Читать книгу Narrative Change - Hans Hansen - Страница 10
ОглавлениеSeth Rose killed two people in Arkansas, stole their truck and some guns, and drove across Texas, heading for Mexico. He stopped for gas in the Panhandle in the middle of the night, and instead of getting back on the highway, he drove down a farm road into the darkness. Seth pulled up to a random farmhouse, went in with an AK-47, and killed the entire family of five; only one young boy, who played dead, survived. Seth shot the boy as he dove for his bed, blasting his body into the wall. He landed still and lifeless.
Seth got back in the truck and crossed the border into Mexico. Seth cannot really articulate why he went to Mexico, except that he knew that was where people went when they were on the run. Seth was going by a popular narrative. After Seth got to Mexico, he stayed in Juarez and simply drove around for a few hours. Inexplicably, Seth then headed back to Arkansas. As he crossed back into the United States, border agents in El Paso searched the truck and found the guns, and the officers discovered that the truck and guns were registered to the murdered couple in Arkansas.
Seth reached a plea bargain and was sentenced to two consecutive life without parole terms for the Arkansas murders. He later told guards in the Arkansas prison that he was probably also wanted in Texas for killing a family there. They ignored him at first, and if not for Seth’s persistence in confessing, the farmhouse murders would never have been solved.
Texas extradited Seth to face the death penalty. If Seth was sentenced to death there, Texas could kill him. If he got life without parole in Texas, Seth would be sent back to Arkansas to serve his two consecutive life sentences without parole there before serving his life sentence without parole in Texas. This really meant that Texas was hell-bent on killing Seth and was willing to waste a bunch of money trying to do so.
The trial was moved to Lubbock, and I consulted and assisted the defense team. On the first day of trial, the prosecution played the boy’s 9-1-1 call. Through every kind of pain, the eleven-year-old struggled to describe the gruesome scene. His entire family, including the dog, had been killed.
After trial that day, I stayed behind in the empty courtroom with Seth, Seth’s attorney, Andy, and the sheriff’s deputies assigned to guard Seth. Seth sat in a chair we had moved to the center of the courtroom, just in front of the judge’s desk. We needed to cut Seth’s greasy mullet so he would look more presentable to the jury. For security reasons, the guards would not let us use scissors. Andy brought in a pair of electric clippers and a comb, and I commandeered an empty trash bag from under the judge’s desk. Seth’s mullet went halfway down his back. As Andy fumbled with the clippers, I held the plastic trash bag snug around Seth’s neck with my thumbs and fingers stretched while I pulled the opposite side of the bag tight with my teeth. I tried to focus on catching the falling hair, but my mind kept picturing the jury’s faces as they listened to the horrific 9-1-1 call. They exchanged glances between themselves and the floor, but never held eye contact.
“How is it looking?” Seth called back over his shoulder.
“Not good,” I said.
■ ■ ■
James Neely murdered Ed Richardson in Midland, Texas. James and his girlfriend Candice only had one intention that night—to leave town. They had received an eviction notice at the apartment building where they were staying. James and Candice walked across the street to a bowling alley that night, and then down the street to a bar, roaming through parking lots, looking to steal a car. At the bar they approached a lady as she was leaving and asked her for a ride. Once in the car, they planned to force her out and take the vehicle. James had a silver butterfly knife in his pocket. Candice did the talking while James waited in front of the car, but the woman got skittish when they seemed unclear on exactly where they wanted to go. She slammed the door and left. James and Candice continued walking down the street. They saw Ed Richardson milling around his truck behind the plumbing store he owned.
“Hey mister,” James called out, “can you give us a ride?” James had his arm around Candice.
“Where do you need to go?” Mr. Richardson was a World War II vet who would do just about anything for anyone. He had a soft spot in his heart for hitchhikers. As a young man in the service, he would hitchhike his way back and forth between Texas and his post in California.
“The Salvation Army,” James said quickly.
