I don't drive so going to Lorton is already strange,
add to that leaving the District. Go south on 395, cross the Potomac, head to Richmond.
From 395, the Lorton exit looks like exurban plastic Northern Virginia, then suddenly
rolling rural. But out here, with the Fairfax County incinerator, is
Lorton Correctional Facility, its human equivalent.
We want Max--the Wall--the Maximum Security Facility.
This is a murder appeal. Actually, a collateral attack because this client
has already been through trial and first appeal. In other words, he could
give me a videotape proving his innocence and it wouldn't matter.
It's too late, the D.C.Court of Appeals won't look at his case again.
I mean, they'll docket his appeal alright and they'll even give
him a lawyer--that's why I'm here. But they won't let him out.
Hai Phiong is waiting for me in Max,
waiting for the Dead Man Walking Rap, even though he doesn't know it.
Lorton is old--built around 1900--and it looks it.
Every building is tired brick, painted and repainted, encircled with some very
new and shiny razor wire. Max is particularly beat up brick and old iron bars.
Sign in, show your bar card and wait. Everybody does a lot of waiting at Lorton.
The inmates wait and the guards watch the inmates wait. We wait today because
somebody got stabbed and the Wall is locked down.
Finally, we get an escort in.
Stop, frisk, check your briefcase for umbrellas and other contraband and instruments
of destruction. Follow the man, slowly, in through the gates, into the Wall.
Past the furry little cats that live in Max to the cellblock
where my client Hai waits.
Hai was from Saigon when it was still Saigon and
not Ho Chi Minh City. He was an ARVN captain and war refugee.
He has an amazing understanding of media manipulation and power strategies in
the U.S., a Chomsky-esque sensibility. He can see the pointlessness of punishment and the
mechanized form-qualities of the prison-industrial complex. He killed his wife, June,
in a domestic dispute--three six-inch deep oblique knife cuts in the abdomen.
Her body, said the medical examiner at trial, showed defensive wounds--that is,
her hands had cuts from trying to fend off the knife.
He writes the trial judge long, angry letters
of halting eloquence. He sees with an almost crystalline clarity how, when and
what the system is doing to him. But there is nothing a lawyer can do for him. There
weren't any significant mistakes at trial, his public defender did the best he could
with the case, but three six-inch wounds can't be made by accident
or by the victim running on the blade three times.
He's in torment. I read his letters and every word
is agonized. When I ask him how he is when he calls collect, he always sighs, "Not
good, Sir, not good." Strangely, in this case, I know the trial judge. After the case
was over, I discussed it with him. "Hai never got used to living in the U.S.,"
the judge said, "He stayed in his little expatriate community,
his wife wanted to assimilate." "I know," said the judge, "that he didn't mean to
kill her. He fainted after he stabbed her, he just wanted to get her back in line.
Still, internal bleeding is a slow way to die."
Hai waits, handcuffed, even for a legal visit,
that's the rule at Max.
Sitting across from him, I tell him that legally
there's nothing more I can do for him. It's sad, but distance-distance.
As a lawyer doing appeals, boundaries are supremely necessary. I mean, after five years,
I've still never actually gotten anyone released on appeal.
Not that I haven't tried, but the Court of Appeals' job is to hold them in,
not let 'em out. Still, part of my job is client relations. I mean, I don't need
to see the client to write an apppellate brief, it's just too ivory tower-esoteric.
But, they need to see me, to put a face on the letters, to see the person
who will defend them.
Hai is angry. "This system you have in America
is wrong. You should not be tormenting me and manipulating me.
They set up a mental health unit here just for me. They got a big grant and staff
living off of me." He says, "of course, I mean the system, not you personally, Sir."
But, he keeps saying,"you did this and you did that," and I know that I am
just the human face of the system and he knows it too.
Finally, I tell him again that there is nothing
I can do for him as a lawyer. "What I do know," I say, "is that I have never
had a client in such torment and pain as you. I know that the system treats you badly,
like any other inmate. But, what about June's death? Did that have anything to do with
you? I mean, if you were carefully driving along under the speed limit,
doing everything right and a child jumped out and got hit by your car,
you'd still feel responsible, right? Even if you weren't to blame I think if you
don't acknowledge what happened to June, and your part in her death, that you'll
always be torturing yourself."
Hai seems bewildered. "Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"No," he says. I know then that there's nothing more for me to do here.
Soon I leave, out past the waiting guards, the wire, and the rolling hills, back
the way I came.
