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Babin is still haunted by Cousin. "It was very hard to sit on that witness stand and breathe the same air as he, Shareef, does," she says. "He knows what I know. Unfortunately, Shareef and I are the only two people left who know what happened." There was something about him on the night of the murder, she says, that she can't shake. "He was the one who made eye contact," says Babin. "I watched his face. I watched his hands. I'll live with that. That's the face Michael saw."
Because American justice grinds on so slowly, because the appeals process in death-penalty cases often lasts years, juveniles who face capital punishment are almost always adults by the time the sentence is carried out. The aging perhaps makes it easier to flip the switch or pull the lever. But it also makes it harder to connect the criminal to the crime. "By the time the state gets around to executing these people, the kid who committed the crime no longer exists," says lawyer David Bruck, who is handling the appeal of Joseph Hudgins, 22, who was convicted of murder at age 17 in South Carolina and sentenced to death. "It is almost as if in some nightmarish procedure the state has arbitrarily substituted one person for another prior to the execution."
Cousin, too, is changing, maturing and learning to deal with life on the row. He still watches cartoons, but he's reading more. He read John Grisham's The Chamber to get some idea about what death row was really like; now he's reading For the Defense by Rubin Ellis. But he is still caught up in memories of childhood. The father of a recreational-league basketball player whose team was an arch rival of Cousin's squad is in the next cell. "It was the only team that beat us," says Cousin. "That was the last game I played before I got arrested." Cousin still thinks about his father, or the man he believes is his father, Epps. "I've called him since I came up here," says Cousin. "He won't come to the phone." So Cousin waits. For justice, for his father to take his call or simply for the next day.