The Queen of Death Row

Georgia's Patsy Morris and others work to save the condemned

There was one case, she remembers well, when she was 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 every available legal remedy in the quest to avoid the electric chair.

Dubbed the Queen of Death Row by one appreciative convict, Morris, 49, a mother of four and a staunch opponent of capital punishment, is death penalty coordinator for the Georgia affiliate of the A.C.L.U. She normally does not start hunting for lawyers until after the defendant has been convicted and his automatic appeal has gone to the state supreme court. Once that appeal has been heard, the state no longer has an obligation to provide a lawyer, leaving most of the condemned on their own if they wish to seek post-conviction remedies in state and federal courts; most lack the money to hire their own attorneys. If the prisoner pursues the entire series of possible petitions, appeals and rehearings, the process can take anywhere from five to six years.

Persuading capable lawyers to go along on so lengthy a legal journey--an "exhausting, self-lacerating investment of time and energy," as the A.C.L.U.'S Henry Schwarzschild describes it--is no easy task. "It's so desperate you take whom you can get," explains Morris. Indeed, the shortage of qualified attorneys threatens to overwhelm Morris and others like her because the nation's death row population, now totaling some 570, is climbing by almost 100 people a year.* Eighty percent of the prisoners mark their time in the states of the Old Confederacy; Georgia has the largest number per capita in the country. While most welcome legal help, there are exceptions: in Georgia, convicted murderer Jack Potts, who says he is in severe phys ical pain, pleaded last week that lawyers drop his appeals and let him die.

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's lawyers, themselves, represent about 50 prisoners nationwide.

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 to get it. She has, in fact, learned so much that she has repeatedly testified in state courts on studies showing greater use of the death penalty when the victim is white.

Morris shares the limelight in the Georgia death penalty struggle with Millard Farmer, 45, who heads Team Defense, a money-starved Atlanta organization that represents about 10% of the state's death row prisoners. As his three criminal contempt citations indicate, Farmer pulls no punches in the courtroom. Once, while defending a black charged with killing a white police chief, Farmer's effort to have an impartial judge preside over the trial led to the disqualification of five judges. The prosecuting attorney was so upset that he burned one of his law books. "I don't have a judge," he exclaimed. "I figure if I don't have a judge, I don't need a law book!" Despite Farmer's efforts, his client wound up on death row.

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 like Patsy Morris in every state.'' -

*The rulings that triggered such growth were three 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decisions holding new discretionary capital punishment statutes--in Georgia and in two other states--to be constitutional because they provided adequate guidelines to prevent arbitrariness. At that point, almost a decade had elapsed since a convict had been put to death. Since then, three have been executed, two of whom refused to cooperate in lawyers' efforts on their behalf. As appeals for others run their course, there could be more executions.

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