On the night executioners killed Joseph Corcoran, a glowing inflatable snowman stood on the front lawn of the Indiana State Prison wearing a top hat and frozen smile. Its left arm was raised in a wave, as if to greet the white vans waiting to take witnesses to the death chamber. Inside the brick building in front of the prison complex, shadowy figures stood at the windows, their movements inscrutable from the outside. As the clock struck midnight on December 18, a few dozen protesters sang “Amazing Grace.”

The 165-year-old penitentiary is located in the northern reaches of the state, just half a mile from Lake Michigan. In heavy coats and winter hats, the demonstrators had gathered across the street, braving the cold to stand in protest of Indiana’s first execution in 15 years. They were joined by a handful of reporters, who paced around the parking lot where yellow caution tape cordoned off a “staging area” for press. Under state law and the policies of the Indiana Department of Correction, this was as close as any journalist would be able to get to the execution.

No one knew when exactly the killing would happen, only that it would be carried out “before sunrise.” 

The rule is a relic of the late 1800s, when states carried out executions hidden from public view.

“No media briefings or interviews will be conducted,” said informational materials emailed in advance. Nor would there be bathrooms available. “Please plan accordingly.”

In most death penalty states, executions are scheduled to take place in the evening, with at least a few members of the press serving as witnesses. But Indiana planned to kill Corcoran in the dead of night, without a single journalist present. The rule is a relic of the late 1800s, when numerous states carried out executions hidden from public view. Aside from Indiana, only Wyoming, which has not killed anyone since 1992, still has a law barring media witnesses on the books.

George Hale, a reporter with Indiana Public Media, was interviewed in the parking lot by abolitionist group Death Penalty Action. One of the few journalists who repeatedly witnessed the federal executions under Donald Trump, Hale knows better than most that media witnesses are critical for documenting evidence of botched executions. Indiana planned to kill Corcoran with the same sedative used by the federal government: a single lethal dose of pentobarbital, which has been linked to pulmonary edema, the filling of the lungs with fluid. Experts have described the experience as torture. 

In an op-ed co-authored with a Freedom of the Press Foundation lawyer, Hale wrote that he’d worked with an anesthesiologist to develop a guide for media witnesses — a checklist of signs that an execution was going awry. Instead, the media ban would hide any red flags.

Hale and other reporters tried to raise alarms about the state’s lack of transparency. As in other death penalty states, Indiana had passed a law shrouding its execution drugs in secrecy. Since obtaining the drugs it would use to kill Corcoran, the Department of Correction had “denied virtually every information request related to the execution,” wrote a veteran journalist with the Indiana Capital Chronicle. “Agency staffers won’t say how many vials were bought, what it cost, the expiration date. Nothing.” 

The Department of Correction disclosed only one new piece of information in the hours leading up to the execution, shared in a brief email at 4:45 p.m. Corcoran, it read, “requested Ben and Jerry’s ice cream for his last meal.”

“His last words were: ‘Not really. Let’s get this over with.’”

At 12:21 a.m., a stream of uniformed officers exited the prison grounds and headed to a cluster of police cars in the back of the parking lot. It seemed too soon for the execution to be over, but the crowd knew better than to ask them questions. “Merry Christmas,” one officer said to a police colleague as he left.

More than 30 minutes later, at 12:59, the Department of Correction sent an email to the press. 

“The execution process started shortly after 12:00 a.m. CST on December 18, 2024,” it read. “Corcoran was pronounced dead at 12:44 a.m.” 

“His last words were: ‘Not really. Let’s get this over with.’”

Grace or Retribution

The return of executions in the Hoosier state came largely at the behest of Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, a MAGA stalwart perhaps best known for targeting a doctor who gave abortion care to a 10-year-old rape survivor. In a joint press release with the governor announcing the decision to seek an execution date for Corcoran earlier this year, Rokita called the death penalty “a means of providing justice for victims of society’s most heinous crimes.” 

Corcoran was 22 years old when he shot and killed his brother, James, and three other men, including his sister’s fiancé. It was 1997, and the family was still reeling from the murder of Corcoran’s parents five years earlier, a crime for which he was tried as a juvenile and acquitted. News reports said that Corcoran had committed the murders after he overheard the men talking about him. He immediately turned himself in.

Although there was no question of his guilt, there was reason to believe that Corcoran was not competent to stand trial. In the years after he was sentenced to die, multiple doctors diagnosed Corcoran with paranoid schizophrenia. Experts testified at a 2003 hearing that he believed prison guards were using an ultrasound machine to force him to speak. It was this delusion that appeared to have led Corcoran to refuse a plea deal before his 1999 trial; court records show that he would only agree to one if he could first have his vocal cords severed “because his involuntary speech allowed others to know his innermost thoughts.” 

Corcoran repeatedly sought to drop his appeals and volunteer for execution. Post-conviction attorneys argued that Corcoran’s severe mental illness made him incompetent to make such a decision, while the attorney general’s office insisted he was fine. In court filings, prosecutors cited a letter in which Corcoran claimed to have “fabricated” his delusions.

