This is the second episode in which Chris and Alison speak with Dr. James Clark, Professor and Dean of the College of Social Work at Florida State University. You can review his impressive vita on the FSU COSW website here. Dean Clark is a forensic social worker and you can learn about the role of mitigation (and social workers), in the book he edited with Edward Monahan: Tell the Client's Story, Mitigation in Criminal and Death Penalty Cases.
These conversations are not appropriate for children. People with their own traumatic histories should be aware that we discuss violent crimes, exploitation, sexual trauma, child abuse, and incarceration.
This is the second episode in which Chris and Alison speak with Dr. James Clark, Professor and Dean of the College of Social Work at Florida State University. You can review his impressive vita on the FSU COSW website here. Dean Clark is a forensic social worker and you can learn about the role of mitigation (and social workers), in the book he edited with Edward Monahan: Tell the Client's Story, Mitigation in Criminal and Death Penalty Cases.
These conversations are not appropriate for children. People with their own traumatic histories should be aware that we discuss violent crimes, exploitation, sexual trauma, child abuse, and incarceration.
Clark_Part_2_Transcript.mp3
Alison DeBelder [00:00:04] This is trauma injustice. This is a podcast about the ways that people confront and manage trauma in the justice system. These conversations touched on seriously troubling topics. This podcast is not appropriate for children. People with their own traumatic histories should be aware that we discuss violent crimes, exploitation, sexual trauma, child abuse and incarceration. I'm Chris Moser and I'm Alison DeBelder. Hi, everybody, thanks for joining us. I just wanted to let you know if you didn't listen last week. Today's episode is part two of a conversation that we had with Jim Clark, who's the dean and a professor at the Florida State University College of Social Work. If you didn't listen last week, you might want to go back and listen to that before you head into this one. Thanks for listening. Do students from the College of Social Work? Is it required that they do coursework in the basics of major mental illness?
Jim Clark [00:01:08] It's not mandated or required, however, and Alison been a major contributor to this college for many years. But this is brand new. The Florida Legislature has given the Florida Institute for Child Welfare appropriated $10 million to begin to really change the child welfare system. The focus of that $10 million is transforming the child welfare workforce because we did a major workforce study that found that our workforce is in deep trouble, there's 50 to 60 percent turnover every two years in the system, which is unsustainable. And part of what we're going to move to and we're in design phase right now is to move to a problem based learning, case based learning approach that will be mandated in our fundamental courses. And it will be very hands on, will be flipping the classroom so that people will read and they'll be looking not at more, I'd say, ideologically driven or traditional driven material, but they'll be reading and probing information and material that have to do with the case or the person or family that will be the subject of the course. And there will be a number of these cases. Some of these fundamental courses. So the theory is that will be driven by the needs of the case situation. So all kinds of knowledge that maybe in the past were not coming in because there was a part of that course that's going to be blown up. Now we're also going to bring in people like experts and the law attorneys, Department of children and family, case managers who are out there today doing this work and medical health professionals and others to open up the range of knowledge of inquiry. And the idea is that nobody leaves those courses with a sense of wow, I've mastered five different disciplines and professions. It's I've got an inkling that I'm beginning to understand what I don't know and how I have to be dedicated a multi professional, multidisciplinary work in these cases, and it's very much like the denigration that happens to public defenders right by the bigger system is somehow you're going to be less skilled or less able if you're in the public defender's system because those cases don't really matter anyway. Same thing with child welfare and social work. Sure. Well, if your work in child welfare for 20 years, there's something really wrong with you because you're working with cases and at the simplest level, you haven't grown. Well, what I discovered in my work in childhood trauma was these in effect are the most complex cases. Just like your cases in public defense are the most complex cases from every aspect, including the law. Because the legal nightmares that you guys face, you know, the records that people have, the evidentiary problems that arise, the family member that comes out of nowhere to refute everything you're putting down as part of the theory of the defense. I mean, I've seen all of this unfold and capital and serious felony cases over the years. You guys have to be extraordinarily able to pivot to know how to move. And meanwhile, you look at people pulling down millions of dollars a year and they're probably doing three things over and over again every day. Maybe they do them at a high level. Maybe they do them right, but they are not under the kind of intellectual firestorms that you guys have to face. I think this is a part of this, the injustice that's built into the system is that we have the least resourced often for people who, you know, turn over in public defense, the least adequately equipped workforce and staffed offices, just like in child welfare and community mental health for that matter and community public health. But the paradox is those are the most complex cases available. And it's something important to reflect on, and it's something important as we prepare people to enter that workforce and enter those environments. And I'm very committed as my team is as the Institute for Child Welfare. Jessica Price and interestingly, some long term staffers at the House and Senate in the Florida Legislature who've watched the child welfare system unravel for years. They're deeply committed and they're asking a lot from us. But one aspect of this money, this appropriation will be to revamp the way we do social work education.
