After appearing to be duly outraged by Judge Adams’s “ineptitude,” I accepted my next assignment, whose body weight was twice that of my previous case. The initial panic borne from its girth dissipated once I opened the first brief. It was a death penalty case. Though capital punishment jurisprudence proved daunting in its mind-bending complexity, it carried the highest stakes—life or death—and as such, I welcomed the challenge.

I was especially intrigued considering the recent spate of DNA evidence proving that countless innocent people had been executed over the past decade. Outraged by these findings, the governor of Illinois had called for a moratorium on all executions until further review. The governor of Pennsylvania had not taken a similar measure, and the man appealing his death sentence was nearing the end of the line. I pored over the first fifty pages without so much as a desire to procrastinate. This is why I had come to Philadelphia, to be a part of such important work.

It didn’t hurt that I actually felt capable of interpreting the law involved. The crux of the case was strictly Sixth Amendment, which provided criminal defendants the right to a public trial, jury, and counsel. Although we had spent much of our first-year constitutional law class dissecting right-to-counsel cases, I’d never encountered as riveting a case as the one I was now reading:

Dell Nelson, a thirty-six-year-old African American male, sits on death row at SCI Greene in Waynesburg, south of Pittsburgh, roughly a nine-hour drive to Philadelphia, where Nelson was born and raised. In 1988, days after Nelson’s eighteenth birthday, twenty-year-old Peter Nussbaum, a junior at the University at Pennsylvania, was found shot to death, execution-style, near Arch Homes, the public housing complex where Nelson resided with his grandmother and three young sisters. Dell Nelson was . . .

DING! Thirteenth floor, going down.

I was astounded that (a) I’d been so engrossed in my work that I had failed to notice the judge’s departure and (b) that the judge had made said departure without insulting anyone.

I read a few more pages before putting Dell Nelson and Peter Nussbaum away for the night. As I turned off my computer, I remembered that our two fellow coclerks would be starting the next morning.

Judging from the clerks I’d encountered thus far, I trusted that the chances of either of them being friendly were slim to none. At that point, however, I’d settle for colleagues who didn’t crack jokes about Supreme Court justices, scoff at non-top-five law school graduates, and accuse others of homophobia. Another week and I’d probably be willing to date a convicted serial killer as long as he didn’t want to discuss Law Review.