The truck only made it 642 feet. James collared Mr. Richardson from behind with his left arm and tried to lift Mr. Richardson out of his seat. Richardson tried to wriggle out of James’s grasp. With his right hand, James began to stab Richardson in the shoulder, neck, and face. Defensive wounds on his hands would show that Mr. Richardson blocked some of the stabs before Candice grabbed his arms and forced them into his lap. James continued to stab. Candice managed to extend her leg over and press the brake pedal, stopping the truck. More stabs landed. Mr. Richardson stopped fighting and slumped down into the driver’s seat.
“Give me the keys and wallet!” James screamed.
Mr. Richardson reached into his back pocket and held up his wallet. Mr. Richardson’s carotid artery and jugular vein had been cut. Blood poured out of him. It soaked his clothes and filled a plastic cup in the seat between him and Candice. Candice reached for the keys and yanked and yanked but could not get them out of the ignition. The truck was still in drive.
“Don’t kill me son,” Mr. Richardson murmured. He began to reach to put the truck in park and get the keys out of the ignition, but as he did his hand went limp and dropped into his lap. His blood pressure was so low he could no longer move his limbs. James stood and reached around Mr. Richardson. James dropped the knife to the floorboard as he twisted the ignition switch back and forth until he got the keys to release. James and Candice got out of the truck.
The interior dome light came on.
“There was so much blood,” James would testify. Seeing it made him sick. Candice started down the street and screamed for James to run, but James stood aghast, looking into the open truck door.
While the jury deliberated whether or not to give James the death penalty, I sat with James at the defense table for a long while, trying to have idle conversation, telling him not to drive himself crazy with what more he could have said or done.
“You did just fine, James,” I congratulated him on his testimony from the stand. James did not testify at his first trial. This time, he detailed the night of the crime, took responsibility, and shared his remorse. He cried while he spoke, as men cry, his face suddenly wet, his voice shaky and cracking.
“I just told the truth,” James kept saying.
I tried to change the subject. During court recess earlier that day, I had taken James’s mother and sister to lunch. They asked me to tell him that they were proud of him and wanted me to make sure that he knew that. I told him. When he mentioned the jury, I told him again.
That morning James’s mother and sister, who had travel from out of state to the trial, got the chance to talk with him. Our team had arranged a brief visit in an otherwise empty courtroom. After the jury had been dismissed for lunch, the guard let James’s mother and sister stay behind and visit James. James sat at the defense table, where he usually stayed during any courtroom breaks. His mother and sister sat on the gallery side, but they leaned on the banister separating the gallery and the defense table. James had swiveled around in his chair. At one point, they held hands. The guard leaning against the wall had straightened up and glared at this touching, but said nothing.
The meeting was against protocol, but we had convinced the guard to give us five minutes. Five minutes turned into ten. Toby, the first chair attorney on James’s case, had asked me to stay close by, monitor the conversation, and just be present “in case something goes wrong.” I had no idea what I was supposed to do, not just in case but especially if something went wrong.
“What’s gonna go wrong?” I asked. My eyes slowly landed on each of the three guns I could see in the courtroom, one on the hip of each deputy.
“Just watch closely and take notes of everything that happens,” Toby said.
“Oh,” I sighed in relief. “That’s all I ever do.”
Soon enough, the nearest guard signaled to me that time was up. I caught James’s eye and nodded to him. James stood up and began to back away from the banister. His mother stood too, but then she suddenly lurched forward. She hugged James and pulled him into her chest. The guard took a quick step toward us, then stopped. The guard later confided that he had a brother in prison and could empathize with James’s mother. James’s mother held him tight. When she let go, she was crying. Her body shook as I led her out of the courtroom.
When I got his mother and sister into my car, James’s mother stared straight ahead for a long while. “That’s the first time I have touched my son in twenty years,” she said.
■ ■ ■
“The jury has been out a long time,” James said to me as we continued to wait in the courtroom that evening. “You’ve seen a lot of these, is that good or bad?”
I had no idea. There was just no telling. I told James I would never hazard a guess, and that even contemplating what might be going on in that room would only drive us crazy. I told him I had heard lots of anecdotal evidence, but the stories all contradicted each other. Some people say it is good if the jury is out a long time, some say it is a bad sign. I told him I would not read anything into it. It was not the time to correct James, but despite his crediting me with lots of experience, I had never waited for a jury to make a life or death decision before this. James had done it twice. He just wanted to hear something, anything, that could be interpreted as a good sign. He wanted hope.