Chris Moser [00:05:41] That's very exciting. I'm just so happy to hear the flip model, which will be specific and individual and will ultimately lead to better policy decisions because if you just look at things in generalities. I don't think you ever get anywhere.
Jim Clark [00:06:00] You've got to get beyond logistics, right? I'm just systems trend toward logistical thinking and bureaucratic and administrative types of thinking that are experienced distance from the real lives of real people. And I think public defense, when the great contributions they've made to legal theory recently and empirical work has been the area of ordinary injustice that that's happening every single day at a scale we don't even want to think about.
Alison DeBelder [00:06:29] I'd like to discuss another development in the College of Social Work at FSU that is particularly exciting. The College of Social Work houses the Institute for Justice, Research and Development. AJ R.D. They are working on delivering clinical services and also performing research. The executive director is Kerry Pettis Davis, and she has focused her career on improving the lives of formerly incarcerated people. IGAD has several projects that are very exciting, they're working on implementing trauma informed care in jail settings. They're working on addressing trauma among young men and broadly reentry reform. I was wondering if you could speak to the work of A.J. R.D.
Jim Clark [00:07:28] It is a incredible center we have at FSU and the College of Social Work and Kerry Davis came to FSU in 2018 and developed IGAD with a lot of private support and now also other kinds of federal grants, and Dr. Pettus got involved in academia in order to help create criminal justice reform. Now, most people come in and academia because they want to be successful academics, and we kind of go into this stream of doctoral work and then postdoctoral and assistant professor of life, and we try to select topics that are fundable and publishable and try to do our best. But Kerry Pettus, from a very early age, even as a pre-teen, got involved with volunteer work and a lot of different types of social service settings and health settings, and that when she got involved in the criminal justice system, she made a decision as a kid that she was going to contribute greatly to the reform of the criminal justice system and that she planned her education around that. That is a very different way to think about your vote. It's a vocation as opposed to only a professional a.
Alison DeBelder [00:08:39] It's a great model, if everybody could do that.
Jim Clark [00:08:42] Yeah, I think it's the old model of being called to do something and listening to that call and then following through with that, what's at the heart of all the innovations, all the training, all of the reentry services that are being tested? There's a couple of basic principles. What is, first of all, that this has to be based on empirical scientific understanding. The claims have to be supported for what we decide to introduce. The second is that this has to be person centered. This has to be about the whole person. So for example, just to be very concrete about it, a lot of recidivism and the field of criminology traditionally spent around looking at recidivism rates as the only variable to care about and somehow using models that attack recidivism. What Dr. Pettis has been advocating for, and she's testing now across the United States is this idea of if we care about clients health, mental health, we care about their family life, we care about their spiritual life, we care about their capacity, they have a job that's meaningful to them. We care about the community around them and the openness of the community to receive them back and help people at these levels. We're going to reduce the rate of people to returning.
Alison DeBelder [00:10:00] It sounds like the social determinants of health that people who are looking at public health models and are looking at medical legal models are interested in, it's much more holistic view of things.
Jim Clark [00:10:12] That's right. Exactly. It's this insight we have in the United States, and I think the COVID pandemic has accentuated this or amplified it is that J wears, no matter what system people around, they're people, they're human beings. They have many, many of the same needs and problems and gaps. And a lot of these are systems driven, right, so the other thing that I've learned from talking with Kerry Paris is that people are going back to prison for really stupid, inane infractions of their parole or size are going to prison because of infractions in their probation. And she has stories that just show me I'm pretty hard bitten guy. I've been through a lot, but she can still tell me things that make my hair stand up and say, that can't be true. And you guys in the public defender system see that all the time where you where people are being basically sent to prison initially, but then often return to prison for very trivial problems, sometimes where everybody in the system, the judge, the probation officer, the attorneys involved are all saying, this is really dumb what we're doing, but we got to do what we're going to go ahead and do it. And so she's also looking at systems reform. So many people are in agreement from all the way, from law enforcement to the judiciary to the bar and certainly those criminology and in social work that are really looking at reform.
