In America, capital punishment is a national gang initiation rite. Typically, an aspiring politician is accepted into our Crips-and-Bloods, two-party political arena only after declaring for the death penalty.
Execution as gang initiation may have happened, but mostly it’s a recurring urban legend. Gang initiates are said to be cruising the streets with their headlights off, ready to assassinate passing motorists who flash their lights as a “turn-on-your-lights” courtesy. False warnings of random initiation killings in WalMarts seem to move faster than light.
Untrue as most of these stories are, there’s something in the national consciousness that makes us vulnerable to them. Whatever that something is, it also plays a role in real-life executions carried out by the state on behalf of its citizens — us, whether or not we support the death penalty.
The 2004 Texas execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, a man experts say was innocent of the arson deaths of his three daughters (the fire that killed them wasn’t even arson) has brought capital punishment back to media prominence. Right-wingers, including Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who fired three board members of the state agency investigating Willingham’s execution, will want to reduce the case to a black-and-white shouting match over the death penalty.
The execution of an innocent man makes a profound, airtight argument against capital punishment. In this case, another question is whether political leaders charged with carrying out state executions should be held accountable when they kill the innocent. Willingham should not be turned into an empty political pawn. Perry and his right-wing allies will want to do that, and will try to obscure the facts of the tragedy behind an over-simplified defense of the death penalty.
As a reporter for the Houston Chronicle back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I covered the state prisons. I was a frequent visitor to Death Row, at that time home to around 125 condemned men. Today there are more than 330 awaiting death at the hands of the state.
Back in the ‘70s, the barber’s chair used to shave the hair of the condemned before electrocution stood in the corridor in front of the Death Row cells. It was a macabre reminder to inmates of the power of the state. But it was a relic; Texas law had already rejected electrocution in favor of lethal injection. Your head isn’t shaved before the needle. I often sat in the steel and vinyl barber’s chair while waiting to talk with inmates. It was the only seat available.
There wasn’t one of these men I ever wanted to see go free. Some did. Vernon McManus was freed when a key witness refused to testify at his retrial. McManus was a muscled-up former college football coach whose trial I’d covered some years earlier. He did exercises on his cell bars while we talked, using his arm, back and leg strength to suspend his heavy body at an angle over the floor of his cell. He meant to intimidate. He did.
I never witnessed an execution. The U.S. Supreme Court said in 1972 that the death penalty was so unevenly and arbitrarily applied that it constituted cruel and unusual punishment. In 1973, Texas passed a new capital punishment statute to meet the Supreme Court standards.
Editors felt the prison beat was perfect training for covering politicians, and I was transferred to the state capitol in 1982. From Austin, I covered the behind-the-scenes, last-minute legal maneuverings before Texas’ first execution under the new law. On a cold December morning, Pearl Harbor Day, 1982, Charlie Brooks was strapped to a hospital gurney, wheeled into the death chamber, and killed. From Fort Worth, Brooks, 30, was the first person in the world to be executed by lethal injection. He’d eaten a T-Bone steak for his last meal.
Mark White, who that November was elected governor of Texas, was attorney general. In a different kind of rite, he’d take his new oath of office one month later. One of his top assistants was Leslie Benitez, daughter of the Episcopal bishop of Texas. The attorney general represented the state, and he had to defend the laws of Texas as Brooks’ lawyers petitioned the Supreme Court for a last-minute stay. I was allowed into the work chambers of the attorney general’s team that dark night. Here’s how I described it in the Chronicle:
The legal proceedings which preceded Brooks’ execution were sterile and technical, but beneath the courtroom wars lay a time-hardened bedrock of emotion that centered on a question too complex for a ready answer: the worth of a life…
Arguing for the state of Texas and the constitutionality of the state’s capital murder law was 30-year-old Leslie Benitez…Leading the 11th-hour efforts to win a stay of Brooks’ execution was New York attorney Eric Freedman.
