The Key to Marie

Marie Deans is having another nightmare. She is sleeping solidly after a marathon weekend of writing a late proposal to keep the Virginia Coalition on Jails and Prisons alive — thereby keeping alive the appeals of most of the men on the state's death row. The worst nightmares, the ones that trigger the migraines, are those in which people she knows (or knew), among the hundreds she's tried to save on death rows across the country, are electrocuted. In this particular dream she seems safe in her bedroom, until the death squad arrives with the electrodes. They want the keys, the ring of keys she is gripping with the intensity of the damned clinging to a last hope. The death squad keeps demanding that she let go of the keys — "Give us the keys and we won't kill you'' — but she fears the trick of the old lie worse than death, and clutches them ever more tightly to her breast. The members of the squad remove the insignia from their uniforms, solemnly attach electrodes to her bed, throw some unseen switch, and she is shocked from her sleep. 

"I wouldn't let go of the keys," she recounts later to me. "Those keys must represent the struggle, the lives of the men on The Row, you men inside. They wanted me to give them up, but I just couldn't let go," she says, as if it is hard even for her to comprehend such tenacity. 

A frequent visitor to the death rows at Mecklenburg Prison and here at the State Penitentiary in Richmond, the tall, thin woman is a figure of national stature in a city unenamored of her, a crusader for an unpopular cause, one of a select group of professional antideath penalty prisoner advocates in the United States. She has served on the national board of directors and the executive committee of Amnesty International, investigating conditions of death rows across the country, and doing public education on apartheid in South Africa. She is the founder of the nationwide Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation and of Virginians Against the Death Penalty. 

After Virginia resumed executions in 1982, Joe Ingle, director of the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons, asked Deans to move from South Carolina to Richmond and do battle with a legal system that did not formally recognize the right of convicted felons to appeal, and which provides no legal counsel to indigent defendants. I have found Virginia to be a humbling experience," she concedes. "The lack of due process in this state is abominable, worse than any other state in the entire country." 

Most of her time is spent recruiting attorneys and serving as a paralegal counsellor in the interviewing and preparing and filing of the numerous appeals involved in the capital murder cases of 16 of the 28 men on Virginia's death row. Deans is a self-taught legal expert and, according to noted Charlottesville attorney J. Lloyd Snook, III, "makes it her practice to keep up with case law. She is bright, she understands people, and makes a better lawyer than many lawyers I know." 

Marie Deans is about as relaxed as she gets right now, cooking dinner for herself and Robert, her precocious 12-year-oId son. She talks to me on a phone held to ear by a shoulder. “I’muh real good cook,” she says proudly, hitting five different musical notes in the one phrase. It is her only meal of the day. After the phone is quiet she will work well into the night on her clients' cases, on letters to editors or public officials as a one-woman prison reform lobbyist, or perhaps writing an article or two. I get her to tell about the time she crashed Elaine's, the ultra-posh New York restaurant, in jeans and t-shirt as a guest of good friend Rose Styron and cornered Norman Mailer to tell him off for abandoning his convict protege Jack Henry Abbott. 

Did she have a happy childhood in South Carolina? "Well, no," she says, her tone turning serious once more. "Let's see. . . . I did have a wonderful year living in a convent when I was very young." It seems this was the beginning of commitment to Christian good works. Why had she been in a convent? "My mother was mentally ill," she says, "and I was, well, badly mistreated. I got intensely involved with the human rights struggle in the sixties," she remembers. For that, her parents "totally disinherited me, and kidnapped my son and raised him to be a good upper-class Scottish-American Lutheran businessman." 

Her tone is now sad, but not bitter. How can you make it on $11,500 a year, with no funding for your small organization, I ask? "I often wonder," she says, looking around the small apartment at the stacks of books, legal papers, and magazines scattered all about. "But I'm doing a lot better than you men are in those cages. You see, I'm a radical Christian. I really feel like you men inside are my brothers, so I'll do what I have to do to make sure the work gets done. Somebody just has to try to stop the killing." 

"I don't get tired," she continues, "because I am constantly inspired by prisoners, by their ability to cope and reach out and comfort others while enduring misery and facing death. It is a great testimony to the human spirit." It is now early January, and Deans is preparing to go to South Carolina to be with J.C. Shaw, one of the men she helped convince to resume his appeals — before he became the first man to be executed in that state in more than 20 years. It has been a rough day. She has found out that men who were supposed to be allies have been trying to get part of her proposed grant, causing her to get riled and do some serious cussing in defense of her plans to use the money exclusively for the legal appeals of condemned men. She gets a phone call from her son in Charleston informing her that her father has been hospitalized and is due to undergo open-heart surgery in three days. She doesn't hesitate to plan to go to his bedside. On top of all this she finds out that an attorney has filed an appeal for one of her clients without informing either her or the prisoner. She blames herself for not staying on top of the case. But it does not enter her mind that she can only do so much. 

Herein lies the deeper key to Marie. She looks upon her activism as only natural, the way an ingenue thinks that the sharing of love — in Marie's case the sharing of the talent, care, and concern — is quite simply the natural thing to do.