Sometimes hope is a cruel thing to give a man.
■ ■ ■
My fight against the death penalty began with a cold call to the antiquated phone in my university office (the phone was original equipment from when the building opened in 1966). The call startled me because I had been in the Management Department at Texas Tech just over a year and that phone had never rung. I did not even know the number. The plastic piece of junk rattled and blared in its faded cradle several times before I even realized the phone was ringing. I also did not immediately speak when I picked up the handset, intending to examine it rather than answer it.
“Hello?” a voice finally scratch-echoed from the tin earpiece as I stared at it.
I slowly pressed it to my ear. “Can you hear me?”
“Hello?” said the caller. “Whom am I speaking to?”
“Hans Hansen,” I said. “Who were you looking for?”
Michael Block and I made plans to meet later that week at a place called The Coffee Haus on University Avenue, right across from the Texas Tech campus. Michael had cold called the Management Department looking for “anyone who knew something about team building.” Research on teams is a distinct and vibrant area of research, but I was not familiar with any of it. Michael said someone suggested he try me.
“It’s the first team of its kind,” Michael said on that phone call. He briefly described a team made up of lawyers who were used to doing their own thing. “They’ve always been lone wolves, but now we have to get them to work together.” I agreed to meet, but I told him up front that I would be directing him to someone else once I got a few more details.
When I walked into the coffee shop, Michael was already there. He brought along Walter Kape, who had been picked to head the new office, which would officially open the following month. We huddled around a bistro table in the tiny storefront. At Michael’s request, I had sent him a paper explaining a little about what I do. It was from a dense academic journal, but it described both ethnography and narrative theory, my methodology and my main theoretical approach. He had shared it with Walter.
“I needed a thesaurus to read it,” said Michael.
“I read the parts that were in English,” joked Walter.
I could hardly blame them. Academic journal articles can be pretty dry—crumbling, actually. Although I was in a business school, I pointed out that I used ethnography because qualitative methods are suited to the kinds of topics I study, such as organizational culture. I held back from sharing that qualitative research was not very popular in business schools where quant jocks often ruled the roost.
A qualitative approach to research posits that the best way to gain knowledge is through firsthand experience of the phenomena. If you want to know what skydiving is like, for example, you go skydiving, whereas researchers using other approaches may send surveys to a hundred skydivers in an attempt to measure their experience. Both approaches have strengths and weaknesses.
Qualitative researchers studying culture, for example, make firsthand observations of cultural practices, customs, and rituals, and they even participate in the culture to the extent that they can. In the golden days of anthropology, an ethnographer might live in a foreign culture and participate in their customs and rituals. Ethnographers make an effort to have a firsthand encounter with whatever they are studying. They take field notes about the social interactions they observe and interview members of groups about rules and rites of passage in their society. They try to elicit unspoken cultural rules and norms so they can describe “how things work” in a particular culture.
Organizational researchers do the same thing with companies. Just like their cultural anthropologist forebearers, organizational ethnographers observe or work in organizations so they can describe what it’s like in that setting. Ethnographers study norms by observing corporate rituals such as sales meetings, where outstanding customer service behaviors and others are rewarded with titles like Employee of the Month. Or perhaps they get a job at a car factory to gain insight into the informal rules of working on an assembly line.
Corporate narratives tell us a lot about an organization’s culture. We have all heard stories about behaviors that are celebrated or sanctioned in the places we have worked. For example, people who work all night may be lauded, whereas people who question the authority of the boss are fired on the spot. Perhaps you have heard about the proverbial hardworking CEO who is still the first one in the office every day and the last one to leave each night. We hear stories about employees who go to extraordinary lengths to satisfy customers. Perhaps a new manager is brave enough to cancel a high-profile product launch at the eleventh hour because the product did not meet the company’s standards. Instead of being fired, the new manager is immortalized in company folklore for her insistence on quality. Stories like these are told over and over in companies so employees know what is important in that culture and to encourage, we might even say control, behavior. Stories help socialize newcomers and model the norms that make up the culture in a way more memorable than any corporate policy manual.
