The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

His record, too, will make him a rarity. In two decades in the South, and after more than three hundred death penalty cases, Clive will lose only six clients to execution. For his efforts, he has an Order of the British Empire from the queen herself—a medallion he keeps strung around the neck of a plaster cast of Zeus, mounted on the burgundy wall of the home he and his wife, Emily, have made not in the well-heeled Garden District of New Orleans but in the Lower Ninth Ward. It is still years before Hurricane Katrina will ravage the area. The Ninth Ward is no longer the more rural side of the river it began as, no longer the place of backyard farms. Crack cocaine has flooded in, and with it gangs. The streets of the Ninth still lack functioning streetlamps. In a city with a famously high murder rate, the Ninth has the highest. In choosing to live in a place many are left to live in by circumstance, Clive is a man not just dedicated to his work, but defined by it.