Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld and Jim Dwyer are on the move in New York city, snatching moments of serenity and cups of strong coffee throughout another helter-skelter day. The bad times are the busiest when you are on the side of the angels.
In a cell in Huntsville, Texas, a man called Gary Graham is preparing himself for a fate he has railed against during his 19 years on death row. As the leading spokesmen on miscarriage of justice cases in the US, Scheck, Neufeld and Dwyer have been making a chorus of protest across the networks all week.
Scheck and Neufeld, old friends, two pugnacious, rumpled lefties in whose hearts the 1960s still live, are the lawyers. Dwyer, with a father from Sneem, Co Kerry, and a mother from Galway, is the double Pulitzer prize-winning columnist whose beat has been miscarriage of justice cases. Together they have produced a book, Actual Innocence, which has become the source-text for a fierce and ongoing debate about the efficacy of the US justice system.
Every time a Gary Graham is subdued and strapped to a gurney to be killed by the State, it falls to Scheck, Neufeld and Dwyer to hit the circuit and slowly, patiently elucidate the haunting Kafka-esque character of a legal system which has been traduced by what Scheck calls the "cheap demagoguery of politicians".
Graham wasn't even a Scheck/Neufeld case, but the pair have become so inextricably linked with the case for reform of the justice system that they have become informal spokesmen for all such cases.
It is a relentlessly sunny afternoon right in the throbbing heart of Gotham. In Rudolph Guiliani's city of zero tolerance this is where the flotsam and jetsam washes up. You want stories? Come to these rooms. On the 11th floor of the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law, Scheck and Neufeld supervise the Innocence Project, an endeavour which has become a destination of last resort for hundreds of wrongfully convicted men and women in US jails.
Dwyer met Scheck and Neufeld on a prison visit some 10 years ago when they bent his ear about a miscarriage of justice case. "I think there and then they made up the name for the Innocence Project," he says. "That's the kind of passionate, creative energy they bring to everything they do."
Actual Innocence comprises a series of case studies of miscarriages of justice, banging home the perils of mistaken eyewitness identity, bad lawyering, police conspiracy, and the pervasiveness of racist assumptions about black male defendants. It is a cold, frightening, compelling read.
The people with their fingers in all those cases operate from here. The Innocence Project operates as a legal clinic within the Cardozo School. Each year, 18 second- and third-year law students are supervised by Scheck and Neufeld as they tackle cases with certain specifications: the identity of the perpetrator must have been an issue at the trial and biological evidence must have been connected, as future DNA testing holds out the possibility of refutation of the original verdict. The results have been astounding: 73 post-conviction exonerations in the US, 40 as a result of Cardozo cases.
It was their history in political and social activism which led Scheck and Neufeld to this unique place. They met as young lawyers in the Bronx Legal Aid office and both saw the chance to use the law as a source for change. They have been a team ever since. "We wanted to make a lot of money but we failed," says Neufeld, the more outgoing of the two.
"We did not. That's not it," says Scheck. "This is the reason for being a lawyer."
"Yeah it's like this," says Neufeld. "You are only going to go around once - and if you can't have a passion for what you do, then do something else. Making money just wouldn't be enough. Look at all the slobs who make a lot of money but wander the earth completely alienated from what they do. The terrific thing about this is we make no sacrifice. We love it, we love the issues, the clients, the satisfaction in tweaking the system, bringing about a little change. It's exhilarating, it's everything you could want. It's sexual."
"Aw, speak for yourself, Peter," says Scheck, shaking his head and grinning. "He's gone too far there."
Scheck's office is a mess. Legal papers threaten to kill someone in an avalanche. Two big suitcases tagged "Scheck, Brooklyn" sit on the floor. The walls are studded with recognition awards and Charles Boggs cartoons, making space on one side for a giant picture of Jackie Robinson, the first black player in major league baseball. Elsewhere on the walls faded posters from the 1960s tell Scheck's story: Support the United Farm Workers Union; Anti-Nuke rallies. In Neufeld's office, the decor is much the same.
They have handled many cases for people who have been brutalised or victimised, or suffered an injustice. Abner Louima, sodomised in a police station by a cop with a nightstick? Ricky McGinn, the first death-row stay granted by George W. Bush? Thomas Pizzuto, beaten to death by guards in Nashua County Prison? The two immigrants shot dead on the New Jersey turnpike by police? And so on. Scheck and Neufeld have their fingerprints on all of them.
And still they fuel their enormous energies with clear, passionate outrage at the world around them.
"You been following this Thomas Provenzano thing in Florida," says Neufeld suddenly. "Awful. Strapped in a gurney, two needles put in him and then they take him out for 24 hours and go through the same thing again and they kill him this time. We are all witnesses to that. You are. I am. As human beings we are witnesses to that in our country. Intolerable. Unacceptable. We are all witnesses and in a way we are all participants."
They are children of a more idealistic age. In his high-school years, Neufeld became involved in the civil rights movement and the freedom schools run in church basements in the deep south. His mother, Muriel, is in her 80s now but still monitors court cases and campaigns for her causes.
Scheck is the son of an entertainer. George Scheck was a tapdancer, one of the few white men of his era to work the Apollo theatre in Harlem. Scheck's anti-Vietnam war stance while a student at Yale was inspired. He fought for an end to all student deferments on the basis that the sight of middle-class, white kids arriving home in boxes would stop the war quicker than anything else.
Their history together, with Dwyer's outstanding record as a tough-guy columnist chronicling the life of a tough guy's city, has brought them to a central position in a debate which will occupy the US mainstream consciousness from now until November, when Scheck's fellow Yale alumnus, George W. Bush, either becomes the next president of the US or the Republican party's most expensive failure.
"We've reached a moment here," says Dwyer, "when the buzz of the George W. Bush thing has helped draw attention at a critical time. He's at the crossroads and the cross hairs. I know an AP reporter in Huntsville, Texas and he has covered hundreds of these executions in Texas. Here's what he does, he writes down last meal, double cheeseburger, milkshake, whatever, last words whatever and time of death. That would be the entire record of this event.
"Gary Graham, though, is a test of what people believe. Most Americans are still clearly in favour of the death penalty but you would never find a clear majority in favour of circumstances as muddied and contradictory as these. [The question of Gary Graham's execution] is a deeply disturbing moment for mainstream America."
This year has been filled with those moments. In Illinois, the pro-death penalty republican Governor George Ryan imposed a moratorium on the process when it became apparent that the tally of death row miscarriage-of-justice cases was outstripping the execution rate in the state. Conservative columnist George Will has changed his mind as a result of reading Actual Innocence, and the Cato Institute, a right-wing think-tank, has taken the view that there is something worrying about a system wherein "the people who misdeliver the mail are pushing the buttons".