After the state announced its plans to kill Corcoran, one surviving relative of his victims spoke out loudly about her opposition to the execution. In a Facebook post in early December, Corcoran’s sister, Kelly Ernst, wrote that his death sentence had done nothing to assuage her grief or bring closure. 

“Instead, it is a lengthy, costly and political process,” she wrote. In the years since the crime, her brother had written to express his remorse and she had forgiven him: “I will not attend his execution, neither as family or as victim, as I believe it would take a piece of me that I will not get back.” 

As the execution drew near, the prosecutor who sent Corcoran to death row also came out against it. As the elected district attorney of Allen County, where the murders took place, Robert Gevers had urged jurors to send Corcoran to death row, calling it the only proper punishment for such “carnage.” But his feelings about the death penalty had evolved since then. “Times have changed, my own thinking has changed,” he told the Indiana Capital Chronicle. 

In a phone call two days before Corcoran’s execution, Gevers said he had come to oppose executions in part due to a conversation with his young son. After the U.S. government killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, his son, then 10 years old, asked him a series of moral questions about the death penalty, unaware that Gevers had once sent someone to die. As he struggled to answer, he began to realize his own stance was untenable.

“If this is what the public has said is a legitimate punishment for certain actions, then the public has the right to know how that’s carried out.”

Gevers later reflected on it in an unpublished essay, which included a scene from Corcoran’s sentencing trial he had never forgotten. The mother of one of the victims had taken the stand. “As she spoke about the loss of her son, the looming years of tragic memories, the future of emptiness in her family, and the awful task of burying a child, she opened the box and set a book on the table in front of her son’s killer,” he wrote. The book was a Bible inscribed with Corcoran’s name. The woman told Corcoran that she forgave him. To Gevers, it was a powerful act of grace. The death penalty was nothing but retribution, he concluded. 

Gevers learned about Corcoran’s execution date from a woman at the attorney general’s office, who called him earlier this year “out of the blue.” The news unsettled him. And he was deeply disturbed to learn the state would not allow media witnesses. 

“I thought, ‘You have to be kidding,’” Gevers told me. “If this is what the public has said is a legitimate punishment for certain actions, then the public has the right to know how that’s carried out.” 

Prosecutors’ Regrets

Among lawyers who once handled death penalty prosecutions, Gevers is not alone in turning against capital punishment. In Indiana, as in many other states, prosecutors are increasingly reluctant to seek the death penalty. And, in part thanks to improved capital defense, it has been a decade since an Indiana jury handed down a new death sentence. 

A month before Corcoran’s execution, I met veteran attorney Thomas Vanes at the Lake County Public Defender’s Office, an aging brick building that once housed a hospital. Located in the northwest corner of the state, just an hour from Chicago, Lake County once led Indiana in new death sentences, placing more than 20 people on death row between 1978 and 1990, the majority of them Black or Latino. Yet almost none had been executed.

Vanes handed me a packet containing facts and figures about the state’s death penalty record as a whole. Prosecutors frequently invoke executions as providing finality and closure for victims’ families. By this measure, Indiana’s track record was abysmal: Of 97 people sentenced to die after the state passed its modern death penalty law in 1977, the vast majority had not withstood legal challenges. Only 20 had resulted in an execution. As of 2019, 60 people had been removed from death row due to reversals by appellate courts, commutations, or deals reached with the state. 

Vanes’s own early career provided a vivid snapshot of this history. As a prosecutor in the Lake County district attorney’s office during the 1970s and 1980s, he sent nine men to the state’s death row. 

“Of the nine, only one ended up being executed here in Indiana,” Vanes told me. “And he was a volunteer.”

 Two others were executed in other states for different crimes. Of the remaining six, one man took his own life. The rest saw their sentences reduced.

To Vanes, such numbers are an indictment of the whole system — especially considering the tremendous amount of taxpayer money devoted to seeking and defending death sentences. “If you were a cold-blooded economic adviser, you would say that’s a poor return on investment,” he said.

It’s not hard to see why so many of Indiana’s old death penalty cases have failed appellate review. The earliest death sentences were the product of a system that had not created a legal infrastructure to provide meaningful representation to defendants on trial for their lives. As a prosecutor, Vanes said, he had a clear advantage over his opposing counsel. 

“The defense was handled by people who were part-time public defenders with their own private practice,” he said. “Meanwhile my workload shrank to afford me the time to do the death penalty cases.” In retrospect, he said, his court victories were nothing to brag about.

“We didn’t know what we were doing, to be honest.”

Vanes was just two years out of law school when he prosecuted his first death penalty case. It was 1978, and the state had just overhauled its entire criminal code. As Vanes recalls, neither he nor his own bosses were especially well-equipped to apply the new death penalty law. “We didn’t know what we were doing, to be honest.” 