Alison DeBelder [00:11:38] There are these beautiful studies instances where public defenders offices have social workers embedded in them to just incredible success and acclaim from the people who know about these relationships. And it is my hope that every office would have that set up at some point because I think that there's something and I hear the echoes in your story of the vision of the great society back in our country said we're going to declare war on poverty seriously. We're going to eradicate poverty. That vision involved work with children, right? Early childhood education and intervention, addressing hunger, especially among children, but also civil legal aid and public health. All of these different measures, which, as you talked about earlier, feel siloed, right? We go to law school is if we don't need the skills that are being taught over in the College of Social Work and your career has married some of those, and I hope that we can find ways institutionally to merge and integrate some of these as well.
Jim Clark [00:12:52] That's a great observation, and I'm very excited about Florida State's new president Richard McCullough, who came to us from Harvard. He was vice provost at Harvard for research at Harvard, and now he's here as our president and he gets this. And it's exciting to be with somebody who came up through the academic ranks who actually grew up in a very poor family in Texas, went to community college, went to public universities before someone quote, discovered them incentive to Johns Hopkins for doctoral work and then at Columbia for postdoctoral work and then lands at Carnegie Mellon for 20 years and then over 10 years at Harvard and rises through the ranks from being a postdoc all the way to being vice president for research at Carnegie Mellon and then vice provost at Harvard. This is a guy who understands in science that the great breakthroughs are the marrying of different sciences. So now we use the word biochemistry every day, right? But think of the days when biology was separate from chemistry. Right, right. And you could have a career in biology without knowing biochemistry. And then this radically changed. So he's seen it in the sciences. He sees this as crucial for addressing social problems in terms of research. Economic and social problems need demand, university driven and interdisciplinary work. And he has a very ambitious plan to incentivize that and help Florida State to what you described as more effectively. So what we hope like in 10 years, a student would come in and never even pose the question that you did, which is to say, Well, I'm the last, but of course I'm taking some of this coursework and over its social work and or social workers or in my law class or physicians or nurses or economists. And I saw that incredible power of that at the University of Chicago, where that happens all the time. They dedicated that university to doing that kind of work a long, long time ago. And I'm very excited about President McCullough being here, and he's asking the deans to think more about this and in terms of education, student success, but also in terms of research and service.
Chris Moser [00:14:53] The pre-law program at Flagler is a minor and it's highly interdisciplinary. I think we have over 16 different majors. It's very diverse in that way. And listening to you and Alison talk about the holistic practice of our professions and people's wellbeing. How do we get rid of earlier than 10 years from now? Maybe next semester, how can I start working on helping undermine the judgment that people have? I just feel like everyone is so judgmental about. Other peoples lives and part of its ignorance. Alison and I always joked about puppies and kittens, right? Everyone's four puppies and kittens. And most people are still okay with small children. But how do we get to the point where we can look at these systems and not attack the person who has been victimized by them? I don't even know if that's a question, but I'm just asking for your advice on that. As a professor,
Jim Clark [00:16:02] yeah, that's a wonderful question. What I found is when I was a social work student was that's one of the things that was most difficult for me was to move away from judging and prosecuting in the disguise of helping. They spent many wonderful novels written about that dynamic. I had a professor named Connie Wilson in Kentucky who was a I would call a Tip O'Neill Democrat, and if you put the sentence, the first woman in Kentucky to do this, fill in the blank. She was like Connie Wilson had done that. She was on the board of trustees representing faculty for many years. She was a person of the incredible political skill and held a lot of power in the state, to be quite frank. And what I learned from her in my class, and I didn't even know this, that she was, all of this was she would give us these cases, these stories to read about clients, about people in which they did all kinds of things. They rejected help. They took food that they were supposed to. I remember a story where they had neighbors who loved these people put baskets of peaches on their porch and they left them out there to rot. And the neighbors said, We're never going to help these people again. And the social workers were upset because they would reject clothing and help. And Connie pushed us constantly to say, What right do you have to say these people? They people don't like peaches? That was the answer. The case was why did they eat the peaches? Damn it. They didn't like peaches, and nobody bothered to find out that. And so they then constructed this incredible moral framework to put these people in. And I remember and supervision my clinical supervision where you really have this experience when you're out in the field. I was working with children. I was writing things up and I had what I think in many ways. A secular saint, a woman named Jane Roe, who died many years ago, was my first clinical supervisor who had been trained at Tulane, dedicated her life to the poor. She reminds me so much of somebody like Dorothy Day and she would sit with me and she read my write up to superintelligent clinically. And she would say things like, you wrote this How do you know this? Who are you to say this? Who are you to say this to this mother? Because then that was the old days with process recordings where you'd have to write out the interviews. And I would think, Oh boy, am I good? I'm writing this out and I'm an incredible therapist, and she would go through these. She said, Who are you? And I remember feeling what psychoanalysts were called narcissistically injured in my sessions with her.