■ ■ ■
“So where will this new team be? What will they be doing?” I asked Michael and Walter.
“It will be right here in Lubbock,” Michael said. The new team would cover most of West Texas. The new office would serve as a public defender’s office, but only for death penalty cases. Michael and Walter gave me a primer on how the death penalty usually works. They were both experienced and had tried many death penalty cases, some together. Overall, things had not gone well with death penalty defense in Texas.“The State wins over 90 percent of the time,” Walter said. I was flabbergasted at the time, but now that I know how it works, I am shocked that the percentage was not even higher.
To be certain you will get the death penalty in Texas, you have to kill at least two people, a child under six years old, or a cop. “If you kill a cop, they’ll break the bank to kill you,” Michael said. You can also get the death penalty for murdering someone in the course of another crime, such as a rape-murder or murder in the course of a burglary.
Of course, not every murder results in the death penalty. The DA is supposed to consider a list of aggravating factors, but in reality the odds of getting the death penalty depend less on any aspect of the crime itself than on the race of the victim and the defendant. The heinousness of the murder is supposed to be a factor, but nothing appears to be more heinous than minorities killing white people. The social status of the victim is probably the largest determinant in whether a murderer is charged with the death penalty, and in the United States, with our history, social status is still too closely tied to race. For people on death row in Texas, all else being equal, their victim was white more than 70 percent of the time and black just 11 percent of the time. Texas seeks “more justice” when whites are killed because the justice system deems white lives to be worth more than black lives.
In late 2011, Texas executed Lawrence Brewer for the infamous dragging death of James Byrd Jr.1 Brewer and his codefendants were white supremacists. They chained James Byrd behind a pickup truck and dragged him along the road until his body tore apart. Lawrence never showed remorse, and if he had the chance, he said he would do it again. Texas executed him.
It was the first time that Texas had ever killed a white person for killing a black person.
■ ■ ■
“So the new team will replace the current court-appointed defense system?” I asked.
“Yes,” Walter said, “but only for death penalty cases. We will be the permanent death penalty defenders.”
“If there’s a death penalty case, it will be ours,” said Michael. “For other types of cases, the court will continue to appoint attorneys just like they do now.”
When someone is charged with a crime, if the person cannot afford an attorney, the court appoints one. If it is a death penalty case, that attorney has to be death penalty qualified. Similar to medical specialists, capital certified attorneys have to have additional experience, training, and continuing education to qualify them to do the highly specialized work of death penalty cases. As part of his responsibilities for the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, Michael organized continuing education training for lawyers seeking to become death penalty qualified.
The pool of certified capital attorneys in Texas had been dwindling for several years. “In some jurisdictions, you just needed a bar card and a pulse to take a death penalty case,” Michael said. Incompetent attorneys were being appointed to death penalty cases by judges who did not care. Texas has made national headlines for using defense attorneys who have slept through capital trials, to name just one popular example.2
In the past decade, appellate courts have ordered retrials for capital cases when defendants have had ineffective counsel. Sometimes the lawyers did not present mitigating evidence or call experts that may have changed the outcome of the trial. Sometimes lawyers failed to file routine motions to exclude prosecution evidence. And, yes, sometimes they fell asleep during a trial when someone’s life was on the line.
Texas seemed immune to the embarrassment but not to the increasing expense of footing the bill for all those retrials. Giving someone a retrial means an entire do-over, a clean slate. A retrial costs just as much as the original trial, and perhaps more if it is done right the second time. Courts hate spending money to have someone sentenced to die twice just because of some amateur snafu. The Texas legislature was getting agitated about the expenses.
One fix was to increase the training requirement for attorneys to be death penalty certified. There were also new resources, such as the Capital Case Bench Book, to assist judges presiding over capital cases. That book identified common issues and gave judges direction as to what is legally required in capital cases. The American Bar Association developed guidelines for capital cases, which most courts adopted, such as requiring a defense team made up of two attorneys, a fact investigator, and a mitigator. On its face, these changes would seem to help, but Texas did not increase the amount they paid attorneys to take capital cases. Texas often paid attorneys a flat fee of $25,000 to take a death penalty case.
