Love Her Madly by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith

evidence.” She turned to Captain Shank. “Ain’t that true, Harley?”
    He nodded. “It is.”
    â€œWhy don’t you explain it to the agent for me?”
    Shank walked to the Plexiglas and stood next to her chair. He said, “Ma’am, this is a state where even if you was fourteen and mentally retarded and you killed somebody? Forget it. You’re dead as a can a corned beef. Why, in the old days, somethin’ like that happened? It was considered a little bitty oversight. Police would have brought the slow-witted child back home and bid his daddy and mama to put a few extra locks on the attic door. But now? You fourteen and don’t know how to cross the street without help? And you get ahold a your daddy’s peashooter and kill the mailman? Why, you goin’ to find your butt smack on the rookie end a death row. We got a coupla gals here can’t tie their own shoelaces. Not that they got shoelaces to tie.”
    I looked from Shank to his prisoner. I wasn’t there to be humored.
    â€œRona Leigh, I am considering actual innocence. I am not speaking about mitigating factors or legal errors. The file we have contains discrepancies which could lead to evidence—”
    â€œMiz Rice, I have no chance for another trial no matter what discrepancy you dug up. In Texas you got thirty days from your conviction to come up with new evidence. Tomorrow, if fifty witnesses came along and said they was lookin’ through that motel window seventeen years ago and the girl that killed those two kids wasn’t me, it’d be too late.”
    I said, “The law giving you thirty days can be tested. If the evidence is not new, if it has been there all along.… I see that as your lifeline to the governor. I want to get that reprieve, a new thirty days. That’s all we can try for.”
    She put her elbows up on her own ledge. Her little hands had been in her lap. Now they were out there, dwarfed by the wide cuffs. She said, “Here is the lifeline that Vernon and I see. Although we will continue to rely on prayer, continue to hope that the governor listens to Jesus, we are not going to put aside other ways that Jesus might place before us.
    â€œYou are a woman in power. You are from the FBI in Washington, DC. We’re thinkin’ that maybe you got ways to get the governor unstuck from the path he has chosen. You know.… What’s the word? You could intimidate him. By throwin’ him off his stride, you could maybe convince him that he has made a serious mistake in refusin’ to consider my plea for clemency.”
    Intimidate the governor. Wonderful. “Playing games with the governor is not my plan. If justice was not served in your case, the rest of us weren’t served either. I want to go to him with something substantive. Realistically—”
    The smile interrupted me. “My husband thinks you might be my only chance to live. My story ain’t pretty. But the things that make a young girl a maniac? When those things are taken away, when she’s cut off from them, then the girl’s essential nature can return. Vernon says the Lord wants to show the governor that repentance is kin to DNA. He says the governor needs to know that if there was a test like that on my essential nature, the test would show I am not the Rona Leigh Glueck who killed two people seventeen years ago.”
    I imagine the flabbergasted look on my face brought on the new and ever-so-condescending smile.
    â€œSee, Miz Rice, Jesus has given me back the DNA that was taken, and I am beholden. In His name, I will do whatever He asks me to do. Vernon says Jesus has asked me to give you my heart so that you can bring it to the governor. He wants you to make the governor understand the woman that Texas wants to execute is already dead.”
    Sometimes, even I can be rendered speechless.
    â€œMa’am, I was born with drugs and alcohol in my DNA. My mother