Chris Moser [00:18:36] What I call that attacked. Did you? Is that what that means? Like, I felt attacked. Okay?
Alison DeBelder [00:18:41] I needed to be narcissistically injured the first 20 years of my career.
Jim Clark [00:18:46] I think I don't want to think about my first five to 10 years of practice because it's too depressing, outrageous to think about. But she was another person who had many years of experience. She was probably close to 70 when she started working with me. And she was teaching me intellectual and moral humility. And I have spent a lifetime trying to take those lessons and do something with it. But I'm not very good at Dallas. I think this is what's lacking in our education and what's lacking in our country right now is the humility to accept the fact that we know really very little about other people. We're lucky if we understand our family, the people we will live with all the time. We're lucky if we understand our circle of friends and our coworkers. If we're successful, we do a pretty good job getting there. But when we start going outside of our habitual social circles, we might know a lot of facts about people, but we don't really know all that much in our hearts about the everyday experiences they face. And I would say that cuts across social class like these terribly grinding social institutions that public defenders and social works rail against. We like to attack that secretary of DCOP. We like to attack that judge. We like to attack the people that have been forced into systems that we might see as adversaries. And we find as we get to know them that many times they are suffering grievously from their experiences of the system. And you begin to step back when you're like me in your 60s and you say this isn't so much about people or evil people or unjust people, although there are certainly those people around. It's about these institutions that we've devised that dehumanize everybody involved in that institution. And that's what's got to change, and that's a much more complicated problem than removing one person, putting another person in. Because I've seen really great social workers, really good people become leaders say in child welfare, mental health, and they become institutionalized because of the political pressures, the financial pressures, the moral quandaries they face and suddenly they become the people that they were fighting against. And you see that a public defender systems to plummet becomes chief public defender. I know I've talked with AD a lot about this, and he struggles everyday not to become the bureaucratic leader that was telling public defenders, you know, traumatizing them at the workplace with rules and regulations and punishments. It's very hard to lead and systems that are deeply flawed. So that's to me, the law and game that we're all talking about here as educators is to be honest about it. So I'll just wrap up this sorry, the soliloquy a little bit where you were talking about with Flagler interprofessional interdisciplinary education, where we get to meet people from different backgrounds who say, Oh my gosh, I love that person. But they think very differently than me, but I just like that person so much. It creates a quandary, right? I don't like what they say. I may not like their politics. I mean, I like the fact that they're interested in this stuff over here. But I like that person so much and I'm excited by the conversations we're having. And in our current society, there's a pause is what's wrong with me? Am I being disloyal? Am I diluting my moral commitment? Whereas in college and in higher education in universities, a great university is this is the business of the great university is creating that discrepancy of different people from different backgrounds with different ideas. It's all in the mix and we're opening it up in civil discourse and mutual inquiry. And the more we do of that, I'm convinced we can preserve this democracy that we love, and we can also embolden and enhance higher education in ways that we have to reaffirm every day.
Chris Moser [00:22:51] That was a beautiful and inspiring and hopeful answer. Thank you so much for that.
