Life after death
"I just knew that if I could find the right words, I could tell Josh's story in a compelling enough way that I could save his life. People now tell me about this great work that I did, except that I didn't do it. He died."
At 9:27 p.m. on March 31, 2016, Sarah Gerwig-Moore 02T 02L watched her friend Joshua Bishop die.
The circumstances of Bishop’s passing were made clear 10 days later in a Macon Telegraph obituary. “Josh Bishop, 41, was executed by the State of Georgia,” the first sentence read. The obit, which in three dimensions and with great humanity described a troubled youth grown into a repentant and changed man, was written by Gerwig-Moore, Bishop’s attorney.
It’s not rare for attorneys to forge bonds with clients. But the friendship between Gerwig-Moore and Bishop formed not with his imprisonment, but on an elementary school playground nearly 25 years ago.
They were sixth-grade classmates. At the time, that was all they had in common. Gerwig-Moore, a self-professed nerd, had skipped a grade, so she was younger than her classmates, while tough-kid Bishop had been held back twice. After school, she would go home to her suburban house and read Anne of Green Gables and Charlotte’s Web. He would climb into a van for a ride to the Methodist Home, which is where all the homeless kids had beds.
One day, some of Tinsley Elementary School’s mean girls were snickering, and Gerwig-Moore felt like a target. Bishop noticed, and while the two hadn’t been close, he said, “Don’t pay them no mind. I think you’re gonna be pretty when you grow up.”
“Josh used to get in trouble for smoking and things like that,” Gerwig-Moore recalls. “But he didn’t suffer bullies. He didn’t have an agenda, either. It was just a nice thing to say.” She never forgot his kindness. The encounter was so meaningful that Gerwig-Moore reminded Bishop of it in 1998, the first time she visited him in prison.
Is this just?
Four years earlier, Bishop and an accomplice killed a man in a drug-fueled haze. The accomplice pled guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. Bishop went to trial and was convicted and sentenced to death. She had heard about the case through a former classmate. At the time, Bishop was the youngest person on death row, and Gerwig-Moore the youngest student at Emory Law. They reconnected, and she offered to stay in touch with letters and occasional visits. She also volunteered to help Bishop’s attorneys when she could.
Gerwig-Moore officially joined Bishop’s legal team in 2011 and in 2013 became lead counsel. Now an associate professor of law at Mercer, she was ideally suited to the role. At Mercer, Gerwig-Moore had founded the Habeas Project, which provides pro bono habeas representation. It was here that Gerwig-Moore drew on her Emory experience.
“Emory Law prepared me to think like a lawyer and learn strategy,” says Gerwig-Moore, who earned a master’s of theological studies at Candler in addition to her JD. “Candler was asking pressing questions for me, like ‘Is this right?’ or ‘Is this just?’ That was the balance that I needed.”
One of Gerwig-Moore’s instructors at Candler was Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was in residence at the time. She keeps a picture of the two of them on her office wall.
In all, about 50 Habeas Project students worked on the Bishop case, and many of them provided crucial assistance on the clemency petition, which Gerwig-Moore dove into after the US Supreme Court denied certiorari in late 2014. Through meticulous research, the Habeas students uncovered a clemency pattern. Since the death penalty was reinstituted in Georgia in the 1970s, nine condemned men (they were all men) received clemency. None had killed a police officer or a child, all had undergone a spiritual conversion in prison, Georgia officials had gone to bat for them at some point, and none had ever professed innocence. Bishop qualified on all counts. A cautiously optimistic Gerwig-Moore made her presentation on March 30. It was for naught. Clemency was denied the morning of March 31, and Bishop was dead 12 hours later.
A story that lives on
As an undergraduate, Gerwig-Moore majored in English and remains inspired by literature, art, and music. Her work is laced with creativity and humor. At Mercer, she teaches a popular course on law and literature where she’ll reference hip-hop lyrics or Harry Potter to illustrate legal points. In her spare time, she plays in a Mercer law faculty-fronted band called Sue ’N the Bastards (if you don’t get the joke, say the name quickly). So, in seeking a way to make sense of Bishop’s death, Gerwig-Moore harkens back to one of her favorite childhood novels.
She calls it a twisted version of Charlotte’s Web. In the book, a pig named Wilbur is condemned to death, but he befriends a spider named Charlotte, who spins messages in her web that, with the help of the farm’s other animals, save Wilbur. The symbolism is not hard to spot.
“I just knew that if I could find the right words, I could tell Josh’s story in a compelling enough way that I could save his life,” she says.
“People now tell me about this great work that I did, except that I didn’t do it. He died.”
In E.B. White’s book, it’s Charlotte who dies, although her friend- ship with Wilbur lives on through her offspring. One of the twists of Gerwig-Moore’s story, obviously, is that Bishop’s memory and story live on through her. And she is telling it as much as she can.
Over the last year, she’s presented the Bishop/Charlotte’s Web story at a variety of capital punishment-themed panel discussions, including two events at Emory. Despite the morbidity of her subject matter, Gerwig-Moore retains her gift for fun allusions.
“You know how in The Avengers, they ask the Hulk how he controls his transformation, and then he says ‘I’m always angry,’ and turns into the Hulk? That’s me,” she laughs, before turning serious. “I’m never not angry or sad about this. I will never be the same, but I never want to stop telling Josh’s story.”
