In death-penalty work, clients often come to desire a swift end.
A cousin is now a lawyer who does anti-death-penalty work, Mr. Becker added.
In death-penalty work, Elisabeth Semel told me, you talk not about losing a case but about losing a client.
Mr. Doyle got his calling while doing pro bono death penalty work as an associate at a Wall Street firm.
But she also said, "I've been doing death penalty work for a very long time, so I'm accustomed to being universally hated for that".
"If I believed death was truly the end of the line, the stakes in death penalty work would be too much to handle," he says.
In remarks at a conference of lawyers specializing in federal death penalty work at a hotel here last month, Mr. Bickell provided a rare inside look at the Supreme Court's oversight of the machinery of death in the United States.
Anthony Amsterdam, a New York University law professor who has been a leading death-penalty defense lawyer for three decades, said he believed there was no way to really make the death penalty work.
While some opponents of the death penalty work steadily for its repeal, executions are grimly applauded by many people and numbly ignored by others, who object but not enough to take action or even pay much attention.
One afternoon, I had assembled a group of young lawyers in my office to discuss pro-bono death-penalty work when, by pure coincidence, I found a letter in my in-box from a man, Christopher Thomas, who said he'd been convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, even though none of the four eyewitnesses to the crime who testified had identified him.
