The first urge when you're reading an execution log is believing that the condemned prisoner's actions in his or her last hours of life were a reflection of guilt or innocence. Those last hours when someone knows that he or she is going to die and not of old age or incurable illness, but after too much pentobarbital administered by the State of Texas, has a reality all its own and has nothing to do with what came before.
Second, you must forgive the guards who may be challenged by the English language but are there, basically, not to observe but to watch, something altogether different. They are there not to describe behavior but to avoid it, to make sure the condemned doesn’t “act out” or “go off on staff” or try to commit suicide.
Finally don’t always believe that use of brand name products connotes
product endorsement. If a condemned inmate was eating a Reese's Peanut Butter
Cup a few hours before execution that doesn't necessarily mean Reese’s is the
bomb, so good that every condemned man or woman would choose it over M&Ms
or Snickers for a final taste of sugar. It just means that’s what was available
in the commissary. As with everything else in an information-glutted
society we’re now getting more details on state-sponsored death and unlike
drone strikes or assassinations, this release is completely authorized. The
Texas Department of Criminal Justice revised its Death Row procedure manual
this summer and Attorney General Greg Abbott ruled the document is a public record.
That's important because as always the state prison system headquartered in
Huntsville, in East Texas, remains the go-to institution on all issues
execution-related. After the recent update there’s even been a new warning to
guards that “Staff must not accept a stay of execution from the offender’s
attorney.” Well yeah. That makes a certain sense. Nothing else does. Any keep-on-person medication
must also now be turned over and administered by medical staff, to avoid the
obvious. A few years ago a condemned Texas inmate managed to swallow a
potentially-lethal dose of medication and was rushed to intensive care, nursed
back to health—and then killed.
There’s much much more information now and it’s yours to read, thanks to General Abbott. “The Mountain View Unit Warden shall," for example, "ensure that a female offender brings personal hygiene and gender-specific items to the Huntsville Unit," containing the holding cells and execution chamber, "as appropriate.” That also makes a certain sense. The offender—inmates in Texas are universally called “offender,” as opposed to “prisoner,” which might have an unwanted political connotation. He or she fills out a religious orientation statement, decides whether his or her body will be donated, writes out a list of last visitors, and a record of his or her past commissary purchases is provided to staff, reason unknown, although presumably in order to assure last minute availability for purchase. “On the morning of the day of execution prior to final visitation, all of the offender’s personal property shall be packed and inventoried.” The inmate does that his or herself. This step is often missed in movies that imitate the final days of the condemned. On Texas’ Death Row you have to tidy up after yourself.
These written execution summaries also detail the prisoner’s last hours, it’s actually something the condemned spend a lot of precious time doing, sorting and re-sorting limited belongings and deciding who gets what when the present owner is gone. The same decision must be made about the inmate’s prison trust fund, basically his or her spending money, usually provided by family: it’s unclear if those who are about to die can bequeath to others who will die later. What's most interesting to us on the outside, is the beginning of the “Execution Summary Log,” seven days out, with observations and notes on the prisoner’s behavior, first every 30 minutes and, as the needle gets closer, every fifteen. Reading how the condemned spend their last hours you get an idea of the sense of unease as if no one knows how to use remaining minutes—so they try to do everything, or nothing at all. Shooting hoops in the exercise yard. . . listening to Metallica . . . eating Reese's . . . that’s how Cameron Todd Willingham passed the hours, among other activities, back in ‘04. Most everyone devoted time to rearranging worldly goods. There was a lot of writing but less reading than you would expect: No mention of the Bible for example. A good analogy about time-use might actually be financial, it’s like having a lot of bills coming due at the same time and very little money and not knowing exactly where to spend it, because there’s not enough to go around. So you waste instead.
The four inmates whose execution logs have been released include three men and one woman. Two Caucasians and two blacks. Two who were put to death more than a decade ago after a thumbs-down by Governor Bush, and two by incumbent Governor Rick Perry. One admitted her crime, one was widely believed to have been guilty and relied unsuccessfully on other means to escape death, and two were very probably innocent.
The four: Karla Faye Tucker, executed in 1998 for her part
in a gruesome murder she admitted helping to commit; Shaka Sankofa, aka Gary
Graham, executed by the State of Texas in 2000 for a robbery-homicide in a Houston parking lot which he may
not have done; Cameron Willingham, who has become the poster boy for anti-death
penalty activists, executed for an arson that killed his own three daughters,
following an investigation and trial that are now considered discredited; and Marvin
Wilson, lethally-injected in August 2012 for the murder of a police informant,
a crime he did not convincingly deny, basing his appeal instead on a low IQ.