Jim Clark [00:22:58] I have another thing about the university that I believe strongly that's why I'm still in higher education is the university should be a place of hope. It should not be a place of despair. It should be a place of hope, even if the university has certain courses are about critical thinking and criticism of current systems and looking at reform, looking at the problems. There needs to be in the functioning of a university like Florida State, like Flagler, like other universities we love. Ultimately, that needs to be a place of hope. At the personal level for students and faculty and staff and everybody associated, but also in the intellectual agenda, it pushes forth.
Chris Moser [00:23:42] And it's so contagious when you have a leader, that's that way. I'm very excited for everyone at Florida State.
Jim Clark [00:23:50] Thank you. We're very excited to.
Alison DeBelder [00:23:59] That leads me to just one other paragraph I wanted to read, if you will indulge me.
Jim Clark [00:24:07] Of course,
Alison DeBelder [00:24:08] this is from a chapter that I believe you wrote with Ed Monahan and speaks to some of the principles and concepts. I think that inform this project that Chris and I have been doing the podcast. All effective professionals require ongoing social support from colleagues, friends and family members. Professionals who are damaged by this work grow less successful in assisting their clients over the long haul. Fortunately, there are proven ways to mitigate compassion, fatigue and secondary traumatic stress, and those engaged in this work have an ethical responsibility to monitor and address these risks, as do the attorney leaders of defense teams and the leaders of defender organizations in order to protect their clients. And that really struck me, it resonated with me because all of the things that we have talked about, the things that you talk about in this text that we talk about in the mitigation world, in the defense world, we must not lose sight of the clients and the outcomes that we're seeking for our clients. And if we pretend that we are unaffected, that is going to lead to a worse outcome for the client. And so yes, we have responsibilities for all sorts of reasons. But if all you care about is the client outcomes, you should still care about these things.
Jim Clark [00:25:45] Yes, a lot of that thinking comes from people like Charles Feghouli, who is a wonderful psychologist, taught in social work programs here at FSU and at Tulane, and he talked about this being a primary ethical responsibility is that of taking care of oneself so one can be effective as a professional. And Lee Norman, who is a colleague of ours wonderful social worker and mental health professional, has done a lot of this work too in public defense. But the idea is, let me just take my thinking a little bit about this. Is that ultimately become a professional when you become a professional, you were making a promise to society. And we do that and personally through licensure and all of those types of things, but to me, there's the moral core behind all of it, which is to say I embrace a fiduciary responsibility to clients and to this society, to this community that I will serve. And I'm going to do it in a way and conduct myself in a way and take care of business in a way that fulfills that promise to serve others. So that's what I taught and continue to teaching when I teach any classes or seminars is let's unpack that fiduciary responsibility. And that's scary to think about, right? But that's at the heart of all the idealism that we bring to these professions, whatever the professions are. So understanding your fiduciary responsibility and meditating on that has to be something that you do as part of your work as a professional, whether it be in law or social work, whatever profession we're discussing. So you move from that and what I learned from my colleagues in the area of research science was, well, it's not about feeling good about what you're doing or feeling noble or feeling heroic or feeling engaged. It could be some of that, but what it really is about is what are the outcomes for your clients? Have you left this child in a better place than when they were before this family, this client, you know? And how do you think about that in systems where you're not hardly any time creating optimal outcomes, right? But we're positive outcomes may be harm reduction as opposed to the full carriage of justice or the full therapeutic effect of an intervention. So we struggle with those things in our fiduciary promise. And the other thing that we struggle with and this helps us by keeping the more philosophical, ethical core in our minds is that from the first day of professional practice and I'll use the term again, we are narcissistically injured. I can't tell you and you guys, you ladies probably have the same belief that you were to come in and you're going to change the world because, you know, I could just convince enough people to look at the world this way and I could enact in my practice or certain way of practice. Things will catch on fire, and I was going to college in the 1970s, so I have a lot of that idealism where we really thought that might be the case, right? You go back. I do a lot of reading in that era for some of the work I'm doing now. I look back at what was written in the nineteen sixties and seventies who thought, Gosh, you know, people really thought that was going to all happen and some of it happened, but a lot of it didn't. But what people are struggling with in professions are every day dealing with really tough moral and ethical quandaries. They're dealing with just the wear and tear. Like Ed Monahan and I have written about case loads and public defense, and there's a lot to say about cases. But in the end, it's about how much can any one professional take and still be functional and still achieve meritorious outcomes for their clients? The same thing happens in all branches of social work.
