SECOND THOUGHTS: It was more a shrug than a statement. “It happens,” the voice said. The voice belonged to Marcia Morrissey, a 65-year-old Santa Monica lawyer who’s spent the past 30 years challenging death penalty convictions. I met Morrissey briefly this week over the phone. While we spoke, another phone in her office kept going off. There was no receptionist, and Morrissey needed to take someone to the hospital. Morrissey, I would find out, is the F. Lee Bailey/Johnnie Cochran most people never heard of. Back when Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. still went by the name Snoop Doggy Dogg and was facing murder charges, it was Morrissey who got him off.
In 2005, Morrissey inherited a death penalty appeal filed on behalf of Santa Barbara defendant George Herbert “Spider” Wharton, who in 1986 took a hammer to the head of his girlfriend Linda Smith and stuffed her body, covered in blankets and plastic, into a large cardboard barrel. Smith’s body would be discovered by police two weeks later. There was no doubt Wharton did it; he confessed. The only issue was whether Wharton — a large, bearded, paranoid schizophrenic black man with severe rage and addiction issues — acted with premeditation. Wharton said he and Smith had been drinking and arguing. She threw a book at him. Then she was dead. A Santa Barbara jury would find otherwise.
Only two weeks before the murder, jurors heard, Wharton told his psychiatrist he feared he might kill Smith. He wanted help. This, the jury concluded, constituted premeditation. The jury also heard that in 1975 Wharton kicked a male UCSB professor to death who’d asked about his sexual availability. That same year, Wharton also raped a 61-year-old woman at knifepoint after she let him into her house so he could make a phone call. For that, he got seven years. In 1987 — after three days of deliberation — a Santa Barbara jury sentenced Wharton to death row, where he’s lived the past 29 years.