Lawyer Brian Donerly sat next to the killer at the defense table, watching the jurors. They had taken only seven minutes to decide whether his client deserved to die for his crime. It was not a good sign that this jury was feeling merciful.
Given the horrific circumstances - a teenage girl plucked from a suburban parking lot and murdered - no one was especially surprised.
Except Donerly. He had argued passionately that this man should be spared. When the court clerk said "death," he hung his bearded head, unbelieving.
What a strange moment. The killer, Oscar Ray Bolin, put his arm around his lawyer.
"You did a great job," he said, consoling him. It was true; the defense had. Ultimately, the case was reversed for a new trial.
Courthouses have too few lawyers like Brian Donerly. They're the ones who spend careers duking it out in the grittiest cases, and not because they can't get a job at a fancy firm. They're true believers, people who think that the death penalty is wrong, that one killing can't justify another. That cops, prosecutors and judges have to follow the rules. That even people accused of the worst crimes deserve the best defense. Poor people, even.
That's what defendants lucky enough to have Donerly assigned to their cases got. He had a hand in 45 first-degree murder cases, helped keep a wild-eyed supermarket fire bomber and a cop killer out of the electric chair. Some people will think this terrible, but he did his job well.
Only one man was executed on his watch: Newton Carlton Slawson, who was convicted of killing a family and later got rid of his lawyers, saying he wanted to get on with his death sentence. Even then, Donerly and lawyer Craig Alldredge were faxing a letter to the governor saying Slawson was not mentally competent to be executed.
As courthouse lore goes, a judge once asked Donerly if his client would testify. "Only if I miss the tackle," he replied.
I heard a lawyer ask him about a case he once had involving a beheading. "Which one?" Donerly said. His world was a strange place.
The only person I ever heard him say he could not have defended was Hank Earl Carr, who murdered three police officers before he killed himself. Two of them were Ricky Childers and Randy Bell, who often faced Donerly from the witness stand. He considered them fine men.
Of course, this came up when we were talking about Carr's girlfriend, who was charged in the aftermath. Her, he could have represented.
He loved to stop in the courthouse halls to talk cases or judges or the latest logic from the Florida Supreme Court. He was very big on logic. He would stand there stroking his graying beard, professorial and perpetually rumpled, his mind always leaping ahead.
"He is the only lawyer I have ever called brilliant," Alldredge said. "And he used that to defend poor people."
Years ago we were chatting about a case outside a courtroom when Donerly rattled something in his pocket. He held out a handful of acorns, laughed, said he'd been collecting them that morning with his little boy.
Then he dropped them back in his pocket and headed in to see his latest client.
Mark Ober said when he worked side by side with Donerly as a defense lawyer, he never needed the law library. "I had Brian Donerly."
When Ober became Hillsborough state attorney, he asked Donerly to come to work for him.
Pleasantly, Donerly asked, "Are you going to continue to try to kill people?" Yes, the office would seek the death penalty in appropriate cases. Donerly declined.
He was a public defender in Hillsborough and most recently Pinellas, with a stint in private practice in between. A few weeks ago, just before a family vacation, he was diagnosed with leukemia.
A man who held degrees in statistics and journalism, he did his research. "He knew what he had and he knew his chances," Alldredge said. Like always, he went to battle anyway.
Brian Donerly died Tuesday at 60, leaving a wife and son. And we all lost a true believer.