For Asheville attorney, a life’s work fighting the death penalty

CHARLESTON, S.C. – The attorney leans to her left, drawing the young man beside her out of his long stare, one that fixates on the wide table before him or some unknown spot straight ahead.

The two share a whispered conversation, and when they are finished, he returns to his gaze, never acknowledging the judge in front of him or the spectators behind, witnesses to an accounting of his terrible crimes against men and women in prayer.

The interaction in a Charleston courthouse, though small and inconspicuous, speaks to the rapport between the defendant and attorney Kimberly C. Stevens. In a career spanning more than two decades as a capital defender, she has represented defendants accused and convicted of a host of high-profile crimes, some that have rattled small towns or large cities or entire states.

This one, the death penalty trial of Dylann Roof and his attack on Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, has captured the attention of a nation.

Until recently, Stevens’ career was centered in North Carolina, where she became known among colleagues not only for her expertise in the complicated legal arena that is capital litigation, but also for compassion toward both her clients and their victims.

Last year, she left state service and Winston-Salem for a senior advisory role as a federal capital defender, establishing an office in Asheville.

Stevens, 49, brings to her cases a doggedness in unraveling the histories of her clients, men and women who often have mental health issues, developmental disabilities or an upbringing plagued by abuse, said Bob Hurley, who served as North Carolina’s capital defender for 13 years until 2015.

“I would point her to the most difficult and challenging capital cases in the state. By that, I mean I felt there was a significant likelihood the defendant would receive the death penalty, either because of the heinousness of the crime or the prominence of the victim involved or the outrage of the community over the crime,” Hurley said. “She would get my first call.”

Those calls from Hurley and others have put Stevens on more than 40 capital cases where often, as with Roof, a possible sentence that pits life against death is the primary concern.

Colleagues say Stevens, who declined interview requests for this article citing the ongoing Roof trial, stands opposed to state execution for reasons that include its tendency to target defendants who are impoverished, mentally ill or are in minority groups, as well as concerns the condemned could be wrongly convicted.

Stevens is exceptional in her dedication to those clients, and that she’s left North Carolina’s roster of death penalty attorneys to focus on federal defense has “left a void that certainly will not be filled by anyone else in the state,” said Victoria Jayne, an assistant capital defender based in Buncombe County.

“You have clients who have made bad decisions all of their lives,” Jayne said. “Every time they make a decision, it’s been a bad one and what we know is that on their own, we can’t expect them to make the most important decision of their life, which is to choose a life plea over going to trial and a possible death sentence.”

Those life sentence pleas negotiated by Stevens include some of the most high-profile capital cases in North Carolina’s state and federal courts: Gary Michael Hilton in 2007 murdered an elderly couple near a popular hiking trail in Pisgah National Forest. A year later, Demario James Atwater kidnapped and shot to death Eve Carson, the student body president at UNC Chapel Hill. Quincy Allen, a South Carolina man, in 2002 shot to death two men at a Surry County convenience store. Eric Lorenzo Davis in 2013 beat to death his 4-year-old daughter in a Jackson County motel.

Twice Stevens has won bids on appeal to have condemned men removed from death row.

And once she did not.

Witness

It was brightly lit, the execution chamber in Raleigh’s Central Prison. The room has not hosted a death since 2006, but in 2003, when Stevens took a seat its cramped gallery, seven men died there.

Set on the other side of a windowed concrete wall stood a gurney, John Dennis Daniels strapped to its mattress. Beyond the prison walls, about 30 protesters gathered against the dark November chill for a candlelight vigil, according to Associated Press reports.

Hours earlier in a last-minute clemency bid, a retired psychiatrist appeared before then-Gov. Mike Easley, telling him she no longer stood by her original assessment of Daniels, one made on behalf of prosecutors amid trial.

Daniels should not be put to death for the strangulation of his elderly aunt, she testified.

The state’s attorneys never gave her critical medical records about Daniels’ suicide attempts, a history of depression and brain damage from alcohol and cocaine use, information the doctor said she learned only after Stevens unearthed and presented her with the missing paperwork.

The testimony failed to persuade Easley, a decision that devastated Stevens, the attorney told a reporter.

“John Daniels is my friend and they're about to kill him,” she said, and in telling her client that no hope remained, they hugged and cried together.

The lethal injection began at 2 a.m., Stevens watching as Daniels lifted his head from the gurney, coughed and then fell still.

