Glynn Cartledge

Wearing a black pinstripe suit, I strode into the cavernous waiting room of a maximum security prison to meet a new client.  It was in the remote desert area of Ely, Nevada.  The “cop-killer.”  Edward.  A 6’ 2” comely, Death Row inmate, he stood anxiously at attention beside one of the front cafeteria tables, anticipating my arrival.  After pulling away from this stranger’s needy hug, I noticed his inscrutable blue eyes beaming through a flat affect.  There he was, my innocent charge.  The man I would represent for over twenty years.

Edward and three others faced the death penalty for the murder of a policeman.  On the advice of trial counsel and without a plea agreement, Edward pleaded guilty to capital murder.  Then, at his penalty hearing, his lawyer argued to the court that Edward was “a Judas Goat…who lured the victim, James Hoff to the scene of his death…[T]hese other boys were influenced and coerced and under the dominion and control of my client, [Edward]…” who “was yelling for his friends to stab Jim Hoff.” 

An artist who spent twenty-five years working as a criminal lawyer, my work explores the front end and the back end of incarceration — the time spent awaiting adjudication of charges and the reentry process after incarceration. My current series P2P is a compilation of oil portraits of formerly incarcerated individuals. Archival criminal and personal documents, family photographs, and recorded historical transcriptions and other sound recordings, along with collaged jail cells, provide context.