I said to you that I didn't like the idea of "killer cross." I said that I didn't think that a killer cross, especially in a death penalty case, was a very effective way to do it. And I said that you should look for gentler, more persuasive ways to cross-examine. These cases are unlike any other. Death penalty cases are not like multiple defendant conspiracies or prosecutions. Cross in a death case is unlike cross exam of snitches or narcotics cops. The karma of courtroom, the feeling of the trial, the drama is intensely different. The jurors' attitudes with expectations, the weight of their task is different. And we must learn to respond differently.

Last evening we were standing around talking about how this world of criminal defense, especially death penalty defense, eats us up as lawyers; how it tears us apart; how it makes us angry; how it causes us to be furious with judges who just don't seem to care; how it makes us outraged at prosecutors who cheat, who put on perjured testimony and who hide Brady materials; how we're angry with cops that lie in their reports and testimony; how we're disappointed by jurors who just don't seem to care; how we're confounded with newspaper and television re-porters who just don't really get it. I suggested that the story of my Aunt Sophie could help us deal with some of that anger.

When I was a little boy, not older than 4 or 5, we were having Shabbos dinner in my grandfather's apartment (Friday night dinner, Sabbath dinner). It wasn't unusual for Aunt Sophie to be there because she was there whenever I was there. She was a gnarled, mean, old woman whose hands were twisted, whose face always looked like she'd just had a bad martini. She was always doing that (gestures a backhand motion). I said to my father, in 4 year old innocence, "I really hate Aunt Sophie."

My father who was a gentle man, I think the only time in his life that he did this, grabbed my arm with such force that I probably have marks on it to this day and pulled me into his father's bedroom and closed the door. He opened up a chest that was at the foot of the bed, rifled through it and came up with a newspaper article from a Berlin, Germany newspaper from the mid-1920's. In that article was a picture of Sophie Hersch, who was a young, beautiful, mid-20s, concert pianist with gorgeous hands and the most beautiful young face. And my father explained to me that this woman, a survivor of the death camps, was twisted and turned and miswrought by hatred because of her experiences in life and that I should never hate her, say that I hate her and he would never tol-erate such a thing.

That lesson, as a very young child, has stayed with me all of my life. It is why I hate the death penalty; it is why I do not like prisons; it is why I urge you that kind of hate, that kind of churn-ing inside, can turn all of us into things we are trying to fight.

I 'm not suggesting, for a moment, that when a prosecutor hides Brady materials that we have to love him with kindness. I'm not suggesting that when a police officer perjures himself, that we turn the other cheek. I'm not saying that when a judge is unfair or racist, that we should let that unfairness or racism go without challenge. I am suggesting that there are ways to combat these evils that do not involve hate; that do not involve a wrenching and rotting of our spirit, which is really a spirit of life, a spirit of redemption, a spirit of hope that ought to inform the whole anti-death penalty movement.

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