Vanes won the case. When it came time for the sentencing phase, even the judge “didn’t quite know what to do, because it was all new,” he said. The defendant, a Black man named James Brewer, became the first person sentenced to die in Indiana’s “modern” death penalty era. 

The early victory was a significant career boost for the 27-year-old. Seeking the death penalty became part of the office culture in ways that sound disturbing in retrospect. Vanes remembered the case of a 16-year-old white boy who killed a bank teller during a robbery in 1988. Since the office had recently won a death sentence against a 16-year-old Black girl, Vanes said it felt necessary to try again. 

“We pursued it against her,” he thought. “How could we not pursue it against him?” 

The jury voted to spare the teenager’s life; today, the Eighth Amendment forbids the death penalty for juveniles.

Brewer’s death sentence was ultimately overturned after a Lake County judge concluded that his lawyer had provided ineffective assistance of counsel. By then, Vanes had left the prosecutor’s office and become a public defender. 

“There is always a danger that prosecutors treat their former cases like they were their own children: Protect it at all costs,” he said. By the time his old cases fell apart, it didn’t bother him that much. He did regret the impact on victims’ families who were misled by the death penalty’s false promise of closure.

Vanes articulated an uncomfortable fact that had loomed over Corcoran’s case regardless of the legal arguments over his competency. Sometimes the very evidence that was supposed to spare someone from execution instead convinces people they will always pose a danger, even behind prison walls, he said. “Unfortunately for this man, his mental illness scares people.”

A Glimpse Inside

The protesters had mostly disbanded when a trio of prison staff walked toward the parking lot at 1:06 a.m. A man in khakis and a black balaclava clutched a stack of papers, followed by a woman in a fur-lined hood. Behind them, an officer shot a thumbs up at the cops stationed in front of the parking lot. 

The man in the balaclava stuffed the papers in an inconspicuous box attached to a No Parking sign. With a teal marker, someone had written “Media Statement” in clumsy block letters. The papers were one-page press statements — printed versions of the email sent out moments before — never mind that there was virtually no one left to receive them. The officials walked back to the prison in silence. 

Shortly afterward, news broke that a local journalist had managed to attend the execution after all. Reporter Casey Smith from the Indiana Capital Chronicle had gotten on Corcoran’s personal witness list. Her dispatch, published around 3 a.m., filled in key gaps in the state’s narrative.

Official language stated the “execution process” had begun shortly after midnight, raising concerns that the lethal injection had dragged out for more than 40 minutes. But Smith’s article revealed that the execution had gone relatively quickly. 

“Blinds for a one-way window with limited visibility into the execution chamber were raised at 12:34 a.m.,” she wrote. “Corcoran appeared awake with his eyes blinking, but otherwise still and silent, at that time. After a brief movement of his left hand and fingers at about 12:37 a.m., Corcoran did not move again. Blinds to the witness room were closed by the prison warden at 12:40 a.m.”

It was not clear what happened in the four minutes between the closing of the blinds and the estimated time of death. Nor is it known what was said in the execution chamber apart from the words prison officials chose to share. Generally speaking, however, the execution appeared to have gone according to plan.

A spiritual adviser who accompanied Corcoran as he died described the final visit in an interview with Smith. “We had prayer together,” he told her. “We talked and laughed, we reminisced.” He said Corcoran seemed less concerned about himself than his neighbors. 

“He actually was talking more about the other guys on death row, and how it was going to impact them. He wasn’t talking about his own feelings and fears,” the spiritual adviser told Smith. “From my perspective, it was very, very peaceful.”

The post Indiana’s Midnight Executions Are a Relic Of Another Age appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

In the decade he worked at the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, Dr. Patrick Gariety carried a notebook almost everywhere he went. “I was a compulsive scribbler,” he said, a psychiatrist and then-aspiring writer working in an environment that, in many ways, had to be seen to be believed.

Gariety had always felt drawn to public sector psychology, treating people who were marginalized and seriously mentally ill. His notebook became a way to process what he saw. “It was emotionally so fraught in different ways, that really the writing became therapeutic, a way of coping,” he told me in a phone call. So when there was a murder at the mental health wing of the prison on January 26, 2010, Gariety spent the next several weeks putting it all on paper. 

It was a Wednesday morning when he got the news. Gariety was entering the reception area, joining the crowded line of day shift workers at security as they took off their shoes, belts, and winter coats, when he heard a guard at the scanner say, “If you haven’t already heard, folks, an inmate was killed last night.” Gariety felt a surge of anxiety. He hoped and prayed that none of his patients were involved. Then his heart sank.

The victim was 51-year-old Victor Castro-Rodriguez, a skinny Cuban immigrant with bipolar disorder. He’d been found in his own cell, bound, gagged, and apparently beaten to death. Although he was not one of Gariety’s patients, Gariety knew Castro-Rodriguez. Just about everyone did. He was a talented graphic artist, Gariety wrote in his journal; some of his drawings hung in the psychiatrist’s office. “He merrily handed out his artwork to everyone.”