Chris Moser [00:29:35] Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
Jim Clark [00:29:37] So it's not. Self-care is an option. It's like a hammer in the professional toolbox. I Carpenter does not go to a site, no matter if they have all the electronic equipment in the world without that hammer. And without that measuring tape. And that's what self-care has to be about,
Chris Moser [00:29:55] what is self-care look like for you?
Jim Clark [00:29:59] Self-care for me is, I have to say in my life, and it can be different for different people, is my family life. I've been married for 30 years. I. So you guys aren't fair. You do what I do to other people. I've been married 30 years to another social worker named Elizabeth Krone, who dedicated her whole life to serving children and built an incredible company that's still working in Kentucky for behavioral health care to prevent kids from going out of care. I've got three wonderful girls in their 20s that are critiquing and teaching me every day and inspire me every day. I even get very attached to our puppies or dogs, which we have a new puppy. We lost a dog recently, which of all things, a therapy dog? And she was to me, I don't understand this. And meditating on her loss over the last few months. She was a wise soul. And she worked with kids all day long. I used to watch her with children and say, God, I wish I could do that. After Hurricane Michael, I took her to Panama City in a room full of people were talking about mental health, first aid, and she walked up and down the aisles. People were petting her and she was talking, you know, she was connecting with them. And I thought, Well, I'm glad I could be here to bring Ali, who is therapeutic while I was up here, dialoging about what was going on in schools and in Bay County. And then I have close friends like Ed Monahan and Ernie Lewis, a friend, Robert Walker, who was very much featured in the book Tell the Clients Story. Is a great intellectual and research scientist and a great philosopher, too. So these friendships and relationships relationships at the core of everything. I feel that I get so much out of those because I can talk to people or people figure out, you know, you're having a bad day and they'll reach out and say, what's going on? And I'm the sort of person that says, I don't want to talk about it because that means I have to relive it. So sometimes don't even wait and wait till I'm less irritable and ask me a second time or third time, maybe a week later, then I can talk to them. I think for me, it's in relationships
Chris Moser [00:32:21] and it's the bonds in the relationships too. Yes, because Alison, I just have such a special bond with each other and with all the people we worked with. And it's really hard to put into words how special that is and how grateful we are and how healthy we are. I think because we had that early on. So, yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to trick or treat you.
Jim Clark [00:32:47] But now, no. I think you asked a great question. And it's really important because if you look at the root of all this trauma therapy, it comes back to relationship. It's the therapeutic relationship. But then it's also building the relationship, the person being able to learn how to trust and build relationships with trustworthy people. Trauma, ultimately is the violation of that trust. We are so biologically wired for this. A lot of developmental trauma is about the violation of relationship. We are programed at many ways. I use that word advisedly to connect and to expect that trustworthy other to be there, and that drives healthy human development. And we all know that's a crapshoot, whether you get that trustworthy other present and waiting for you as a baby, as a child, as a student, as a partner. Yeah, but that's what we're all wired to expect. And ultimately, what we can create that in community and in family and in relationships, that's what ultimately is therapeutic and healing. There has to be a crucial part of self-care. You should, you know, exercise and nutrition and all that. That's all crucial, too. But if you don't have the relationships, ultimately, you can't do this work. And some of the most troubling and instructive cases have been young people forgiving. What I would consider heinous treatment.
Chris Moser [00:34:32] Yes.
