Bob Hammerle decided he would look.
Despite advice that he simply glance away, Hammerle would keep his eyes focused on Gregory Resnover as 2,300 volts of electricity surged through the convicted man's body -- jolting it up in the wooden chair against straining leather straps, sending a flash of flame and a wisp of smoke up from his head, and permeating the room with the sickly sweet scent of burnt flesh.
As Resnover's heart stopped, Hammerle's heart pounded.
As Resnover's life ended, Hammerle's life was wrenched.
Resnover's eyes were hidden by a black hood, and Hammerle couldn't turn his eyes away.
Now, 6 years later, the criminal defense attorney's opposition to the death penalty remains strong -- intellectually, philosophically, emotionally and morally. But he can't do the legal work anymore.
He cannot represent a client who faces the death penalty.
Not since Resnover.
"I can't deal with it when somebody's life's on the line," he said, furiously wiping away tears after recounting the last minutes of Gregory Resnover's life. "Because you can't have this happen.
"I mean, you've got to stay detached, and I can't anymore."
Resnover and Tommie Lee Smith were convicted and sentenced to die for the 1980 shooting death of Indianapolis police officer Jack Ohrberg, who Hammerle knew from previous cases and considered a friend.
Resnover was 43 when he was executed by electrocution at 12:01 a.m. Dec. 8, 1994, the last person to die in Indiana's electric chair. Smith became the state's 1st to die by lethal injection on July 18, 1996.
Hammerle is talking publicly about the toll the Resnover execution took
on him at a time when there is more and more scrutiny of the death penalty.
Last year, the Republican governor of Illinois, a death penalty supporter, issued a moratorium on executions after a series of people on death row were exonerated. Gov. Frank O'Bannon subsequently directed a legislative study commission to take a look at Indiana's laws and procedures to ensure the death penalty was being fairly applied, but he stopped short of a moratorium.
Hammerle said in the long run, he is confident the death penalty will be abolished. He continues to speak out against capital punishment in many settings -- but not in courtrooms.
Hammerle had been involved with only a few death penalty cases before Resnover's and was on the Resnover case for only 7 months, when lawyers had exhausted all court appeals.
He had long been a passionate voice against capital punishment, however, and joined Resnover's legal team for the final rounds of the battle for Resnover's life. Hammerle was brought on board to argue for clemency before the parole board and to be the point-person for the media. He became as close to Resnover as the rest of the team, and continues to argue even now that Resnover was executed based on a court record filled with errors.
His passion about the Resnover case is something he believes even Jack Ohrberg would have understood, he said, recalling a difficult case in which Ohrberg, by testifying truthfully, hurt the prosecution's case.
Ohrberg was a man of integrity, and the law mattered to him, Hammerle said. That's why he could reconcile his grief for the slain officer while he worked on behalf of Resnover.
"It was what Jack Ohrberg would have expected me to do," Hammerle said.
When all of Resnover's appeals were gone and an execution date loomed, it was Hammerle who was chosen to watch -- to ensure that Resnover knew an advocate was with him, and to be a witness should something go wrong. It was a role no one on the legal team wanted, but all agreed someone had to see through.
It's not unusual for attorneys who watch their clients be executed to never take a death penalty case again, said George Kendall, staff attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York.
"It asks too much of people," said Kendall, who has witnessed 4 executions. "It's the worst experience I've ever had."
It was Kendall who advised Hammerle, in a long distance call from New York to the car that was taking Hammerle to Michigan City's Indiana State Prison, to look away for the 1st jolt.
Kendall had been there, and he wanted to spare Hammerle the horror.
Instead, Hammerle absorbed the execution completely. It would give him nightmares, leave him weeping whenever he recounted it and send him to therapy.
And the day after Resnover was executed, the legal team made a decision that would haunt Hammerle in another way -- they drove Resnover's body back to Indianapolis and paraded it in a caravan around the governor's residence. Then-Gov. Evan Bayh was serving as host of a Christmas party and many of the guests were friends of Hammerle's.
The caravan was a protest, one that seemed logical to the frustrated and heart-broken attorney at that time, but it left him ostracized from the Democratic "in" group, which didn't appreciate the timing or the tone of the demonstration. For Hammerle, a social man who thrives on human interaction and conversation, the long-term fallout was devastating.
Even today, while he won't actually say he regrets the decision to take Gregory Resnover to crash the governor's Christmas party -- he remains loyal to the cause and devoted to his colleagues -- it's the one aspect of his advocacy for Resnover that gives him pause.
"I'm tormented by the possibility that somehow, I tarnished the whole thing," he said. "I was fearful of that."
Still, friendships were lost. Over the long term, the stress also contributed to strain on his marriage to Monica Foster, his law partner at the time and a leader of Resnover's legal team. Their divorce is now pending.
Foster and Rhonda Long-Sharpe, who also was on the Resnover team and part of Hammerle's Indiana Avenue law practice, have left to open their own firm. They will concentrate on the kind of legal work that Hammerle has left behind -- capital punishment.
In the days, months and years since the execution, Hammerle has endured symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome similar to the battle-fatigue of war veterans and others who have been traumatized.
"He would wake up in the middle of the night screaming, and that was something he never did before,'' said Foster, who remains close to Hammerle.
Foster was at a nearby motel during the execution, but she wasn't left unscathed by it.
"I didn't get out of bed for 2 months," she said. "When I finally did get up, I seriously questioned whether I was going to go back to work."
Eventually, she did -- and she credits Resnover with helping her do so.
Foster also still can't get through a discussion about Resnover without choking up, which she did as she recounted her last visit with him. He told and Long-Sharpe that their efforts had given him dignity.
"He said, 'Keep fighting for these guys.' And we said, 'That is the one thing that we cannot promise you.' He said, 'Give it a couple of days or a couple of weeks. If you feel the strength to represent people back here, then you will know that I will be helping hold you up.'"
At first, Hammerle tried to do more death penalty work, too. He took one case within a year or two of Resnover's execution, but had to be excused because he had once represented a witness for the state. But during the time he was on the case, Hammerle said, he realized he was hoping to be removed from the case.
For the realization that he can no longer represent clients facing the death penalty, he offers this baseball metaphor:
A batter who has been beaned by a fastball might never be a reliable hitter again, because he flinches.
A defendant who faces the death penalty, Hammerle says, can't afford an attorney who flinches.