There were two killers, one of whom was Gariety’s patient: 38-year-old Charles Hall, who everyone called Chuck. Despite a tough-guy exterior — shaved head, tattoos — Gariety had never thought of Hall as dangerous. His violence was mainly directed at himself.

For practically his whole adult life, Hall had been afflicted by a severe case of Crohn’s disease that had ravaged his intestinal system — and which made life in prison a living hell. Hall expelled waste through an ostomy bag attached to his abdomen, which often failed to work properly, and he was often in pain or discomfort. In the weeks before the murder, he’d had his seventh corrective surgery. The sights and smells of Hall’s disability had made him a target among his neighbors; after arriving in Springfield, Hall had repeatedly asked to be placed in isolation. More than once, Hall had tried to take his own life, usually when he was having a flare-up of his symptoms. It was a suicide attempt that had landed him in Gariety’s unit in the first place.

“Certain things jump off the page.”

In the weeks following the murder, Gariety’s own feelings of rage and revulsion gave way to a desire to make sense of it all. He reread his first psychiatric evaluation of Hall. “Certain things jump off the page,” he wrote. Hall had problems controlling his temper and acted out in ways that seemed irrational and self-defeating. The crimes that sent him to federal prison were a good example. While incarcerated in Maine, Hall had made a series of audacious threats to federal authorities by phone and by mail. He made no effort to hide what he was doing. “He even signed his name to one of the mailed threats,” Gariety wrote.

Hall showed similar behavior after Castro-Rodriguez’s murder. He insisted that he would kill again if he wasn’t put in isolation. “I want you to take me seriously,” Gariety recorded him saying.

There was something else in Hall’s file that captured Gariety’s attention. Hall had told him that his father had molested his sister when they were children — and that Hall once retaliated by trying to poison his dad with Drano capsules. Gariety wondered whether Hall himself had been abused. “It’s easy for me to imagine this only being the tip of the iceberg,” he wrote in his journal.

Gariety sensed an undercurrent of deep fear beneath Hall’s behavior. Perhaps his violent actions were partly a response to feeling threatened — and “a way to imagine himself now strong enough to stand up to” his abuser. Whatever his unprocessed trauma, it was compounded by his physical suffering, he wrote. This did not justify his actions. But it was a way to understand them.

Gariety left his job at the medical prison not long afterward and moved out of state. Earlier this year, a lawyer named Angela Elleman got in touch with Gariety out of the blue. It was then that he learned that Hall had been sentenced to death.

Gariety also learned that his previous speculation about Hall had proved prescient. Though it had been revealed at Hall’s trial that the story about his sister and their father was untrue, Hall’s post-conviction team had uncovered broader allegations of sexual abuse at a school he attended as a child. According to Hall and additional witnesses who gave sworn declarations as part of a legal filing in his case, Hall was one of numerous students molested by the school’s founder. “It would be unsurprising for a male inmate to have deep shame about any history of sexual abuse and to substitute his own story with a fictional one for someone like a sister,” Gariety wrote in a declaration for Hall’s attorneys.

“I’m opposed to the death penalty,” Gariety told me. “I didn’t experience Mr. Hall as a particularly sympathetic character, but I did not want to see him executed.” He remains circumspect about his observations back in 2010. He’d had no way of knowing the truth of Hall’s life and had clawed for an explanation. “Him committing murder was just so unexpected and so extreme,” Gariety said. “Where the hell did that come from? Why didn’t anyone see that?”

State of Emergency

Today, Hall is 53 years old and lives in the Special Confinement Unit at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. He spends most of his waking hours in solitary confinement, living in a cell the size of a bathroom. In his decade on death row, Hall has had no disciplinary infractions; according to a former case worker at the prison, who wrote a letter to the White House earlier this year saying that it would be best for Hall and for the staff in Terre Haute if his sentence would be reduced to life without parole. Hall “was not a management problem” during the seven years that he knew him, the case worker wrote. “He did, though, have intense medical issues that our prison was not set up to handle.”

“If I had known this information at the time of Mr. Hall’s trial, I would not have voted for the death penalty.”

As President Joe Biden prepares to leave office, Hall is among the dozens of people on federal death row who have asked him to commute their death sentence. His clemency petition makes a powerful case for mercy. It is supported by the family of his victim, Castro-Rodriguez, who say that executing Hall would only add to their pain. It also contains declarations from jurors who served at Hall’s 2014 trial, who say that the new claim of sexual abuse — along with abnormalities in Hall’s brain recently revealed by neurological testing — now cast him in a different light. “If I had known this information at the time of Mr. Hall’s trial, I would not have voted for the death penalty,” one juror said.

The new information is also at the heart of a lengthy legal challenge to Hall’s death sentence filed in federal court earlier this year. The record contains hundreds of pages of declarations and expert reports shedding light on critical aspects of Hall’s early life that his defense attorneys never investigated. “As a result,” it reads, “the jurors never heard a wealth of evidence, readily available at the time of Chuck’s trial, that would have led at least one juror to vote for a sentence less than death.” (The Department of Justice has not yet filed a response to Hall’s motion.)

