and faculty reflect on the legacy of the Virginia Capital Case Clearinghouse, closing its doors after over 30 years serving capital defense attorneys.

BY JEFF HANNA

ON MARCH 8, 1974, A 19-YEAR-OLD FT. BRAGG soldier from Chicago named Robert Gary Bock Jr. was sentenced to death for the fatal stabbing of a woman in rural North Carolina.

That was a defining moment for Bill Geimer, a young defense attorney.

“When my client was sentenced to death, I can tell you that’s when your intellectual college-student opposition to the death penalty turned to stark reality,” recalled Geimer, noting that a 5–4 U.S. Supreme Court decision eventually saved Bock from execution.

Memories of that case followed Geimer to Lexington, where he joined the law school faculty in 1980. He spent his early years establishing his academic bona fides and earning tenure. All the while, he felt “the pull and tug of the need to do something on an issue that had been so important to me for a long time.”

Then, in March 1987, the law school hosted a two-day symposium on death penalty reform, and one of the speakers mentioned the possibility of a student program on the issue.

“That,” Geimer said, “flipped my switch and inspired me to say, ‘Well, I think we can do this at W&L.’ ”

Geimer organized the clinic during the 1987–88 academic year. They began, he said, by making things up as they went along.

“There is a maxim that says death is different,” he noted. “The idea is that when somebody’s life is at stake, the courts are particularly careful in reviewing the law and giving clients the benefit of that careful review. But the exact opposite was in effect in Virginia. You had people going to trial on Monday, and they were in the death house by Thursday night.” clinics, almost all were designed to represent individuals already on death row.

Geimer’s band of second– and third-year students, working out of the lower level of Lewis Hall, began writing motions and supporting briefs for defense attorneys, many of whom had never tried a capital case. In the succeeding years, almost 400 W&L students participated in VC3, assisting hundreds of Virginia attorneys to provide clients with an adequate defense.

The clinic’s fundamental objective was to promote an adequate defense in capital cases. Indeed, that 1987 symposium — the one where Geimer’s switch was flipped — began with a presentation of three death penalty cases that suffered from blatantly inadequate counsel. The speaker was a South Carolina attorney named David Bruck, who would eventually join the W&L faculty and become VC3’s third director.

“Bill Geimer’s great insight was that, in Virginia, a clinic like that was too late,” explained Bruck. “Once the death sentence was imposed in Virginia, odds were extremely good that you were going to be executed no matter what was in the record. The idea he hatched was to have a clinic that focused at the pretrial and trial level. For the most part, it was amateur hour on the defense side in case after case; prosecutors had a decisive advantage with lots of experience in these cases. The goal was to raise the standard of defense representation.”

Otto Konrad ’91L was an early participant in VC3. His personal opposition to the death penalty drew him to the clinic, but, he said, VC3 was never about abolishing the death penalty, even if that’s how some saw it. Instead, he said, the students provided resources to overtaxed attorneys so they could represent their clients effectively.

“We worked on motions and on pleadings with our partners in private practice. Our clients were the attorneys, not the defendants,” said Konrad, now a partner with Williams Mullen in Richmond.

~Bill Geimer

At the time of the conference, said Bruck, there was a lot of righteous concern about how inadequate the defense function was in Virginia, where executions were steadily increasing. Although law schools were beginning to organize death penalty

Despite Geimer’s insistence, confirmed by others, that VC3 was not about abolishing the death penalty, not everyone bought it. Even inside the law school, Geimer said, the clinic was a curiosity. “People wondered, ‘Who are they? A bunch of antideath penalty bomb throwers?’ ”

In April 1989, only a year into VC3’s existence, the Richmond Times-Dispatch attacked the clinic for one of its continuing education seminars. The editorial read, in part: “When this W&L clear-