Who doesn't enjoy having grandchildren? We can give them what we didn't have or didn't do for our own kids. Like the trip we took to Washington with two of our grandsons in early autumn 2009. I was also trying to get it right at the same time for Shawn Hawkins, a fellow who calls me "father." Now 53 years old, unmarried and no children of his own, Shawn is serving his 33rd year of life imprisonment without parole in the Ohio "Correctional" system for two murders that he asserts he did not commit. He was tried and convicted and lost at every state and federal appeal level, (except for one intermediate appeal at which I prevailed) as well as in two failed attempts to obtain a hearing by the US Supreme Court. At least I was able to get him off Death Row, eight days before he was scheduled to die.

Shawn and my twin grandsons are tied together because of the events of that weekend in 2009. My wife Susan and I were determined to show our grandsons things we hadn't experienced ourselves in our youths, including a visit to our nation's capital while the boys were young enough to care about it. I was able to pull strings and booked a trip to Congress through our Republican congresswoman and a trip to the White House through our Democratic congressman.

We had a glorious time. We saw the Mall and the Washington monument, then closed to visitors. We eyeballed the founding documents at the National Archives. We visited the Jefferson Memorial and then walked over to the Lincoln Memorial, during the walk getting a distant view of President Obama commuting back to the While House on Marine One, after landing from somewhere far away at Joint Base Andrews. There were visits to kid friendly restaurants and the Air and Space Museum. There we lost grandson William temporarily. After I was charged to find him by his stern (and frightened) grandmother, I eventually tracked him down attending a video and lecture on the nature of flight. I like to think that this led to his current work as an aerospace engineer for one of our largest rocket contractors. I shouldn't pat myself too vigorously on the back, however. When we returned to Cincinnati satiated with a host of new and renewed experiences, I was convinced that what the boys had enjoyed most were rides on the Metro and the swivel chair in the motel room, from which one evening endlessly circling they watched the Baltimore Wizards pounding some other NBA team.

I did not know it immediately, but that weekend was also a big one for my death row client and "son"-at-law, Shawn Hawkins. At the request of a friend who is a Federal judge, I had taken up teenager Shawn's defense long after he had been tried and convicted of killing two other teenagers in a drug deal gone bad. After ten years of continuing litigation, his appeals in the state system were played out. His case was now making its torturous way through the Federal habeas corpus system. There were not enough public attorneys available to continue handling his case. I had been on the case for some years the weekend of the grandsons' tour of the Metro, the swivel chair and all those old buildings. We had not visited the Supreme Court building on Capitol Hill, where I knew that a potentially momentous decision by the nine members of the Supreme Court would be made. I did not know when.

Some months earlier my team and I had filed pleadings with the Court, not asking it to decide whether Shawn was going to live or die, but simply asking it to allow us to appear before it and make the argument that he should live not die. A long winded way of asking the Court to hear the case. That is how you do it. The Supreme Court only hears arguments from October till the following June and only takes jurisdiction of 70 or so cases per year, currently about 1% of the cases presented for consideration annually. The Court tells us that it is working very hard and handling all the cases it can. Hence it is very careful to select only the few cases it deems worthy of its scarce time. We had spent months putting our petition together, had it printed at considerable personal expense by professional printers in Washington, and shipped it to the Court in six bound volumes.

The justices consider these petitions for a "writ of certiorari", requests to hear a case in full, in closed conferences attended only by the nine justices on Saturday mornings. When the mail came into the office the Wednesday after we returned from Washington I received a very thin envelope on cheap stationery, return address Supreme Court of the United States. Without opening it, I knew what it was. I did not have even a flicker of hope that I would be surprised when I opened it. There was no official pleading, no slip opinion, nothing from Chief Justice Roberts, or any of the other justices, just one sentence from the unnamed clerk of the court that Shawn Hawkins' petition for review of his case by the court was denied. Shawn's last hope for having his life spared by an American court had died the Saturday we were in Washington with our boys.

At the very time we were showing our grandsons everything that we thought they ought to be familiar with in our great country, the nine justices of the Supreme Court met in private and decided Shawn's fate without offering one word of reasoning, one word of explanation why Shawn should be put to death. And could not be bothered personally signing a letter of notice to his counsel from their secret vote. From this there was no legal appeal. Shawn was at the end of the legal line.

The Court was through with Shawn, had unceremoniously wiped its hands of him, but we had not. We immediately went to work on what we knew beforehand we would need to do, put together an application for clemency under the laws of our state to the governor. From start to finish we spent two years of the thirteen that we worked on Shawn's case working on his clemency application. Not all of this was newly tilled soil. We were able to use many of the documents supplied to the Supreme Court and the lower courts who had earlier weighed in, painting an entire picture of how Shawn wound up on death row. Clemency in our state gives the accused one final chance to tell his entire story. He or she is not limited to the severely circumscribed argument that is left after appeal after appeal in the court system. The arguments the accused is allowed to make are limited further with each climb up a rung of the appeal ladder. Imagine American Gladiator, except the contestants are given an additional 50 pound bag of sand to carry with each new hurdle that challenges them.