His attorneys’ failure to present such evidence is emblematic of the kind of lawyering that has too often paved the way for executions at both the state and federal levels. Hall was represented at trial by veteran death penalty attorney Frederick Duchardt, who has become known for his refusal to do mitigation investigations, the painstaking process of digging into a client’s history for any evidence that might be used to spare their life.

Of the 13 people executed during the killing spree carried out during Donald Trump’s first term, two were represented by Duchardt. Wesley Purkey, the second person killed in 2020, was sent to death row despite a history of sexual abuse by his own mother. Lisa Montgomery, the only woman executed by Trump, endured a lifetime of harrowing sexual abuse from the time she was a child. In both cases, Duchardt refused to hire a mitigation specialist, arguably one of the most important parts of a death penalty trial. Then, rather than concede any errors in support of his former clients’ post-conviction litigation (as trial lawyers often do), Duchardt filed lengthy affidavits defending his work.

Duchardt has been more cooperative in Hall’s case. Earlier this year, he sat down with Elleman to give a sworn statement explaining his decision-making in Hall’s case. The transcript was filed as part of Hall’s legal challenge. “There was a deep and rich story about what happened to Chuck Hall that Fred Duchardt didn’t understand, didn’t uncover, and didn’t tell the jury,” Ellemen told me. Duchardt declined to speak to me about the case.

While Hall still has a ways to go before exhausting his available legal challenges, there is no guarantee that his litigation will outlast a second Trump term. The looming return of federal executions has created a state of emergency for death penalty lawyers and their clients.

Many who watched in horror as Trump carried out an unprecedented execution spree during his final months in office have called upon Biden to intervene. Throughout November, Democratic lawmakers and hundreds of advocacy organizations called on the president to grant mass commutations to people on federal death row. On Sunday, Pope Francis urged Biden, a Catholic, to do the same. On Monday a new round of calls came from a wide range of groups, from retired prison officials to business leaders, current and former prosecutors, and judges. On Tuesday on Capitol Hill, the mother of Christopher Vialva, who was executed in 2020, spoke alongside other advocates at a congressional briefing organized by Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass.

Thus far, there is no indication as to whether Biden will heed these calls. Until this week, he had been stingy in exercising his commutation power. After angering people across the political spectrum by pardoning his son, on Thursday Biden pardoned 39 more people — and granted nearly 1,500 commutations to individuals released to home confinement due to the Covid pandemic. While activists lauded his actions, they also urged Biden to go bigger by granting clemency to all 40 people on federal death row.

If there’s at least one reason for hope among the men in Terre Haute, it’s that Biden recognized the problems with the federal death penalty enough to campaign on ending it in 2020. The promise did not hurt him with voters then — and now he has nothing to lose.

What Happened to This Person?

The Indiana Federal Community Defenders office is on the 32nd floor of an office tower in downtown Indianapolis. On a Tuesday morning in late November, a makeshift display of Hall’s artwork sat alongside office supplies in a quiet corner of the office. There were pencil portraits drawn of Hall’s legal team, a blue crocheted blanket, and dangly earrings made of pink and gold beads.

Angela Elleman, Hall’s lead attorney, had come to the office that day for a scheduled hearing in his case, which had since been canceled. She usually works in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, where, after years doing post-conviction litigation, she turned to trial work for 10 years. She came back to post-conviction work shortly after the end of Trump’s execution spree. In March 2021, she was appointed to represent Hall.

Reading the case files, Elleman saw things that Hall’s jury should have heard. In the run-up to the murder, Hall had reported thoughts of hurting others; despite his requests to be placed in isolation, he remained in an open unit at the prison. Due to his recent surgery, Hall had been taking prednisone on the day of the murder, a steroid that can cause mania and rage.

“I just felt like I knew in my bones that this was a possibility.”

But there were also unanswered questions. As Elleman recalls, she began to suspect early on that Hall may have been sexually abused as a child, although she struggled to explain why. “I just felt like I knew in my bones that this was a possibility,” she said. Elleman’s hunch was so strong she spent time researching the Catholic priests in the parishes where Hall was raised, to see if any of them had been accused of abuse. But she came up empty.

Elleman’s intuition was at least partly informed by her 20 years representing people facing execution. Like all death penalty lawyers, her clients’ histories have been frequently marked by some form of trauma, abuse, or neglect, which is why investigating their early life is so critical. “People who have healthy and well-adjusted childhoods don’t just wake up one day and decide to kill someone,” she said. “The question for me becomes … what happened to this person?” As she read through the records and trial transcript in Hall’s case, Elleman realized that this fundamental question had gone unanswered.

It was not hard to see why Hall had been swiftly convicted. There was no question of his guilt; surveillance tape from the prison showed Hall and his co-defendant, Wesley Coonce, entering and exiting Castro-Rodriguez’s cell on the day of the murder. After Castro-Rodriguez’s body was found, Coonce and Hall quickly took responsibility for the crime. Hall went on to talk about it to seemingly anyone who would listen, from the FBI to his family to men he later met at another federal medical facility in North Carolina.

