The Execution of Noa P. Singleton Read Online Free PDF

his first assignment. No, he was a twenty-four-year-old young man who had just graduated from law school, and this was his first appointed case—the case, in fact, that he felt could inform the rest of his pathetic career. But he was too young to do anything. Too untested. Too unsure of who he was going to become to devote his time to anyone like me.
    Then he came back alone the day after Marlene gifted me with her presence and brought with him an empty pad of yellow legal paper. He pushed a loose strand of hair behind his ears (where an unexpected tuft of gray sat like a bird’s nest) and pleaded to me, just like Stewart Harris and Madison McCall and all those lawyers pleaded to the jury so many years ago when they convinced me to fight the charges in court.
    “Let’s look at you as a person,” he said. “Let’s look at Marlene and what she has to say. Victim impact testimony is precisely what makes this case different from others. And because of Marlene, we can approach clemency from the inside out. We can allow her to spearhead everything. A clemency petition, a declaration from the victim’s family, an affidavit with her signature and with her plea for you to live, all directed to the governor’s desk for his immediate review. Let’s see what the governor thinks. Does he really want to let you go to the gurney without a fighting chance?” Oliver said to me, as if begging me to grant him clemency. “People are what matters now. It isn’t the facts. It isn’t the law. It’s compassion. It’s people.”
    It was clear that I was Oliver’s first client in here. And who doesn’t want to be somebody’s first anything?
    Still, even though the taste of being someone’s first something (even while incarcerated) seemed delectably irresistible, I did resist. He wasn’t offering anything new for me. It was the other way around, and quite frankly, I was exhausted from giving. Then he reminded me about Marlene.
    “She doesn’t believe in the death penalty anymore?” I asked. “Truly?”
    Oliver shook his head.
    Clearly there had to be more to it than just that, but in an instant, my head dropped to my chest in defeat. To Oliver Stansted, though, my acquiescence was a vigorous nod of compliance. And almost on cue, he picked up his legal pad in his right hand and pushed on the head of the ballpoint pen with his left.
    “Do you mind if I take notes?” he asked. It was his first moment of willful determination, and I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to spend my final days with Atticus Finch. I wanted to be charmed by Mark Darcy before I ate my final meal. I wanted to speak with Clarence Darrow. Instead, I settled on Ollie Stansted.
    “No, I don’t mind.”
    I’m sorry for agreeing. In retrospect, I wish I never had. I’m saying it out loud so it’s quite clear: I wish we had never started this.

Chapter 2
    M Y MOTHER DROPPED ME ON MY HEAD RIGHT AFTER I WAS born.
    It happened in the hospital, just moments after bequeathing my first sound (a rough high-pitched scream reminiscent of a mezzo-soprano). The doctors handed me to her, and slimy and laminated with blood and amniotic fluid, I just slipped through her fingers and fell right onto that sweet spot of softness crowning my skull. Preempting a double lawsuit, one of the nurses gathered me from the ground and pumped me with drugs while the doctors attended to my mother. I never even had a chance.

    Okay, it didn’t exactly happen that way. And clearly, it’s not exactly a memory per se, but it’s a story that I like to think captures my early days. Take it or leave it.
    It is true, though, that my mother dropped me when I was a baby. As the story goes, I actually did fall out of her hands from the top of a stairway when I was ten months old, landing on my right side where the shoulder meets the arm. My mother screamed at the top of her lungs after it happened and rushed down the stairs until she grabbed me from the floor.
    “Noa!” she cried, scooping me