Alvin Melleth

One lawyer said that the finality of it is enough to give you vertigo, to watch a person who you've built a relationship with, sometimes over years, be reduced to a few file boxes you put into storage at the office.

The days after an execution are the most acute.

Sleep comes in 18-hour chunks.

But even after you get back to work and try to keep up with your other cases, a dark cloud lingers.

Burnout is pretty common.

Alcoholism and divorce, too.

All this to say, these lawyers are operating under tremendous pressure.

It's not just their clients' lives that are at stake.

It's their own emotional states, too.

But actually, this kind of thing doesn't come up much when we're following the lawyers around.

When I asked Greg about it, he said that when he's on a case, he tries to push all of that away.

He can't think about it without succumbing to paralysis.

But obviously it's there.

It's got to be.

So as the lawyers talk about the propriety of barging into Randy Wells' hospital room to get him to say that he lied on the stand while he lies there on his own deathbed with his wife and his family around him as he dies from lung cancer, well, this might be the closest I've come to actually seeing the pressure in action.

the things the lawyers are willing to do to avoid an execution, and everything that follows.

These lawyers feel that every option must be on the table, even if it means a sort of gross and distasteful scene at a Texas hospital.

But it doesn't come to that.

Naomi hears from Tracy.

Randy Wells has been released.