There is no bigger case than a death penalty case. They are long, drawn-out juggernauts that require all your time, effort, and attention. If you have a capital case, it should be a priority. Cases often take years to resolve, even if you reach a plea. Death penalty cases are not for the faint of heart.
Attorneys on court appointment lists usually have their own private practice to run in addition to making themselves available on the public defender roster. The appointment process varies across jurisdictions. Sometimes judges appoint attorneys, and cronyism and campaign contributions can play a role in who is assigned to death penalty cases. Sometimes there is a list and a court administrator simply appoints the next lawyer in line. Sometimes they literally spin a wheel to see whose name comes up. If the attorney has a private practice that is going gangbusters and has plenty of money coming in, the attorney may turn down the case. Who wants to put everything on hold for three years to take a death penalty case, especially when you are only paid $25,000 to do the whole thing?
In fact, two types of attorneys take that kind of work: the very best and the very worst. The very best are ideological, true believers who do whatever it takes to focus on saving someone’s life. The worst are doing so poorly in their private practice that the $25,000 flat fee looks attractive. They often take a death penalty case alongside trying to manage their private practice, doing divorces, DWIs, and whatever work they can bill. Because they get a flat fee, there is no incentive to put time into the case. In fact, there is an incentive to put in as little time as possible, thereby increasing the amount of money earned per hour (billable hours is how revenue is measured in the legal world). So defendants get lawyers who take on death penalty cases but don’t devote any time to them, and don’t care, because the state wins all the time anyway.
“Some of them might as well be pall bearers,” Michael said.
If an attorney does not want to take a death penalty case, the judge or administrator spins the wheel again or calls the next attorney on the capital-qualified list. The judge may have to call several attorneys before one agrees to take the case. In some Texas counties, only two or three people are on the list. When Texas increased the certification requirements, but not the compensation, the list of certified attorneys dropped dramatically. Why put in more time and effort to maintain your death penalty certification if the pay does not change? The work is thankless and tormenting. If you care, you feel responsible for someone’s life. Most people do not last long under that kind of pressure.
As late as the mid-2000s, more than seven hundred attorneys were qualified to take death penalty cases in Texas. On the day Michael called me, there were less than seventy.
The lack of death penalty certified attorneys was especially bad in rural West Texas. Judges would demand that Michael, who happened to live in Lubbock, find someone to take a capital case because of his role with capital assistance at the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. “Who’s on your list?” Michael would ask the judge.
“He was too busy,” said the judge. “Get me someone else.” Or maybe the attorney had angered the judge somehow: hadn’t contributed to the judge’s reelection campaign or was combative on some other case. Or maybe the attorney really was too busy, doing too well in private practice to want to put everything on hold for years to take on a soul-retching death penalty case.
Meanwhile, there was pressure from outside Texas to get things in order. Next door, in Louisiana, they were having similar problems appointing attorneys to defend capital cases. Higher courts told Louisiana that they were serious about the constitutional rights to a defense. If Louisiana was not able to provide a defense against the death penalty, these courts pointed out that Louisiana could no longer charge people with it.
Bloodthirsty Texas took notice. With judges breathing down his neck to get more attorneys certified to do death penalty cases, Michael made an innovative suggestion. “What if we had a permanent capital defense team?” Michael asked. Then no one would have to worry about appointing attorneys to capital cases anymore.
No more judicial appointments. No more lists. No more wheels. If the district attorney charged someone with the death penalty, the case would automatically go to the public defender team for capital cases. The team would handle only death penalty cases, but all of the death penalty cases, across a large geographic area. It would be like an anti-DA’s office. The district attorney’s office is a permanent office in charge of prosecuting crimes. We could have a permanent office in charge of defending crimes, but only death penalty cases.
Administrative judges in Texas talked, the Task Force for Indigent Defense got involved, and they decided to start the capital defense office as an experiment, based in West Texas. A big part of the task force’s concern was providing indigents’ defense for death penalty cases because those cases are so high-profile and come under so much scrutiny from higher courts—not to mention the media.
