Penny Brill's initial reaction, "Why is this a death case?," carried through a more extensive consideration of the case and the death penalty was waived. I then made an appointment to see Ms. Rundle.
She is an engaging person and greeted me smiling as she extended her hand. We shook and sat down. I had decided to begin by telling her my opinion and then to apprise her of the circumstances. I told her that I thought the decision-making that the office conducted on the death penalty was arbitrary. Her response took me by surprise. "Is it?" she replied.
"Is it?"
It was an innocent, even insouciant, response and I also found it endearing at the time. She said that she didn't know about the law on the death penalty, that she relied on the "experts," Ms. Brill, et al. She said this matter-of-factly and I processed it similarly. That is, she freely and unabashedly acknowledged that she did not know death penalty law and seemed to assume, correctly, that I understood. I understood because death penalty jurisprudence is niche knowledge. As such, it is not knowledge that I would expect any State Attorney, after all a politician, necessarily to possess.
Significantly this conversation occurred in 1998, that is six years after Rundle had become State Attorney. For six years Rundle had been affixing her signature as the final authority on documents in which her experts were literally deciding life and death, and yet after six years she still evinced the profound unfamiliarity accurately captured by her “Is it?” response. "Is it?" meant "Is it? I hadn't really noticed."
Rundle had a "knowledge gap" and this knowledge gap was not confined to one narrow area of the law, however important. Rundle had a knowledge gap on the law generally.
This conversation exemplifies important personal traits that have deeply imprinted themselves on how Rundle runs the State Attorneys Office: reliance on a coterie of top aides, a reliance not to acquire but to substitute knowledge. And to substitute judgment; a resultant isolation, from other prosecutors in the office, and from the law itself; the mutual reinforcement that this reliance and isolation have on each other and which contributes to a widening of the knowledge gap. And this conversation illustrates the interplay of politics and justice on the most important decisions made by her.
-David Ranck