Although Texas prisoners are specifically exempted from the state’s stringent
open records laws, Attorney General Abbott recently ruled the execution logs
can be released. Like his predecessors Abbott seems to have been moved by the
state’s strong adherence, surprisingly, to transparency—one of the few issues
that both parties in Austin have seemed to agree on in the past. So, too, there is the need
to satisfy the public’s fascination about executions. There does seem to be a certain public bloodlust at work but that's common in Texas. And then there’s the Lone
Star mentality, period. To many Texans there are only two kinds of people, good
‘uns and bad ‘uns and the bad ‘uns who kill need to get the needle. The Texas
public wants a couple of pounds of flesh, wants to see payback so, politically,
release of these logs was a good decision, eventually leading perhaps to the
hoped-for televised spectacle that polls have shown the public really desires, perhaps with sponsors like Hershey's chocolates.
Either that or gladiator games.
While
praising General Abbott, however, we should note that the value of these logs,
which could be a rich resource for research and investigation of both man and
the state’s baser instincts, was already diminished the moment Abbott made his
decision. The inmates whose last hours have already been chronicled by the
state were presumably unaware that their final movements would be made public.
In the future—once the grapevine activates and the condemned know that their
final days will be publicized—that knowledge will doubtless influence how they
spend their last moments. Like final statements and final meal requests, future
logs of these last moments may be tainted by self-awareness, by playing to the audience which is us.
Entries written by Shaka Sankofa's guards described him like a caged tiger, as trite as that may
sound. This isn’t soul on ice, it’s fire instead: sleeping fitfully, pacing
back and forth across his cell like the captured big cat he was, there was no
coming to terms with his fate. It was Sankofa’s seventh trip to the Death House
and he seemed to know it would be his last, with a bloody-minded
born-again Christian governor in office. George W. Bush would eventually okay the
executions of 153 out of 154 condemned inmates on his watch and this was a death
foretold. The scenes in the cell make for a pretty impressive one-man show,
worthy of Denzel but starring Shaka instead.
There’s not much dialogue—“pacing in
cell” and “laying in bed awake,” this was, like the death of the born-again
Christian Karla Faye Tucker, a celebrity execution. Sankofa was visited by
Bianca Jagger and Reverend Al Sharpton and both the Klan and the Panthers
demonstrated outside the prison with Texas Rangers present in case the groups mixed. Before being strapped down on the gurney, according to the log, Sankofa had
even taken a goodbye call from his Congresswoman. In the execution chamber Sankofa went into a long rap
as his final statement, still proclaiming innocence, rather eloquently one must
say, and putting his “murder” in revolutionary perspective. Long before her
death Karla Faye was visited in her cell by Governor Bush’s general counsel and
future United States Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, apparently carrying the
news that she would die. Among the last visitors who stood outside her holding
cell and talked to her, per the guards, was the head of the Texas prison
system, a Republican lawyer and criminal justice fixer from San Antonio named Polunsky.
In both cases what was discussed is known only by the lawyers themselves, who
aren’t talking. Sankofa’s death
was almost public, attended by much media—family and friends of both the
condemned and victim.
Like the others who were put to death, his time in the cell was not public until now and arguably more poignant for that fact. He paced, as has been noted. He went through his things. He read the newspaper, apparently following his own case in the media. He did what we all do, multi-tasking because he was pressed for time. “Offender sitting on toilet, also brushing his teeth.” Didn’t get much rest even when he could close his eyes: “Offender was waken from sleep by Officer Duff for count purposes.” He talked to himself and to the inmate in the cell beside him. He made his bed (everybody makes his or her bed, perhaps with the hope he or she will return to it) and got a clean jumpsuit. The pre-execution routine seems relentless. Those early morning prisoner counts even in the final hours. Sankofa refused a physical. And then came the explosion. Filmgoers are used to the long walk with clergy and warden, a la The Green Mile, or something with Jimmy Cagney, made popular through the years by Hollywood. Sankofa hadn’t seen the movie. He fought instead. That’s when the Extraction Team appeared, a group of well-padded guards, described by those who know as kind of looking like RoboCops, whose responsibility is to take dissenting inmates to their deaths. One of the last notations in the long log has Sankofa sitting of the floor of the van on the way to the execution chamber after he lost the fight. A USA Today reporter who witnessed the execution said later that Shaka was fighting again as he was strapped down to start the IV. While the attorney general has released these logs, as valuable as they are, the state has been more hesitant about film. Video of at least part of Sankofa’s encounter with the Extraction Team was taken but General Abbott’s predecessor as attorney general, incumbent U.S. Senator John Cornyn, denied all requests for its release years ago. Don't hold your breath.