Ms. Benitez worked through the weekend, alone most of the time, in jeans and a sweatshirt, bent over stacks of legal briefs…Freedman worked out of a converted bathroom.
They fought over Brooks’ life from their separate offices, sending out their legal briefs by air courier and telephone, telecopier and errand boy.
There was little sleep.
Did Rick Perry and his team lose any sleep as they rejected Cameron Todd Willingham’s appeals? I doubt it. Instead, Perry seems to have given evidence of innocence little consideration. And, of course, he’s slammed the door on the Texas Forensic Science Commission investigation into the matter.
Today, state executions receive little news coverage. Many citizens, allowed to distance themselves from state killing, reach a kind of abstract comfort that vengeance has been taken on the cold-hearted murderers who perpetrated inhuman crimes.
Back in 1979, I asked George Beto, former Texas prison director and a Lutheran minister, whether a new film about life on Death Row would impact the debate over capital punishment. Beto shook his head. “As far as our criminal justice system is concerned, there is an invincible ignorance that exists among the general public.”
As I’ve written elsewhere, it is curious that right-wing defenders of the death penalty are willing to invest the state with such power even as they march in the streets to protest intrusive government.
Afraid of looking soft on crime, most politicians, whatever their private convictions, pass the national gang initiation test. Their calculation? “I can’t get elected if I oppose the death penalty, and that will stop all the good I might do once in office.”
Until the death penalty is repealed – and, if we are to call ourselves civilized, it should be – the very least those politicians can do is work with all their power to make certain only the guilty are killed.
Recently, Rick Perry dismissed several investigations that found Willingham innocent. “I’m familiar with the latter-day supposed experts on the arson side of it,” he said. As far as justice is concerned, an invincible ignorance exists in the heart of Perry and his kind.
I wonder, Glenn. What kind of “ignorance” is it, on the part of “Perry and his kind”? I think the political calculation you state — “I can’t get elected if I oppose the death penalty …” — is correct.
No doubt there is some ignorance, willing and otherwise, which informs voters and demands a particular “tough on crime” political stance necessiatating support of the death penalty. The pols themselves perpetuate that support by telling the pro-death penalty voters what they want to hear — both in feeding and then meeting that expectation.
Perry’s actions regarding the Texas Forensic Science Commission suggests his ignorance is selective and convenient. I have no idea if he personally supports the death penalty. But along with many other pols, he clearly has strong political convictions about using such support — and thus using the lives of people like Mr. Willingham.
I wonder — what will it take for a serious gubernatorial candidate to have a serious chance of winning in Texas?
Well, I was referring back to Dr. Beto’s statement about the public’s ignorance on criminal justice matters. And, as far as Perry goes, a lack of understanding of justice makes his cynical manipulations possible.
Got you. Ignorance regarding criminal justice certainly plays a big role. I wonder if Perry is aware of his lack of understanding, and the consequences thereof, or thinks he does understand. Or for that matter, maybe justice doesn’t really enter into it at all — political calculations are all that matter. He’s “familiar with the latter-day supposed experts on the arson side of it,” a clear dismissal.
But Dr. Beto’s statement about the public’s ignorance — that ignorance is necessary for the existing system to exist.
I have trouble ascribing it to simple ignorance of the justice system. The principle is so clear to me: if the possibility even exists that an innocent person may be condemned to death (and in a system where such decisions are made by ordinary humans, that possibility is impossible to avoid) there is no room for a punishment so irreversible. It’s especially ironic to me that these are the same people who claim to own morality. Really, what’s worse? Allowing gays to marry, or allowing the state to murder a man who already lost his daughters to an accidental fire?
It seems to me that ignorance, lack of understanding about the justice system, plays a role — regarding the populace in general, and to some extent the Elected Insiders. But the manipulations by those Insiders are, I’d guess, much more out of their perspectives on morality and political calculations than failure to understand the justice system.
To be clear, I have always opposed the death penalty, so no doubt that colors my thinking.