“Reading Marvin’s story was like sifting through a pile of broken ceramic. I wanted to piece the splintered bits together, to reconstruct Marvin’s human image from the fragments. But I felt, most of all, a sense of hopelessness. Marvin seemed shattered beyond repair.” Should we give a convicted criminal some mercy because of the childhood he experienced? In The Marshall Project, Burke M. Butler tells the story of one such criminal and one such childhood. The First Time Texas Killed One of My Clients.