Jim Clark [00:34:34] And as a therapist, especially my younger years, wanted to carry the burning sword of justice and say, you should cut off that relationship, it's toxic. It's, you know, what's the matter with you? That's the sign of insecurity or a sign of overcompensation, or we have all kinds of defense mechanisms to assign to people who are morally superior to us. But I have to say it's true and I want to come back to capital cases. One of the cases I worked on was a guy named Gerald McQueen in Kentucky, who had killed a college student from Eastern Kentucky University. He and his brother entered a convenient mart kind of liquor store type of place, and they were both high. He was using heroin and benzodiazepines everything, and his brother was high. Somebody killed that convenience store clerk. The camera was destroyed, so there was no actual video evidence. Harold and his brother were both tried and the small town they grew up in. Harold was the scapegoat of the family. He was the screw up, he was the older stepbrother. The younger brother was seen, as you know, an innocent victim of Harold's delinquent ways and mentoring into drug use and all of that. Harold got a not a public defender. You know, this will be all too familiar to public defenders who heard this, but a contract lawyer that was providing defense a contract with the state, who was an alcoholic himself, who fell asleep during the trial, which tried with his brother, who had a Harvard educated attorney. And of course, you can tell what would happen in that case. Harold is demonized, receives a capital sentence. His brother receives a 10 year sentence. So I got into this case years later with some wonderful appellate attorneys. I was involved in the case for about 10 years and I got to know Harold during the time Harold would say things to me like, Well, I'm I'm clean and sober. This is my fifth year and you've been in prison for like 20 years. And I was so naive at the time. I said, Well, Harold, you've been in prison 20 years. He said, Jim, you can get anything in here. So that finally clean, I'm not taking any drugs. And he says, when I become a Catholic and I'm studying scripture, and he said every day I pray for my victim and my victims families. So what I did was horrible. And we got to literally two weeks before the scheduled execution. And I've been producing reports and mental health staff doing the usual drill at every level, we're losing every case in federal court. You could only imagine the lawyer ringing up, but on top of that, he got similar mental health testimony, if hardly any. And his family didn't like Harold very much either. They weren't appreciative when I went down there and spent time with them and I met his brother, I met his mother and sisters and other people in his life, and they were very, you know, they were like, Well, maybe you can help Harold, but he's not really savable. He never wise. And I hope you're not going to screw up our lives too badly in this effort to save his life. And you could also feel for them because they'd been through the wringer. They were pariahs in their community because of what Harold and his brother had done. So I got a call from his lead attorney a couple of weeks before the execution, scheduled execution, and he said, Jim, we need to go to Eddie Bell and talk with Harold. His decided not to. He wants us to stop. He's ready to die. He feels everything reasonable, so exhausted, and I said, well, what do you think? And he said, Well, we're going to try to pin this on his brother and we're going to try to do this. We're going to try to do that. You know, the last gasp right of every great public defender who believes in their client to take anything they can and try to do it. And I said, Well, what do you want me to do exactly? I've submitted all of my material and I said, I'd love to see Harold, but what can I do? He says, you need to find him incompetent. So I thought, OK, well. I hear what you're saying, but you know who I am. I'm going to go and I'm going to find what I'm going to find. If you want somebody with a pre formulated finding, there's other people you can get, maybe even a psychiatrist or two that would do this. And he said No. Harold, also, Harold wants to talk to you. So I went and saw him and. I've never been. With probably apart from some family members and my parents with somebody who was so ready to pass away to accept. So I was doing my drill right, that competency issues, you know, mental state and I'm doing my job finally interrupted me and said, you know, we've known each other for a long time and I've appreciated everything you've done for me. You did your absolute best. And the lawyers have done everything. They did their best, and I'm so grateful to them. But we all know what's going to happen. You know, he was a very intelligent man, despite his lack of education. He said, I've been following this. I know my case. There's no shot. This governor isn't going to create a stay of execution. There's not going to be any clemency. I know that all these things are getting turned out. So so could you just maybe we could just sit together and talk? So. You know, I'm pretty upset, but I'm being the consummate professional, unmatched showing it, of course, hero. Let's talk, you know? But I'm torn up inside because he is the only person in the whole crew on the whole team who is who has absolutely figured out this situation. And is accepted and as at peace with it, and of course, our job isn't to be a peace where they're right, our job is to do everything we can to the last possible moment. And he understood that too. But he was basically saying The time I have with you is too valuable for you to be doing this bullshit around competency, especially after the first half hour. I realize this man is absolutely competent, legally speaking, and you talk about perverse formulation competency to be executed, who cooked that up, you know, that is such a perverse idea. But anyway, he