These statements formed much of the government’s evidence against Hall at trial. Especially damaging were letters Hall sent to his own federal prosecutors, in which he insisted that he should be given the death penalty. “The only thing that will stop me from killing again is putting me to death,” he wrote. He even laid out the reasons he met the statutory requirements for capital punishment, pointing out that the murder could be considered a hate crime because Castro-Rodriguez was Cuban.

If Hall’s acts of self-sabotage were a reflection of his suicidal impulses and instability, they were also aided by the attorney who represented him in the two years after the crime. The first lawyer assigned to Hall, Darryl Johnson Jr., had almost no experience with death penalty cases. When Johnson’s co-counsel was forced to withdraw due to a conflict of interest, Johnson replaced him with his own wife, who had never done criminal defense of any kind. Neither Johnson nor his then-wife responded to requests for interviews.

The couple represented Hall at a critical stage. In the federal system, attorneys for people accused of death-eligible crimes have the chance to meet with members of the Department of Justice’s Capital Review Committee, which advises the Attorney General’s Office on whether to seek the death penalty in a given case. In the summer of 2011, Johnson traveled to Washington, D.C., where rather than seek a plea deal or explain why his client should be spared, he told the committee that Hall wanted the death penalty. That July, the Obama administration gave formal notice that it would seek death against both Hall and his co-defendant.

Johnson and his wife eventually withdrew from the case amid allegations of professional misconduct by Johnson, as well as criminal sexual assault charges brought against him by a former client. He was later suspended from practicing law, although he has since been reinstated, and he was acquitted in the criminal case. In 2012, Johnson was replaced by Kansas City-based death penalty lawyer Frederick Duchardt.

Nature vs. Nurture

If mitigation investigations are a hallmark of modern death penalty defense, Duchardt has long had a reputation among many death penalty lawyers as being proudly behind the times. “I do not follow orthodoxy,” he told a Guardian reporter who profiled him in 2016, dismissing mitigation as “social work issues” that do not sway juries.

The more jurors are able to see a defendant as a human being rather than a monster, the harder it is to vote for them to die.

In fact, the evolution of mitigation work has been a game-changer for capital defense, and almost certainly a contributing factor to the dwindling number of new death sentences in the United States year after year. It was mitigation that led a Florida jury to spare the life of Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz when he faced the death penalty in 2022. The more jurors are able to see a defendant as a human being rather than a monster, the harder it is to vote for them to die.

Hall was raised in Maine by a couple who adopted him and an older sister when they were babies. Although Hall and his sister have said that they received love and care, records in his case file also show that both children struggled with feelings of abandonment and identity, which manifested in behavioral problems their parents were ill-equipped to handle. The family participated in counseling programs that raised concerns about the couple’s drinking, which spurred conflicts at home. As Hall got older, he began stealing, including from his parents. By his early 20s, he had cycled in and out of jail and prison.

Duchardt had a lot to work with upon taking over the case. Although Johnson had done little to investigate Hall’s early life, he obtained voluminous records from Hall’s parents, which contained some glaring red flags. One was an undated handwritten note from Hall to his parents in which he threatened to kill himself by carbon monoxide poisoning. “This is one problem you can’t solve with cops,” he wrote.

Records show that while Duchardt took some steps to investigate Hall’s background, he stopped short at critical points. Although he secured funds for an investigator, the investigator did not start his work until two months before Hall’s trial — and spent the bulk of that time tracking down Hall’s birth mother. This was an important piece of the puzzle: She had given Hall up after she was gang raped and impregnated as a teenager. But Duchardt did not send the investigator to speak to teachers and others who knew Hall as a child.

Duchardt also consulted with a neuroscientist immediately after taking the case. Despite being told that it was likely neuroimaging would “show some abnormalities in Mr. Hall’s brain structure,” Duchardt did not seek funding for such testing until the trial was less than a month away. By that point, it was too late. In a phone conference in April 2014, the presiding judge told Duchardt that “we’re three weeks from trial; and if we were to go forward with this, there’s an awful lot to be done.” He denied the motion.

Hall was tried in 2014 alongside his co-defendant, Coonce. Prosecutors argued that the men had targeted Casto-Rodriguez because he had intervened “in a fight or an argument” between one of his neighbors and a prison employee and was branded a “snitch.” Jurors found them guilty in about an hour.

The penalty phase of the trial would have been the place to draw a sharp contrast between Hall’s record and that of his co-defendant. Hall had gone to federal prison for a series of threats that, while perhaps terrifying, did not physically harm his targets. Coonce, meanwhile, was serving a life sentence for kidnapping and rape. One juror later told Hall’s attorneys that being tried alongside Coonce was “the thing that hurt Chuck Hall the most.” While the juror felt it was only fair to sentence them both to die, Coonce’s previous crimes “were in a completely different league.”

