..  ..Olen "Eddie" Hutchison ...No 144432 ...Riverbend Maximum Security Institution ...Nashville Tennessee ...Year of Birth 1954 ...Marital Status single ...Children unknown ...Date of offense August 14, 1988 ...Sentenced to death January 18, 1991 ...Status under appeal . Click on the image to view a larger version. Scroll below for an account of the session.

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Olen Hutchison & several codefendants were convicted of conspiring to murder Hugh Huddleston for the proceeds of two large life insurance policies, of which Hutchison & a codefendant were beneficiaries. Huddleston had gone fishing in a pontoon boat, & had drowned in the presence of two of the accused. Though the medical examiner originally reported that the death appeared accidental, & Hutchison was apparently not at the scene, he was condemned to death. The charges against Olen "Eddie" Hutchison were conspiracy & first-degree murder. By his own admission, Olen did a little loan sharking. And by coincidence, the only person on whom he ever took out an insurance policy died of suspicious causes. He was at home in bed at the time of the murder. From the time Olen was very young, he had worked. Extremely industrious, he had bought his own home by the time he was 17. An unlikely murderer, he claims he has no idea why he is facing the death penalty, even why he is in jail. This is the first conviction of Olen's life, & the state's case was circumstantial. Because Olen has plenty of money saved from his jobs & extracurricular businesses, he can afford to pursue his defense aggressively. "When I found out I was gonna be indicted, I transferred everything out of my name...& still, I live comfortably....I don't hurt. A lot of these guys don't have nothing. And the only thing I have to be careful about is how much money comes in here & how much goes out. Because then they'd start trying to tax me on it." We exchanged many letters with Olen before finally establishing our credibility. He then sent us volumes of trial transcripts & other materials. In this case the facts were complicated. But Olen's claim was simple, though not very comprehensible when put in his own words. "See, anytime, anytime you are found guilty of first-degree murder & the corpus delicti says hey, there's got to be a crime committed. Here we started with no crime & they made a crime. See, they just turned it around. So there, my issue, the corpus delicti issue, hasn't been met. Just because you have the dead body don't mean that it's been murdered." Death row is tense in Nashville, & security is high, albeit invisible. Not many people could be seen in common areas. The high-tech design of the pods where inmates are housed has reduced the number of personnel needed to manage the ever increasing numbers held in the prison.

The room where we took the photographs had an odd shape. Using convex mirrors, one guard outside the room could see every nook & cranny & monitor all activity inside the visiting space. Mirrors were everywhere. I thought they might be used to suggest the "fishbowl" atmosphere of prison. Reflected in a mirror, Olen's image is a story within a story. I was so anxious to get an image on film, I went to work in a panic, without thinking-afraid the authorities would rescind their permission at any moment. I heard hardly a word Hutchison was saying. Olen is feline in appearance & nature-not like a domesticated house cat, but a lion or a tiger. He talked about his situation in a conspiratorial manner, curling around his chair, careful not to say anything incriminating. Nothing in Olen's background could make us believe he was capable of what he was charged with. He knew how to use the court system to his advantage. "Because I'm...I'm suit happy. Do something to me, I'm gonna sue you. You want to give me that right, I'm gonna do it. And I figure that everybody's like I am." Prison is changing Eddie's white-collar attitude, though. Prison is fertile ground for all kinds of education. "Well, there's a lot of things I didn't know when I came to prison. I didn't know how to hotwire a car. I didn't know how to do forgery. I didn't know how to manipulate the law.... How to build bombs. You learn all the bad stuff....Prison does not rehabilitate." No one believes that every person convicted of murder should die. We are therefore faced with the problem of determining who should live & who should die. All human history tells us that we are not good at making such decisions. As Justice Harry Blackmun said shortly before his retirement from the Supreme Court: "I am...optimistic...that this Court eventually will conclude that the effort to eliminate arbitrariness while preserving fairness in the infliction of death is so plainly doomed to failure that it-& the death penalty- must be abandoned altogether. I may not live to see that day. But I have faith that eventually it will arrive. The path the Court has taken lessens us all."