience has been in criminal defense, and working on the prosecution side required me to remove myself from this mindset. The second was my anti-death penalty stance, which was primarily the result of a class that I took as a graduate student in the Robertson School of Government at Regent. In that class, we corresponded with death row inmates in Alabama for a semester and read a few books by Christian authors that addressed the morality of the death penalty. That class, coupled with my time working for defense attorneys, caused me to seriously doubt the morality of state-imposed death as punishment for being convicted of a crime.
Needless to say, both of these biases were confronted head-on during my time at the AG’s Office, where I spent the majority of my time drafting a response to a direct appeal filed in a death penalty case. And, in fact, that is what I had hoped would happen; it’s why Capital Litigation was my first choice—I wanted to see the other side of the criminal justice system and spend time with people who wholeheartedly believe that death is the appropriate punishment for certain acts. The interesting thing about working on capital appeals, however, is that most of your time is not spent reviewing the details of heinous crimes. I didn’t spend my days at the AG’s Office reviewing bloody crime scene photos or studying testimony about the atrocious acts committed by the accused. Instead, my days were spent studying the details of the trial and looking for legal errors that occurred during the proceedings. Of course, those bloody crime scene photos and detailed descriptions of the accused’s actions were contained in the 40-volume record that sat on my desk, but I had to go out of my way in my research in order to review those things; the brief I was composing was focused on issues that were much more “vanilla.” My focus was on the actions of the attorneys and the judge at trial, not the actions of the accused.
What this made me realize is that all of our laws are a reflection of our priorities as a society. Causes like the death penalty or abortion or same-sex marriage may receive the most fanfare, but the rules of civil procedure, appellate procedure, and evidence often determine the outcome of a trial or appeal, because they structure the entire process. Thus, more than learning about the justifications for imposing the death penalty (which I certainly did), I learned about the dynamics of a trial, the mechanisms that the law puts in place to help facilitate fairness and cultivate “truth,” and why these mechanisms are effective, but also sometimes fail. I learned that “justice” is found in the details; that hot-button laws like capital punishment can certainly help create a more just society, but are not its sole determinant. As Christian leaders, we cannot forget to work for justice in the details. Our society may not be shaped by laws that we believe reflect God’s ordering of society, but we can still make a difference—bit by bit, we can work toward creating a better legal system by not forgetting about the details.