Unintended Consequences by Marti Green Read Free Book Online Page A

she’d helped a man or a woman escape from an unfair death. Failing to exonerate an innocent person and then watching that person’s execution was torturous. She always attended when she lost an appeal. Her clients needed to have one person witness their death who knew the truth.
    Tommy gave her a warning glance. “You think every client is innocent. Toughen up, Dani. Most of them aren’t; you know that. And this guy is probably guilty too. We haven’t even met with him yet and you’re already on a crusade.”
    Most of the staff at HIPP opposed the death penalty. Tommy was one of the few who believed heinous criminals should face a heinous end. Despite those feelings, he was the best investigator in the office. Tommy believed in truth as strongly as he believed in retribution, and he worked doggedly to uncover whether the person facing the death penalty deserved to die. Dani long ago gave up trying to sway Tommy to her view that no person deserved to die at the hand of the government. She was just grateful that he used his incredible detecting skills to sniff out the facts.
    Some people accomplished a lot of work on airplanes, but Dani wasn’t among them. Concentrating while thirty thousand feet in the air with nothing but clouds and sky between her and the ground wasn’t in her makeup. She could fly—she just felt an undercurrent of uneasiness during the flight. She closed her eyes and let her mind wander.
    Like most states, Indiana executed death-row inmates by lethal injection. It hadn’t always been that way. First, prisoners had been executed by hanging, a salute to the days of the Wild West. Then the state moved to the electric chair, pulling back from the concept of punishment as righteous revenge and embracing the notion of humane treatment. After all, the Constitution banned cruel and unusual punishment, and strapping a murderer into an antiquated wooden chair and zapping him with twenty-three hundred volts of electricity supposedly killed the convict more quickly. It was done in three rounds: eight seconds, then twenty-two seconds, then eight seconds again. And if that didn’t do the job, another three rounds followed. Dani had once counted off twenty-two seconds and then imagined electricity shooting through her body during that interminable wait; she shuddered every time she thought about it. Still, it was quicker than hanging and easier to implement. With hanging, unless the length of rope and the weight of the prisoner were calculated precisely, multiple attempts were needed to get the job done.
    By 1980, electrocution had replaced hanging as the most popular form of execution. Problems still existed, though. It turned out that sometimes parts of the prisoner’s body ignited. Blasts of blue and orange flames bursting from a man’s head, filling the room with smoke, made for uncomfortable viewing. Continuing the quest to be more humane—at least for the viewing public—most states retired electric chairs in favor of lethal injection. Indiana made the switch in 1995.
    When first convicted, Calhoun would have been executed in an electric chair. Now, if HIPP didn’t succeed, the state would mix up a potion of three chemicals: a barbiturate to put him to sleep, a muscle relaxant to paralyze his diaphragm and lungs, and potassium chloride to stop his heart. Sometimes, though, the barbiturate didn’t put the prisoner to sleep. And so he remained conscious when the drugs stopped his breathing and his heart, causing unimaginable pain.
    Dani hadn’t even met George Calhoun and yet she already thought he could be innocent. No, if she were honest with herself, she had to admit she wanted to believe in his innocence. She was on her way to meet a man who was convicted of the most unspeakable of crimes: a parent murdering his own child. She didn’t want to meet that man. She wanted to meet a father who loved his daughter, who, as his letter said, would never have harmed her. So, yes, she allowed herself to