We named the new office the West Texas Regional Public Defender for Capital Cases. It was supposed to be an experiment lasting a few years, and it was meant to serve only two of the nine Texas judicial administrative regions, in which capital case appointments had been particularly challenging. The team took all the capital cases from the seventh and ninth judicial regions, which covered the entire Panhandle of Texas, all the way down to Midland and Odessa, and west over to Pecos and east past Abilene, an area that included more than eighty counties and almost a third of Texas.
In line with the American Bar Association guidelines, the new team would be made up of attorneys, mitigators, and a fact investigator. There would be office staff. For death penalty cases, the courts mandate two attorneys, a first and second chair, for each death penalty defendant. Mitigation specialists and fact investigators assist with various investigations to support the defense. Some judges in Texas were hesitant to adhere to the guidelines because it was not a good look politically to spend taxpayer money defending killers. Typical Texans were not eager to hear about their tax dollars being used to defend murderers.
Counties signed on in droves. Not having to fork over taxpayer money to pay for the defense anymore was mouthwatering. Instead of paying the entire cost of providing a defense, counties would now pay a nominal fee and have all the death penalty defense team expenses covered in the event of a capital case.
Counties referred to our office as providing “murder insurance.” Each county paid a little bit every year to avoid a big expense in the event of the catastrophic costs of a death penalty case. For rural counties, a death penalty case could wipe out the entire budget. Capital case expenses lasting several years can easily reach a million dollars once you add up the prosecution, investigation, defense, defense investigation, and mitigation costs, not to mention the costs to pay for expert testimony on both sides, and other court costs such as seating a jury. No matter where a killing occurs, the defendant is entitled to an effective defense, and the local government must cover all of these costs, even if the county is dirt poor. With the new team in place, the appointment problems would be gone and the cost would be controlled. It was very attractive financially. No one gave much thought to whether we would win or not. Given the past record, why should that enter anyone’s mind?
So far, Walter had been the only person hired. “So how do we go about building the team?” Michael asked me.
“Well, I’ll try to find somebody who can help you,” I said. “Most people—and they are smart people—might suggest coming up with a strategy and talking about things like hierarchy, mission statements, job descriptions, and team composition.” Michal and Walter nodded. Those were the first terms out of my mouth they recognized.
“But I wouldn’t do any of that stuff,” I said.
Michael and Walter glanced at each other. “Well…what would you do?”
“I would create a team narrative. I would have the whole team collectively write a whole new narrative about the way we should defend death penalty cases. All the team members will have a role in the story, and our story will detail who is doing what when, and why, and what other team members are doing at every stage of a case. I would even include people outside of the team in a new narrative, like the DA and judges, to include the actions that others typically take during a death penalty case because they play a role in the narrative too. We must take into account the likely actions of others. All of those other voices will be included alongside the team’s voice. That’s one major departure from a typical strategy, which focuses on what an organization wants to do and how. If we’re going to be interacting with the opposition during real cases, that needs to be represented in a team narrative.”
“So we would start fresh?” Walter asked.
“In some ways,” I said, “but we will still rely on all your experience and knowledge, and fashion a new narrative out of that existing material, putting it together in new ways. We will come up with some new ideas as well. We have a chance to literally rewrite the way the death penalty is defended.”
“So what exactly is a narrative?” Michael asked. “Is it like a playbook?”
“You could say that,” I said, “but a very descriptive one. It’s more like a story, or a vision with a plan for bringing it to fruition. We would use the narrative to guide our actions and decisions. I like the phrase ‘go by.’ A team narrative is something we would go by in doing our work.”
I told Michael and Walter that I often used the metaphor of a first date to explain narratives to my students. In class this past semester, I asked the class if anyone recalled going on their first date. I got a few reluctant hands. “Well, if you’d never done it before, how did you know what to do on your first date?” I ask. “How did you know how to behave?”
“I don’t know,” they say, “I guess from what I saw on TV and in movies.”
“Yes,” I say, “or maybe you had friends who had gone on dates who told you stories about what they did. What you do on a date involves cultural norms, right?”
There are nods.
“So before your date, is it safe to say you already have a narrative to ‘go by’ to guide your actions and help you accomplish the date?” More nods. I pick someone. “So what did you do on your first date?”