Karla Faye Tucker also made a video sent to
Governor Bush apparently pleading for mercy, which the State of Texas has also refused to make public. Still, we do see something
of the condemned here if only through words, a few sentences here and there
written by people who were interested in security not history or
sociology.
Karla
Faye Tucker the day before her death: “Sitting on bunk talking to officers
about her busy day and how worried she was due to the amount of stress her being
at the unit has put on the staff.” “Stated she was writing an outline for
Chairman Polunsky on inmate rehabilitation to submit to the Board for future
reference.” “Lying on bunk looking at wall.” There does seem to be an effort by
the guards to put final moments in their best light, to skew the image of the
people we as a society have decided to separate from. To make it look like they
were more accepting of their fate than they actually were. Again in the case of
Tucker, the last entry on her last day reads: “Standing at cell door with a
smile on her face talking with Warden Dessie Cherry.” That was shortly before
the end. It’s probably safe to say she expressed other emotions as well, which
weren’t recorded.
That same emphasis on the positive is apparent
in the notations on Marvin Wilson, a more recent execution. “Talking with grand
kids with a smile on his face.” Several notations mention him smiling in his
last hours. He may have been a cheerful guy, but maybe he had other feelings as
well? Like: This is bullshit? Or, this is fucked up? Back in the
day, twenty years earlier, down in Beaumont he's supposed to have capped a
brother who ratted him out in a drug deal. So far, so bad. Then he told someone
about it, which is a recurring theme on Death Row, talking about it after
the fact. A potentially fatal mistake, in this state. Fast forward. In contrast
to Shaka Sankofa who took photos with his family (what's that caption
in the family album?) Marvin Wilson combed his hair before his last family
visit, got an insulin injection and was for a while on his final day playing
chess in his cell, which might belie his argument that his intellect was too
low to understand the charges against him. Tucker wore, the guards noted,
“prison whites, personal shoes” in the Death House. What does one
wear to one’s own execution? Sensible shoes. Karla Faye refused
meal trays (“Sitting on bunk writing. Stated she [is] fasting and was at
peace”), refused a shower, and “declined to watch television when asked if she
wanted to watch the news.” The only news she needed to know she already
heard.
Guards noted
Willingham chatting with a neighboring inmate, Bobby Ray Hopkins, a former bull
rider and drug dealer who was condemned to die for knifing two women. But
nothing about what they said to each other. We’re not asking
here for Socratic meditations, the meaning of good and evil or even final
thoughts about the meaning of life. But a few words about the last roundup might
be enlightening. Hopkins was apparently reticent generally. On the gurney,
before the poison started to flow, he told the warden that he had no statement,
“at this time.” The most pitiful of the four seems to be Willingham, in
the good sense of the word pity. Although not mentioned in his execution log
the rumor is that as he was strapped to the gurney Willingham used his free
hand and last minutes of life to try to give his ex-wife—who campaigned for his
death—the middle finger.
Ultimately
it’s still Shaka Sankofa who most attracts our attention, both in the cell and
outside. Even liberals in Texas argued that then-Gary Graham’s history of
bad acting on the streets of Houston had been so extensive that the death
penalty was not acceptable but still understandable. If that was true he was
being executed, in Texas terms, as a bad ‘un despite limited and contradictory
evidence. One condemned man who was housed in a
cell near Sankofa, a Latino from Ft. Worth who followed him to the gurney, took
time in his final statement to praise Allah. Shaka Sankofa was an earlier wave
of this same polemic.
Missing
in the recent death penalty debate—you may have noticed—is Barack Obama. Not
surprisingly for a president who doesn’t court controversy, no federal prisoner
has been scheduled for execution so far during his time in office. There are 58
men and women on the federal government’s death row, 35 of them minorities, the
highest number from—you guessed it—Texas, according to a reliable death penalty
website. Presumably the issue will come up eventually. It’s a good bet that President
Obama, like Bill Clinton, will come down on selective use of the needle in
those cases where the public is most demanding and the facts are clearest. As
he is not opposed to all wars, only dumb wars, one supposes that he is only opposed to
dumb executions. His work in the Illinois Senate limiting use of the death
penalty is not much to go by, the issue is different for a president who must
enforce the law than for a senator who has to write it. And we still
owe Attorney General Abbott a debt of gratitude for taking away some of the
mystery of our last hours.