Although Duchardt called 15 people to the stand at the penalty phase, 10 of them testified via video — and two of them could not identify Hall when asked to do so. Some witnesses would later tell Hall’s attorneys that they had felt unprepared — and that rather than digging into any hardship Hall might have endured in his youth, Duchardt had elicited testimony to portray his upbringing as happy and filled with love and support. One man who had spent time with Hall at a punishing juvenile boot camp was cut off by Duchardt when he started to say that the camp had been shut down after revelations of abuse. “There’s so much more I could have said,” he said in a declaration.

Duchardt seemed especially adamant about showing the jury that Hall’s adoptive parents had done their best with a difficult child. “They weren’t perfect but they were sure darn good and they showed him every bit of love and care,” he said in his opening statement. He insinuated that Hall might have simply contained some intrinsic evil given how he was conceived. It came down to the “classic” question, he said: “Is it nature or is it nurture? And we don’t know for Chuck because, [his birth mother’s] rapist, we don’t know what his background was. We don’t know what his makeup was. We can’t tell you about any of that.”

Several witnesses addressed Hall’s tendency to exaggerate or invent elaborate lies about himself. An ex-girlfriend said, “he didn’t like the person he was … so he tried to make himself out to be somebody different.” The jury heard about Hall’s false claims of having tried to poison his father as retribution for molesting Hall’s sister — which his family testified was untrue — along with another convoluted lie. A psychologist who had once provided therapy to Hall said he’d falsely claimed to have had plans to attend the University of California, Berkeley, but that those plans had been derailed when he was arrested for assaulting two men who molested his friend’s 4-year-old daughter.

With no testimony to provide possible context for such invented revenge scenarios, the lies seemed to come out of nowhere. A different psychologist testified that Hall had “Antisocial Personality Disorder,” stating on cross-examination that he could be considered a “psychopath.”

Nonetheless, jurors remained split on whether to send Hall to death row. On the second day of deliberations, jurors sent a note to the judge saying that they had decided on Coonce’s sentence but “we are unable to reach a unanimous decision” about Hall. After the judge ordered them to keep deliberating, the jury decided on death.

A Shocking Discovery

Not long after Elleman was appointed to Hall’s case, she and her team started taking a closer look at the schools where Hall had spent time as a child. One of them was an alternative school in Burlington, Vermont, where Hall spent the 1984–1985 school year, when he was 13 years old. Although Duchardt went to Vermont at one point seeking records, he concluded that it would be impossible to learn much more about the school, which had shut down in 1986. As he told the jury at trial, “Frankly, we don’t know what happened there.”

In fact, there was a lot to learn about Shaker Mountain School. Newspaper articles throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s portrayed it as an innovative model for nontraditional education. Founded in 1968 by a man named Jerry Mintz, a “likeable, burly individual,” as the Burlington Free Press described him in 1970, the school once operated in an old grocery store and eventually expanded to multiple properties across Burlington. Teachers cobbled together classwork, vocational training, and arts instruction for students who did not thrive at public schools.

Like Hall, many of the students had problems at home and had spent time in juvenile facilities. There was no set cost of admission to attend. As the school entered its 10th year, Mintz wrote to the Free Press that the goal was “to provide an educational alternative for any student who wants one.”  

Mintz went on to become an author, consultant, and leader in alternative education. Meanwhile, Hall’s time at Shaker Mountain School seemed to derail him further. Although Hall had struggled at home and in school from the time he was in elementary school, records show that he was depressed and withdrawn upon his return. Sessions with a school psychologist in 1987 described Hall as “increasingly in crisis,” with “temper outbursts” and attempts to run away.

As Elleman and her team researched the school, it did not take long for a disturbing picture to emerge. Her mitigation specialist, Rebecca Cohen, found a Facebook page for alumni of Shaker Mountain School. When she contacted the administrator, he told her that he’d always hoped someone would look into what happened there. As Hall’s legal team later described in their motion, “the school had a freewheeling and sexually permissive atmosphere,” which gave rise to wildly inappropriate relationships and behavior by staff. “A teacher once played the piano with his penis in front of everyone,” they wrote.

Most shocking, the Facebook administrator revealed a dark, open secret that Cohen would hear about again and again as she tracked down more people connected to the school: allegations of systemic sexual abuse by Mintz of boys in his care.

Mintz directed questions to his attorney, Cory Morris, who noted that Mintz has never been arrested, let alone faced “felonious allegations,” in his life. “My client denies any and all wrongdoing,” Morris wrote in an email to The Intercept.

The accounts from the former Shaker Mountain students, which Hall’s lawyers memorialized in their motion to vacate his conviction, were strikingly consistent. Mintz would take boys from the school to go bowling or to the movies, often followed by sleepovers at the loft where he stayed. According to the declarations, the boys slept on mattresses placed on the floor. Mintz slept in his underwear and encouraged them to do the same. “At first, Jerry would offer us backrubs,” one former student recounted in a 2023 declaration. “I never wanted one, but he kind of pushed himself on you. And then, after awhile, when I’d be trying to sleep, I’d feel his hands on me.”