“Dinner and a movie,” he said.
“The always reliable dinner and a movie. So that was a plan, right? And one you didn’t think up on your own?”
They nod.
“You heard that narrative somewhere, right, your friends had done it? We might say that when we ‘go by’ a narrative, we are ‘enacting’ it into being, such that the narrative in our heads, our cognitive framework, comes to fruition and becomes reality as we act it out.”
There are nods.
“By enacting the narrative, it becomes true, right? You actually perform the narrative into existence. It is an accomplishment. Like implementing a plan, we go by the narrative we have in our minds, and in doing so, it becomes reality and we end up going to dinner and a movie on a date.”
More nods. I have them part way to understanding narrative theory.
“So narratives are handy, right? They allow us to navigate social situations such as first dates by enacting some narrative we hold. But what else do narratives do beside help us accomplish interactions like dates, or even job interviews?”
Silence.
“Do you see how the narratives we go by might also control us?”
They know that’s a rhetorical question.
“What I mean is, narratives guide our behaviors, but they also control us, confining us to do things we think are appropriate in a particular situation. We follow social norms about dating. So what happens? Narratives guide us and allow us to accomplish a date, but…?” I raise my eyebrows.
“We never do anything but go to dinner and a movie?” someone ventures.
“Exactly!” I say. “If our narrative defines a date as dinner and a movie, that is what we always do, over and over. Narratives can confine us, even imprison us!” I shout, “to a narrow set of behaviors. And if we keep enacting the same old narratives, we end up trapped in a cycle where we keep doing things the same old way. In fact, the narratives we go by can become so powerful that we can’t imagine doing things any other way. Some narratives are so culturally ingrained and taken for granted that it never even occurs to us that we can do something other than go to dinner and a movie. We are on autopilot.”
I try to walk and move my arms like a vacant-eyed robot. Everyone in the classroom is staring at me. That’s good.
“It gets juicier,” I say. “So narratives guide us, but also control us. Now, on top of that, we may never even realize this predicament because we are often not conscious of the narratives we are going by. You are always, whatever you’re doing, going by something. And that something is guiding you, but it is also controlling you. And most of the time, we are not conscious we are being controlled. When we are mindlessly enacting our narrative of a date, we are not thinking about how it is just a cultural convention, learned through stories, that we are going by. We are thinking—that’s just the way we do things. We don’t critically question the origin or legitimacy of the narrative because we can’t—because we don’t even realize we’re going by it.”
I can see from my students’ faces that wheels are starting to turn in their heads.
“So we can’t question the narratives if we aren’t conscious we are going by them. And we’re being controlled via our own enactment of the narratives that society has indoctrinated us with. We strictly follow the narrative and the social norms they entail, without question, doing and thinking whatever they tell us to do. You are all basically programmed robots.” I pause. “The bottom line is this: you’re all doomed. Now have a good night. Go do whatever society or your TV tells you to do.”
“So that’s it?” someone frets. “We’re leaving it right there? At we’re doomed?”
“We only have two more minutes left,” I say. “We have to leave it at doomed. It’s a cliffhanger.”
There are disapproving looks.
“Okay then, one last question!” I say. “But you all have to start thinking. Where do all these narratives come from? How do we get them?”
Puzzled looks.
“Well, they weren’t always there, right? We had to learn them from somewhere.”
“They come from us?” someone awakens.
“Yes, yes!” I say, “Us! Collectively. Society. We create them! We build them out of past experience and as we make sense of events, or come up with explanations of why things happen, or what should happen, by…?”
“Creating narratives,” someone finishes.
“Yes! Narratives are socially constructed, meaning that we, society, create them. Some narratives become so deeply ingrained and widely shared in our culture that they seem to be permanent and objective fixtures, like immutable laws of the universe about how things work instead of something we made up. But, if we are the ones who created the narratives, that means…?”
“We can change them?”
“Bravo!” I put both arms up. “We can be free!”
There are smiles.