began to talk about his family and said, Look, I don't want them dragging my family through the mud. I don't want them. My brother just got released a little while ago. I don't want anything to happen through these legal procedures. I would send him back to the penitentiary. He's paid a very high cost for being my stepbrother and I did get involved in drugs. I'm morally guilty of that. He said, and to be honest, I don't know which one of us killed that lovely young undergraduate. It might have been me, it might have been, I don't know, but I it's my responsibility in the end. Whatever happened? And I am now paying a price for that. And he said I don't believe in capital punishment, but that's what the law is. And I'm a person of faith and I realize that God has forgiven me. And when I die, I'm going to be OK. And he says, I just want to be sure everybody else is OK. So by now, internally, I'm a mess, and I'm talking with him and saying, Harold, you know what we do when we're with a client who's going to be executed with, you know, just talk about the friendship that had developed inside of the professional relationship, the friendship and the mutual regard. I said, I hope, I really hope that we're both wrong about this. I hope, Harold, you're wrong, that there's a miracle that somebody wakes up and sees what's happened to you. And he said it's not going to happen, but I don't want you to be too sad, just remember me. And I told them how much I had learned from him and how I would try to take what I had learned from him and take it to all their cases and share it with my students and my people I was working with and also bring it to my everyday life. And he found that tremendously helpful and satisfying. At least that's what he said, and I left. I walk out and I'm driving back from Eddie Ville and I got a call and it's the lead attorney, Randy says, Well, what did you find? I said I found a man who. Is spiritually superior to me in almost every way. And I said, unfortunately for for the legal proceedings, I cannot honestly or ethically write a report saying that is incompetent to be executed. I could say something about the incompetence of the people that want to execute them. But not him. He is thinking clearly. He's just done something that very few of us never do, which is to accept an impending death. And the lawyer said while that's not of a lot of use to me and we laughed, it was the black humor. He knew this probably was going to happen because he had shared that similar experience with Harold to try to counsel him earlier. And what happened was they put out as much, you know, last minute legal procedural actions as possible. Everything was turned down and and Harold was ultimately executed. And we all as a team had to live with that, and we all got together and spent time talking about Herald after he died and what that meant. And this comes back to the self-care, right? Like when something horrible happens to the team. And it's something that the team had been formed and dedicated to working to prevent. And it happens nonetheless. It's crucial that we gather together and talk about it and try to support each other and help and learn not only learn from it intellectually or professionally, but also morally, spiritually, emotionally and support each other. And that's what we did. We met a week later, maybe we met somewhere and just spent some time together, had a meal and spent some time talking. I found it tremendously helpful.
Alison DeBelder [00:45:25] Is there anything that anybody wanted to cover that we haven't talked about before we bid one another adieu?
Jim Clark [00:45:33] I would just want to say that my whole career, how much I've admired public defenders and the people that work closely with them as Alison as you said, you know, there's more and more social workers working in public defender offices across the country. I've often felt like public defenders and social workers are siblings looking up at that judge looking up that those courts, those appellate courts forbidding parental figures and siblings looking at each other and saying What's going on? I thought we were so prepared I thought I thought mom and dad were finally going to give in. And I don't mean to infantilize the experience, but we're so many of our values and social work and the public defense bar are similar, and so we share the same clients. Somebody once said, I think people in public defense and in social work have said the aspersions are cast upon you for being a public defender or for that matter, being a social worker should be embraced with honor because that is what you share with your clients. That is forbidding as hell for me, especially when you're at a dinner party and you tell people what you do for a living. But it's really true, it's at the moral core, you become identified with the people you work with and the way you are taught me that where people you work for because the law ethics are very clear about that. I just want to give a shout out to everybody working in the system. Because I think as we make progress in the system, it's harbingers of what progress we can make in the areas of race and social class and inequality and all the things that we struggle with now in American society. All of them come alive in your work. And the fact that there are people getting up every day and doing this work is inspiring to me. So I want to thank you all.
Alison DeBelder [00:47:26] Thank you for spending this time with us today. We appreciate it.
Chris Moser [00:47:30] Thank you so much.
Jim Clark [00:47:32] Thank you.
Alison DeBelder [00:47:34] Trauma and justice is created by Chris Moser and Alison DeBelder and engineered by Chris Higgins. Thanks for listening. To help us out, please subscribe to the podcast. Leave a star rating and review for us on Apple Podcasts and share with others who might be interested. Follow us and share your feedback on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at Trauma Injustice.