Minutes later, before the official pronouncement of death, the attorney left the room.

Stevens was overcome with emotion.

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Sidelined

Emotion has been there also, in a federal courtroom in Charleston, and though the defense team led by the venerable and storied capital defender David Bruck will not comment, their frustrations often have been visible.

Roof represented himself in jury selection, relegating Bruck and Stevens to the role of standby counsel. Unable to address the court directly, the attorneys attempted to use notes to guide Roof through lines of questioning.

The defendant appeared unable or unwilling to follow direction, an exercise that often left Bruck to raise a hand to a furrowed brow, as Stevens’ frustration came in sagging shoulders.

At Roof’s request, the counselors were reinstated in the guilt phase of trial, but the 22-year-old will again serve as his own attorney as a jury weighs sentencing, a phase that commences on Jan. 3.

The move blocks counselors from presenting evidence that Roof may suffer from mental illness.

That situation is most certainly devastating for Stevens and the team, said Hurley, the former North Carolina public defender.

“I think the worst position for a capital defense attorney to be put in is one in which the defendant has decided to go pro se [self-representation] and they’re asked to sit on the sidelines and watch,” Hurley said. “It’s almost like watching someone committing suicide and you can do nothing about it.”

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A quiet stand

Stevens began as an assistant federal capital defender in July 2015, a senior position held through the Oregon-based Capital Resource Counsel Project. Its primary focus is to guide and train death penalty lawyers in cases throughout the eastern United States.

A native of Tacoma, Washington, Stevens in 1989 graduated from Washington State University, then accepted a full scholarship to Wake Forest University’s law school. By 1994, she began representing death row inmates in North Carolina, taking on defendants facing the death penalty in the following years, work that later took her to the federal courts.

She joined the Roof defense team as co-counsel in July as a late addition, the impending trial date only months away.

The timing of that move came on the heels of a court filing that indicated Bruck, appointed to the case a year earlier, would pursue a mental defect defense at sentencing.

While Roof in courtroom interactions appears cordial and comfortable with the team, his own statements and filings indicate he split with Bruck’s decision over the mental health issue.

In her defense of clients, Stevens brings a commitment to unearthing medical records and a personal history that might explain why they committed crimes, said Mark Rabil, a law professor and director of the Innocence and Justice Clinic at Wake Forest.

“She’s somebody who works endlessly to find the good in people. In the mitigation phase you look into someone’s background and talk to all of their family, their friends, get all of their records to find out, ‘What is it that created this person?’” said Rabil, who has partnered with Stevens in about a half-dozen capital cases, each ending with a plea deal for life.

“If anybody can help us find out why this horrible situation occurred in Charleston, Kim’s perfectly suited to that and she’s very, very sensitive and caring about the victims of the crime and the victim’s families.”

Rabil noted also that she is conscientious of the charged and difficult issues where race is a factor, typically involving a black defendant and a white victim.

Roof, an admitted white supremacist, was convicted of murdering nine black parishioners in the Dec. 15 jury finding that included guilty verdicts based on hate crime laws.

Throughout the trial, about 40 or so people have gathered on the benches behind prosecutors. Most are African-American and family members of the slain. Seats behind the defense team are populated by reporters and the public, with one bench reserved for Roof’s family. His grandparents have appeared a few times; his mother once, at opening statements.

At moments, wrenching testimony has dropped courtroom spectators to a silence burdened with grief, interrupted only by the low hum of a furnace from somewhere deep in the building.

It is a despair that also appears to weigh on a defense team trying to save the life of a client who targeted a church, a pastor, fathers, mothers, the elderly, the young. All of them innocents.

Among the survivors is Polly Sheppard, who appeared as the last witness for the prosecution on Dec. 14, delivering a steady and solemn account of praying aloud amid gunfire, drawing Roof’s attention.

“Shut up!” he yelled, still holding the gun as the dead and dying lay around them. He told her would let her live to tell the story.

That story told, Bruck walked to the retired nurse, hands linked behind his back.

“I'm so sorry,” he said quietly. “I have no questions.”

Behind him, Stevens rose to stand in a silent gesture of respect.

The movement reverberated throughout the courtroom, as row by row, the dozens of observers took to their feet in silent ovation. Sheppard, in slow steps, walked into the arms of supporters.

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