We put together a package that we thought would appeal to the bipartisan parole board, which first hears the application before it is sent on whether approved or not to the governor, who has the sole power of clemency under the Ohio constitution. This could have been problematic but proved not to be. Governor Kasich, a sometimes quirky guy who can fly off the handle, extended us every courtesy during the months leading up to his decision, and seems to have paid attention to the full argument we presented, including supporting letters among others from several prominent Republicans, a state senator, a former secretary of state, and a former attorney general.

After the parole board's courteous lengthy interview of Shawn, then a ten hour hearing before the parole board, and a week of nerve wracking waiting, we received a call, not from the clerk of the parole board, but from the Chairwoman of the Parole Board herself, letting us know that the board was recommending clemency to the governor by a vote of 7-0.

Those in the know told us that the governor would adopt the recommendation of the Parole Board, but that did not keep me from losing sleep throughout the weeks leading up to the governor's announcement, which would have to come soon as Shawn's execution date was set only a few weeks in the future. Word got back to me during this time that the County Prosecutor had secretly sent his team up to Columbus to make a back door plea to ignore the parole board and proceed with execution. Fearing the worst I called the Assistant Attorney General who was our point person in the governor's office to complain without being offensive, and state ever so gently that we deserved the same opportunity to make a closed door presentation in the governor's office. Of course we did not know how far the two county assistant prosecutors had gotten. Knowing how the governor's office is organized I am confident they never spoke directly to the governor. At any rate, our contact called back after an agonizing delay and obliquely told me that there was nothing that I needed to do. No action need be taken. And have a nice day.

The following week, when the governor's grant of clemency was announced, the warden of the Youngstown penitentiary, where the death row inmates were then housed personally went to Shawn's cell, without accompanying guards, to give Shawn the good news. Governor Kasich's public press release referenced the personal tragedies he had suffered with the untimely deaths of his own parents and while not proclaiming Shawn's innocence firmly stated that he was not worthy of death beyond reasonable doubt.

The difference in treatment by our court system, from bottom to top, from that extended by the state's clemency procedure and the thoughtful and personal involvement of state officials, from Governor Kasich to the warden, down to assistants and clerical help is too much of a contrast to ignore. The court system falls short, much too often and the clemency procedure must serve as a fail safe mechanism to keep too many people from unjust death.

I find it hard to deny that we should try it all another way. I spent a considerable time over eleven years trying to fit Shawn's case into an ever tighter strait jacket as I tried to present constantly more oblique but winning arguments to this or that panel of judges. At almost every step of the process we lost. There were occasional minor victories and helpful comments from individual judges in dissent from the majority, but we were never able to squeeze through the ever narrowing window of reversal of the original guilty verdict. We were not alone in this fruitless endeavor. Some few hundred fortunate individuals over the last twenty some years have had their death sentences reversed or vacated. However there are more than 2400 condemned men and women on death row in 27 states and two Federal jurisdictions. They have been there on average 18.9 years, a time that has increased by two-thirds over the past twenty years. Shawn Hawkins spent a very typical 19 years on death row before Governor Kasich granted him clemency.

Why? For all the bold political talk, our justice system is not anxious to execute people. It comes up with every argument it can to slow down the process. While we do that, hundreds of individuals, many of them guilty but some of them innocent lead wasted lives under the specter of death by execution some place down the line. It is not beyond the realm of probability that some decisions are made with every expectation that at some point a governor or in Federal cases, the president will step in and grant clemency, taking the beleaguered individual off death row, in some cases even wiping out the sentence and putting the person at liberty.

We should not be warehousing the condemned for twenty, thirty--even five or ten years. An efficient justice system could determine the guilt beyond a reasonable doubt of a person tried for a capital offense in much less time than that. Beyond an efficient trial with both prosecution and defense handled by trained experts dedicated not to convicting or to freeing but first of all to eliciting the truth, there should be one and only one level of appeal, at which an equally dispassionate tribunal would examine the entire case file and any appropriate expansion of the file that court deemed appropriate before affirming the sentence of death or vacating it, with appropriate conditions of term of imprisonment or parole. That stage could look a lot like the clemency process we have in place now.

No one on either the right or the left in this country would argue that life is not sacred. Equal care and equal energy should be devoted to safeguarding the end of life process as is now lavished on the beginning of viable human life and the stages leading up to it. We owe the same level of care in ending the lives of those who have trod the earth with us for a lifetime of years as we do for the unborn whom we have never seen or heard.

None of this even touches on the efficacy of the death penalty itself. Why do we drag out the process so much? Is it not clear that we drag it out because it is something that most Americans, at home and in government just don't have the stomach for. The majority of Americans are not in favor of the death penalty save for a very few of the most heinous crimes. However, abolition of the death penalty will have to wait in line behind other major life and death issues like abortion and gun rights. Given the death penalty we do have in many states and are reluctant to use, at least we should handle it in an even handed and humane fashion.

Let's try it another way. Who knows? Perhaps even the Supreme Court would show some interest in and respect for the process under a fairer, more efficient system. And send me a personal letter acknowledging their interest.

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Retired lawyer and former college English teacher, Tony Covatta writes creative non-fiction and short stories, full length, flash and micro. For more information please visit tonycovatta.com.