ON THE JOURNEY TO THE DEATH PENALTY

In this third installment we continue to follow Reverend Irvin as he continues his journey through school and an early legal career, on his journey to the Death Penalty ....

In the last article I began to describe an initial attraction to the courtroom from watching the television show “Perry Mason” as a child. The show made me feel like the courtroom was the venue where wrongs were righted, the truth was uncovered, and where justice in the end always prevailed. Perry Mason, the television attorney, was portrayed as a humble, highly intelligent, strong, often silent and pondering, fair, just, righteous without coming off as being righteous type of person. He was my ideal of what an attorney should be. One who was never afraid to stand up and fight, but whom never sought a needless fight.

This attraction to the courtroom continued during high school and college, as the only career path I ever thought about during those years were to aim for law school and become an attorney.

While in law school I interned for two years in a States Attorney’s Office in Illinois. As an intern in that office I tried over fifty traffic bench trials. Those simple trials proved invaluable in teaching the basic skills of a trial litigator.

After graduating from law school a position came open in a States Attorney’s Office in Illinois. (For those outside of the Illinois area, the title “States Attorney” is equivalent to “District Attorney” in most legal jurisdictions. Illinois terms the position as a “States Attorney.” It is the prosecuting attorney, prosecuting primarily criminal cases on the county level.)

I joined the States Attorney’s Office in a county in Illinois in January of 1983, and thus began to date a twenty-two year stint as a licensed attorney, first in Illinois and later also in the state of New York.

In the States Attorney’s Office I began as many prosecutors do, trying traffic cases and conservation cases (common in rural Illinois.) Each day I was in the courtroom learning the skills of the trade and gaining bench and jury trial experience. My first jury trial, a Driving While License Suspended Case, was held one week after I joined the office.

The trials accumulated, and during the course of the next sixteen years as a prosecuting attorney in three different prosecuting attorneys’ offices, I tried to completion over three hundred separate bench trials and one hundred and thirteen separate jury trials. Of these trials sixty-five were homicide cases.

During those sixteen years I tried murders, manslaughters, vehicular manslaughter cases, rapes, drug cases, child sexual abuse cases, domestic violence cases, burglaries, thefts, robberies, conservation cases, traffic cases … pretty much every type of conceivable trial which prosecuting attorneys try.

After prosecuting for eight years in Illinois, I returned to law school for one year to obtain an advanced law degree, a Masters of Law in Litigation degree, specializing in trial work.
In May of 1992 I began work as an Assistant District Attorney in New York City. Over the next eight years I served in the city of New York prosecuting criminal cases.

It was during the course of these sixteen years, and while serving in the courtroom trying hundreds of bench and jury trials, that my thoughts on the Death Penalty began to emerge. I entered the prosecutors offices I served in with no preconceived opinion on the Death Penalty one way or the other. I was as neutral as one could be on that issue, and rarely thought about it. This neutrality would change, however, as I began to come into contact with on a first hand basis the ins and outs of the murder courtroom.

Stan