the entire cost of providing a defense, counties would now pay a nominal fee and have all the death penalty defense team expenses covered in the event of a capital case.
Counties referred to our office as providing “murder insurance.” Each county paid a little bit every year to avoid a big expense in the event of the catastrophic costs of a death penalty case. For rural counties, a death penalty case could wipe out the entire budget. Capital case expenses lasting several years can easily reach a million dollars once you add up the prosecution, investigation, defense, defense investigation, and mitigation costs, not to mention the costs to pay for expert testimony on both sides, and other court costs such as seating a jury. No matter where a killing occurs, the defendant is entitled to an effective defense, and the local government must cover all of these costs, even if the county is dirt poor. With the new team in place, the appointment problems would be gone and the cost would be controlled. It was very attractive financially. No one gave much thought to whether we would win or not. Given the past record, why should that enter anyone’s mind?
So far, Walter had been the only person hired. “So how do we go about building the team?” Michael asked me.
“Well, I’ll try to find somebody who can help you,” I said. “Most people—and they are smart people—might suggest coming up with a strategy and talking about things like hierarchy, mission statements, job descriptions, and team composition.” Michal and Walter nodded. Those were the first terms out of my mouth they recognized.
“But I wouldn’t do any of that stuff,” I said.
Michael and Walter glanced at each other. “Well…what would you do?”
“I would create a team narrative. I would have the whole team collectively write a whole new narrative about the way we should defend death penalty cases. All the team members will have a role in the story, and our story will detail who is doing what when, and why, and what other team members are doing at every stage of a case. I would even include people outside of the team in a new narrative, like the DA and judges, to include the actions that others typically take during a death penalty case because they play a role in the narrative too. We must take into account the likely actions of others. All of those other voices will be included alongside the team’s voice. That’s one major departure from a typical strategy, which focuses on what an organization wants to do and how. If we’re going to be interacting with the opposition during real cases, that needs to be represented in a team narrative.”
“So we would start fresh?” Walter asked.
“In some ways,” I said, “but we will still rely on all your experience and knowledge, and fashion a new narrative out of that existing material, putting it together in new ways. We will come up with some new ideas as well. We have a chance to literally rewrite the way the death penalty is defended.”
“So what exactly is a narrative?” Michael asked. “Is it like a playbook?”
“You could say that,” I said, “but a very descriptive one. It’s more like a story, or a vision with a plan for bringing it to fruition. We would use the narrative to guide our actions and decisions. I like the phrase ‘go by.’ A team narrative is something we would go by in doing our work.”
I told Michael and Walter that I often used the metaphor of a first date to explain narratives to my students. In class this past semester, I asked the class if anyone recalled going on their first date. I got a few reluctant hands. “Well, if you’d never done it before, how did you know what to do on your first date?” I ask. “How did you know how to behave?”
“I don’t know,” they say, “I guess from what I saw on TV and in movies.”
“Yes,” I say, “or maybe you had friends who had gone on dates who told you stories about what they did. What you do on a date involves cultural norms, right?”
There are nods.
“So before your date, is it safe to say you already have a narrative to ‘go by’ to guide your actions and help you accomplish the date?” More nods. I pick someone. “So what did you do on your first date?”
“Dinner and a movie,” he said.
“The always reliable dinner and a movie. So that was a plan, right? And one you didn’t think up on your own?”
They nod.
“You heard that narrative somewhere, right, your friends had done it? We might say that when we ‘go by’ a narrative, we are ‘enacting’ it into being, such that the narrative in our heads, our cognitive framework, comes to fruition and becomes reality as we act it out.”
There are nods.
“By enacting the narrative, it becomes true, right? You actually perform the narrative into existence. It is an accomplishment. Like implementing a plan, we go by the narrative we have in our minds, and in doing so, it becomes reality and we end up going to dinner and a movie on a date.”
More nods. I have them part way to understanding narrative theory.
“So narratives are handy, right? They allow us to navigate social situations such as first dates by enacting some narrative we hold. But what else do narratives do beside help us accomplish interactions like dates, or even job interviews?”
Silence.
“Do you see how the narratives we go by might also control us?”
They know that’s a rhetorical question.
“What I mean is, narratives guide our behaviors, but they also control us, confining us to do things we think are appropriate in a particular situation. We follow social norms about dating. So what happens? Narratives guide us and allow us to accomplish a date, but…?” I raise my eyebrows.
“We never do anything but go to dinner and a movie?” someone ventures.
“Exactly!” I say. “If our narrative defines a date as dinner and a movie, that is what we always do, over and over. Narratives can confine us, even imprison us!” I shout, “to a narrow set of behaviors. And if we keep enacting the same old narratives, we end up trapped in a cycle where we keep doing things the same old way. In fact, the narratives we go by can become so powerful that we can’t imagine doing things any other way. Some narratives are so culturally ingrained and taken for granted that it never even occurs to us that we can do something other than go to dinner and a movie. We are on autopilot.”
I try to walk and move my arms like a vacant-eyed robot. Everyone in the classroom is staring at me. That’s good.
“It gets juicier,” I say. “So narratives guide us, but also control us. Now, on top of that, we may never even realize this predicament because we are often not conscious of the narratives we are going by. You are always, whatever you’re doing, going by something. And that something is guiding you, but it is also controlling you. And most of the time, we are not conscious we are being controlled. When we are mindlessly enacting our narrative of a date, we are not thinking about how it is just a cultural convention, learned through stories, that we are going by. We are thinking—that’s just the way we do things. We don’t critically question the origin or legitimacy of the narrative because we can’t—because we don’t even realize we’re going by it.”
I can see from my students’ faces that wheels are starting to turn in their heads.
“So we can’t
