Return Of "The Corner Office" -- This Time, On Apartheid & Death Row Cases: Kenneth C. Frazier

Given that I've written here a fair bit, and at another property, nearly daily, on the improbable story of Martin Shkreli. . . he, who is to be sentenced in about four hours. . . it seems fitting, and timely, to post his here.

Oh. And it is clearly on-topic, as to "Merck's leadership". Do go read it all, in the NYT, this morning -- but here is a bit:

. . . .[As a younger lawyer,] I read about the need in South Africa for law professors and lawyers to come from the U.S., because black law students in South Africa were obviously during apartheid only allowed to go to second-rate law schools.

I lived one whole semester in Soweto. It was completely lawless. There were no streetlights. It was a completely separated area where people were contained, because the South African government’s job, as it saw it, was to separate blacks from whites.

But what I remember more than anything else was interacting with people who their entire lives had been told that they were second class, that they were inferior, and how hard it was to get particularly the men to speak up in audible tones, because they had been in many ways told that their voice was not worth listening to. In addition to trying to teach people the substantive legal issues, it was a lot about trying to instill self-confidence. . . .

You also represented James Willie “Bo” Cochran, a death row inmate. What was your first impression of his case?

My first reaction was, “I’m much too busy to take on another piece of pro bono litigation.” But there were two younger lawyers in the firm who heard about the case, and they came to me and frankly they sort of shamed me into doing it.

You eventually won his freedom. What did that mean to you?

It was the high point of my professional career. This is a man who was facing an execution date for a crime he did not commit. And what I will never forget about Bo was that he had no sense of recrimination whatsoever. He was just thankful for every day that he had as a free man. It sort of reminds me of Nelson Mandela in the sense that he was able to live his life going forward without regard to trying to even scores. . . .

Indeed; so it goes. And hopefully, one day soon, this man might consider being. . . the next President of the United States of America. Smile. Hope is a good thing. It is perhaps the best of all things. . . and so, I will sit quietly at luminous dawn, and wait for a new, and grinning, hope. . . to rise. Onward.

नमस्ते