In the decade he worked at the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, Dr. Patrick Gariety carried a notebook almost everywhere he went. “I was a compulsive scribbler,” he said, a psychiatrist and then-aspiring writer working in an environment that, in many ways, had to be seen to be believed.

Gariety had always felt drawn to public sector psychology, treating people who were marginalized and seriously mentally ill. His notebook became a way to process what he saw. “It was emotionally so fraught in different ways, that really the writing became therapeutic, a way of coping,” he told me in a phone call. So when there was a murder at the mental health wing of the prison on January 26, 2010, Gariety spent the next several weeks putting it all on paper.

It was a Wednesday morning when he got the news. Gariety was entering the reception area, joining the crowded line of day shift workers at security as they took off their shoes, belts, and winter coats, when he heard a guard at the scanner say, “If you haven’t already heard, folks, an inmate was killed last night.” Gariety felt a surge of anxiety. He hoped and prayed that none of his patients were involved. Then his heart sank.

The victim was 51-year-old Victor Castro-Rodriguez, a skinny Cuban immigrant with bipolar disorder. He’d been found in his own cell, bound, gagged, and apparently beaten to death. Although he was not one of Gariety’s patients, Gariety knew Castro-Rodriguez. Just about everyone did. He was a talented graphic artist, Gariety wrote in his journal; some of his drawings hung in the psychiatrist’s office. “He merrily handed out his artwork to everyone.”

There were two killers, one of whom was Gariety’s patient: 38-year-old Charles Hall, who everyone called Chuck. Despite a tough-guy exterior — shaved head, tattoos — Gariety had never thought of Hall as dangerous. His violence was mainly directed at himself.

For practically his whole adult life, Hall had been afflicted by a severe case of Crohn’s disease that had ravaged his intestinal system — and which made life in prison a living hell. Hall expelled waste through an ostomy bag attached to his abdomen, which often failed to work properly, and he was often in pain or discomfort. In the weeks before the murder, he’d had his seventh corrective surgery. The sights and smells of Hall’s disability had made him a target among his neighbors; after arriving in Springfield, Hall had repeatedly asked to be placed in isolation. More than once, Hall had tried to take his own life, usually when he was having a flare-up of his symptoms. It was a suicide attempt that had landed him in Gariety’s unit in the first place.

“Certain things jump off the page.”

In the weeks following the murder, Gariety’s own feelings of rage and revulsion gave way to a desire to make sense of it all. He reread his first psychiatric evaluation of Hall. “Certain things jump off the page,” he wrote. Hall had problems controlling his temper and acted out in ways that seemed irrational and self-defeating. The crimes that sent him to federal prison were a good example. While incarcerated in Maine, Hall had made a series of audacious threats to federal authorities by phone and by mail. He made no effort to hide what he was doing. “He even signed his name to one of the mailed threats,” Gariety wrote.

Hall showed similar behavior after Castro-Rodriguez’s murder. He insisted that he would kill again if he wasn’t put in isolation. “I want you to take me seriously,” Gariety recorded him saying.

There was something else in Hall’s file that captured Gariety’s attention. Hall had told him that his father had molested his sister when they were children — and that Hall once retaliated by trying to poison his dad with Drano capsules. Gariety wondered whether Hall himself had been abused. “It’s easy for me to imagine this only being the tip of the iceberg,” he wrote in his journal.

Gariety sensed an undercurrent of deep fear beneath Hall’s behavior. Perhaps his violent actions were partly a response to feeling threatened — and “a way to imagine himself now strong enough to stand up to” his abuser. Whatever his unprocessed trauma, it was compounded by his physical suffering, he wrote. This did not justify his actions. But it was a way to understand them.

Gariety left his job at the medical prison not long afterward and moved out of state. Earlier this year, a lawyer named Angela Elleman got in touch with Gariety out of the blue. It was then that he learned that Hall had been sentenced to death.

Gariety also learned that his previous speculation about Hall had proved prescient. Though it had been revealed at Hall’s trial that the story about his sister and their father was untrue, Hall’s post-conviction team had uncovered broader allegations of sexual abuse at a school he attended as a child. According to Hall and additional witnesses who gave sworn declarations as part of a legal filing in his case, Hall was one of numerous students molested by the school’s founder. “It would be unsurprising for a male inmate to have deep shame about any history of sexual abuse and to substitute his own story with a fictional one for someone like a sister,” Gariety wrote in a declaration for Hall’s attorneys.

“I’m opposed to the death penalty,” Gariety told me. “I didn’t experience Mr. Hall as a particularly sympathetic character, but I did not want to see him executed.” He remains circumspect about his observations back in 2010. He’d had no way of knowing the truth of Hall’s life and had clawed for an explanation. “Him committing murder was just so unexpected and so extreme,” Gariety said. “Where the hell did that come from? Why didn’t anyone see that?”

State of Emergency

Today, Hall is 53 years old and lives in the Special Confinement Unit at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. He spends most of his waking hours in solitary confinement, living in a cell the size of a bathroom. In his decade on death row, Hall has had no disciplinary infractions; according to a former case worker at the prison, who wrote a letter to the White House earlier this year saying that it would be best for Hall and for the staff in Terre Haute if his sentence would be reduced to life without parole. Hall “was not a management problem” during the seven years that he knew him, the case worker wrote. “He did, though, have intense medical issues that our prison was not set up to handle.”

“If I had known this information at the time of Mr. Hall’s trial, I would not have voted for the death penalty.”

As President Joe Biden prepares to leave office, Hall is among the dozens of people on federal death row who have asked him to commute their death sentence. His clemency petition makes a powerful case for mercy. It is supported by the family of his victim, Castro-Rodriguez, who say that executing Hall would only add to their pain. It also contains declarations from jurors who served at Hall’s 2014 trial, who say that the new claim of sexual abuse — along with abnormalities in Hall’s brain recently revealed by neurological testing — now cast him in a different light. “If I had known this information at the time of Mr. Hall’s trial, I would not have voted for the death penalty,” one juror said.

The new information is also at the heart of a lengthy legal challenge to Hall’s death sentence filed in federal court earlier this year. The record contains hundreds of pages of declarations and expert reports shedding light on critical aspects of Hall’s early life that his defense attorneys never investigated. “As a result,” it reads, “the jurors never heard a wealth of evidence, readily available at the time of Chuck’s trial, that would have led at least one juror to vote for a sentence less than death.” (The Department of Justice has not yet filed a response to Hall’s motion.)

His attorneys’ failure to present such evidence is emblematic of the kind of lawyering that has too often paved the way for executions at both the state and federal levels. Hall was represented at........

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