Cohen also collected declarations from former staff, who admitted sensing that something was not quite right about the sleepovers but mostly looked the other way. Although some students tried to report the abuse, their complaints went nowhere. According to Hall’s legal filings, Vermont’s Department of Rehabilitative and Social Services, which today is the Department for Children and Families, opened at least one inquiry based on a child’s complaint but “was told by child welfare personnel that his account alone was insufficient to substantiate charges.” The department did not respond to a message left by The Intercept.

Several former teachers and students remembered Hall, whom they knew as Chuckie. One woman remembered seeing him hanging out in the school’s “smoking area,” where Hall often seemed vigilant about where Mintz might be, according to her declaration. “His eyes were red-rimmed. ‘Where’s Jerry?’ he’d ask us.” Another man, whose declaration described Hall as his “best friend at SMS,” said that he remembered Hall going to the loft without him. “I remember telling him to stay away, but we never talked specifically about what Jerry had done to either one of us. It just wasn’t something you said out loud, even if everyone knew what was going on.”

Eventually Cohen met with Hall. Sitting across from him at a steel table at the Terre Haute prison, she told him that they had not talked much about his time at Shaker Mountain School. Without disclosing what she had learned, she asked him if he would tell her more about Mintz. As Elleman described it, Hall hung his head and began shaking. “Do I have to?” he asked.

During their visit that day, and in subsequent conversations with mental health experts, Hall spoke for the first time about what had happened at Shaker Mountain School. His accounts were incorporated into expert reports filed by Hall’s attorneys, including in one by Dr. Howard Fradkin, a leading expert on male survivors of sexual abuse. Fradkin concluded that it was a “clinical mistake to diagnose Chuck with Anti-Social Personality Disorder,” and that his primary diagnosis was post-traumatic stress disorder and Complex PTSD. In his opinion, “the impact of the untreated trauma is the best explanation for the many dysfunctional behaviors he engaged in throughout his life, culminating in the murder of a fellow inmate.”

The psychologist who testified at trial that Hall had Antisocial Personality Disorder also gave a declaration to Hall’s attorneys. “I based my ASPD diagnosis on the available information given to me by Fred,” he said, referring to Duchardt. Although the psychologist had suggested to the lawyer that brain imaging should be done prior to trial, this did not happen. Subsequent testing by Hall’s post-conviction attorneys “are remarkable,” he wrote, “in that they support that Mr. Hall has abnormalities to his brain.” Given this information and the alleged sexual abuse, he said, “I believe Mr. Hall’s brain dysfunction and history of trauma may better explain his history of lying/confabulation and failure to conform with the law.”

Duchardt learned for the first time about the accounts of sexual abuse at Shaker Mountain School during his interview with Elleman. Although he conceded that it would have been valuable information, he said he would not have necessarily presented it to a jury. “That would have been up to Chuck,” Duchardt said, according to the transcript. Regardless, his client never shared it. “And that’s where you have got an advantage on me, because I think that is something, believe it or not, that a man would share with a woman before he would share with another man.”

“I Felt a Lot of Peace”

A couple weeks before he went on trial for his life in 2014, Hall sent a letter to Olga Castro, the older sister of Victor Castro-Rodriguez. “I wanted to write to you earlier, but was advised to wait,” he began. “My lawyers and I agree that the time is appropriate. So I hope this letter doesn’t offend or upset you.”

“I know that Victor was someone you all loved and now miss dearly,” Hall went on. “Please know that I am deeply sorry for everything you’ve gone through in your loss of a loved one.”

The letter was read aloud by Duchardt’s co-counsel at trial. Taking the stand for the defense, Olga testified through an interpreter that the letter had been a source of comfort: “I felt a lot of peace.”

“I don’t believe in giving them the death penalty.”

In fact, the family had made clear to the U.S. government years earlier that they did not support a death sentence for either Hall or Coonce. During a meeting between the family and a Department of Justice prosecutor in September 2010, Olga and her brother Eulogio had “advised that they opposed the death penalty,” according to a report by the FBI special agent who investigated the crime. Carrying out an execution “would not solve anything,” he wrote. “They noted that their decision was based on religious grounds and their belief that the prison was at fault in the death of their brother.”

Last year, Hall wrote another letter to Castro-Rodriguez’s family. “I wanted you to know that there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t live with regrets for my actions,” he wrote. “I do wish there were a way to change the past and bring Victor back to your family.”

In a video accompanying his clemency application, Olga and Eulogio reiterated what they told federal prosecutors more than 14 years ago: They do not want to see Hall executed. He and Coonce, like Victor, “were young men who were also sick,” Olga said. “I don’t believe in giving them the death penalty.” She said that she will pray for them: “Because only God delivers justice. Thank you very much.”

The post Charles Hall Insisted He Wanted the Death Penalty. Now He’s Asking Biden for Mercy. appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.