“Plus,” I add, “narratives are changing all the time anyway, even if it is slow. Our social norms about dating are not the same as they were fifty years ago. Yes, there are still a lot of dinners and movies, but some tiny things have changed, like who pays, and who can ask whom out on a date. The good news is, if we created the narratives we go by, that means you can create a new narrative to go by, and attempt to enact it. You don’t have to walk around like a robot doing whatever society has programmed you to do. Just remember, everyone else will be enacting various narratives as well, and you will be pressured to stick to the script. It can be a lot of pressure, and not always for good reasons.”
“Just because that’s the way it’s always been done,” says a student.
“Yes,” I say, “norms. The social pressure to keep reenacting them seems insurmountable. So it won’t be easy to enact a new narrative, but it is a possibility.” I raise a finger for a final instruction. “You don’t have to be controlled. You can be conscious and reflexive instead.”
■ ■ ■
Michael, Walter, and I are the last three customers in the coffee shop. What I underlined for them was the idea that, if we go by narratives all the time, we should create the very narratives that we use to guide our behaviors and actions. We can take processes that we do naturally and unconsciously in everyday life and engage in them very deliberately and consciously on an organizational scale. Why shouldn’t the team create and agree to go by our own narrative in deciding “how things are done” on death penalty cases?
“We’ll play by our rules, not theirs,” I said.
“There won’t be any hugs or trust falls, will there?” Walter asked.
“Not unless you need a hug,” I said. “I know it sounds weird, but if you think about it, enacting a narrative is not so different from pursuing a strategy. However, I believe thinking in narrative terms has a bunch of advantages over traditional vision statements or strategies. The very process of constructing the new narrative will give everyone on the team a shared understanding of what we’re trying to accomplish, along with more details about how to go about it. Plus, they will have a better understanding of their role in enacting the narrative.”
“So it will just be like a goal?” Michael asked.
“Much more powerful,” I said. “Narratives entail goals as well as how to go about achieving them. I think stories provide a lot more direction than strategies but also retain a lot of flexibility. It will empower team members to act more proactively, yet their actions will be highly coordinated with other team members.”
“Proactive would be nice,” Michael said. “That’s not something we see on many defense teams.” Walter described how the DA drives things and the defense team is always reacting. “It would be nice to be on the offensive for once.”
I closed by telling them I thought creating a narrative could instill a positive culture as well. I expected Walter and Michael to ask me when I could get them the name of somebody else to help them, so I could go right back to being a hermit in my office, writing papers that nobody would ever read, in journals that nobody ever heard of, all of which I had already resigned myself to do. To tell you the truth, I actually looked forward to it.
“We’ll do it,” said Michael.
My eyebrows shot up and my eyes widened. I am pretty sure my mouth opened a bit.
“Well, whatever we’re doing now isn’t working,” Michael said.
Then, it got less flattering. “At this point, we’re willing to try anything,” said Walter.
“We’ll do anything you tell us to, Hans. We’ll create one of these narratives and use it to guide all our work. Just tell us what to do.”
My tongue dropped toward my stomach as realization shot up my spine. I felt like a tremendous bluff had been called. Before that moment, the discussion had been comfortably theoretical.
“What’s in it for you?” asked Walter.
Despite being flabbergasted, I managed to answer what would be in it for any academic. “Well, for me, I am in the publish-or-perish business, so whatever I do has to have a research component. I would like to conduct an ethnography of the death penalty. That means I need to learn about everything you do, go everywhere you go, and gain an insider’s perspective on the death penalty.”
“That will expose you to a lot of privileged information,” Walter said.
“In that case,” said Michael, “you had better just join the team.”
Walter nodded.
“Do you have any legal experience at all?” Michael asked.
“None.”
“I want to teach you your first legal term,” Michael smiled, “pro bono.”
“I’ve heard of it,” I said. “Research will be my agenda, not money. I’ll write papers about the death penalty as a social institution. I could do a paper about the narrative process we go through.”
They smirked at each other.
“You won’t have to read them! But just so you know, some professor-types would actually find it quite interesting. If we construct a team narrative and attempt to enact it, it will be the first time anyone has ever deliberately applied narrative theory as an organizing principle and strategic device. I think we would be the first organization anywhere to even try it.”
Michael leaned forward, “You mean you’ve never done this?”
