The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts (18 page)

Dr. Austin Sarat, a professor of political science at Amherst College, authored
Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty
, which chronicles capital punishment gone wrong through the centuries as the United States has attempted to find a more “humane” form, moving from hanging to electrocution, poison gas, and lethal injection. Even when using this final method, the state, Dr. Sarat found, can only pretend at an ability to control death: an alarmingly high number of lethal injections are especially painful or prolonged—from 1980 to 2010, Dr. Sarat put that figure at more than 7 percent.

Who is being put to death at such executions? It is and is not the person who committed the crime. Decades may have passed.
The person in the gurney may have become devoutly religious, or new evidence may have complicated the way the person's crime is understood. The sentenced may have gotten married to someone who doubts their guilt or forgives them. Or they may be even more bitter and ruthless, and less repentant. Of course, as is disturbingly often the case, they may be innocent. Since 1973, one person has been exonerated for every nine executed, according to Dr. Sarat.

Change may also have occurred on a larger scale in the community where the crime took place, with the criminal act receding into the distance. In the popular justice of the past, this community, as a mob, fueled by outrage, ended the life of an alleged killer. The mob often employed extraordinarily graphic violence to do so. These acts—burning people to death, slowly cutting them into pieces, pouring boiling oil into their wounds, and other methods used independently and in combination—were remarkably imaginative and intended to surpass the brutality of the original crime committed. The waiting period inherent to the modern application of the death penalty makes it possible for the emotions that drove such acts to subside. A new generation comes of age. The punishment of the convicted becomes secondary to current issues of concern, including whatever new transgression has been committed.

Some of those who support the death penalty say they do not want to pay for the criminals to live in prison. According to Garland, the costs of keeping someone alive in prison are far exceeded by those incurred when the death penalty is pursued, in large part because of the cost of the original trial, which is much lengthier and includes more expert testimony and far more attorney hours. Sub
sequent rounds of appeals continue to escalate the cost. A study by the Urban Institute using data from 1978 to 1999 found that Maryland spent about $1.1 million for each death-penalty-eligible case in which prosecutors did not pursue this sentence, compared to about $3 million in cases that resulted in a sentence of death.

Perhaps, in a state such as Pennsylvania, the existence of the death penalty, though unapplied, maintains a purpose: sentencing a criminal to execution is a symbolic means of affirming to victims and citizens that the person accused is deserving of the maximum punishment available. Death is delayed, dangled over the convicted, until they die of natural causes in prison.

Texas is not Pennsylvania. Here, the death penalty is not an empty threat; it is a frequently applied punishment. The gap between how these two states use it indicates what has allowed the penalty to survive in the United States: the division of state and federal powers. A majority of Americans may or may not approve of the practice. That doesn't matter—the majority of Texas lawmakers do.

Michael Graczyk, an Associated Press reporter based in Houston, has witnessed around four hundred executions since 1984, perhaps more than any other American and certainly more than any other journalist in this country. He describes executions, using the lethal injection method, as somewhat anticlimactic. The person usually begins to make noises that sound like snoring. Eventually, the sounds get less pronounced, and the person stops moving.

In Texas, the members of the family of the victim and the family of the convicted are placed in two separate rooms, where they watch the execution from behind a window. By the time they are allowed into these rooms, the needle has already been inserted into
the arm of the convicted. No appeals are possible, just the inmate's last words. After the execution is complete, Graczyk often asks the family of the victim how they feel, and they sometimes express disillusionment: the execution took too many years to complete, they lament, and when it was actually carried out, it appeared to be disconcertingly peaceful, like the “dude was taking a nap,” as one man said to Graczyk.

Witnesses chosen by the convicted often shed tears. Sometimes they beat on the walls or cry out or hyperventilate. In many instances, by the time the execution is over, a foggy handprint is on the window.

The victim's family, on the other side of the wall, tends to show less emotion. Graczyk can remember few occasions when these witnesses have done more than simply sit in silence. At one execution, a man turned his back toward the convicted, so it was all the condemned man could see of him as he died. Once, when the execution was completed, an observer yelled out, “It's time to paaaaarty!” Usually, however, little is said. The day that began this process—when the loved one was killed—hangs over the event and likely dominates thoughts. It might be seen as a victory—that justice has been served—but it's also solemn, a day of mourning for a series of events that all wish had never transpired.

The intentionally mundane nature of these executions usually gives reporters little material to sensationalize, were they so inclined. This suits Graczyk well, as a careful steward of this controversial beat, intent on maintaining impartiality. When asked how the executions weigh on him, the emotions he goes through, or the experience of watching the first execution versus the four hundredth, he
said that his work as a reporter preempts any possibility of emotional involvement. He is simply too busy doing his job, often as the only reporter present to record what transpires, to indulge personal revelations.

I asked Graczyk if it would be useful for me to attend an execution as I attempted to understand them better.

“The only thing that you would see or experience for yourself is how quickly it occurs,” he said. Normally, the inmate goes unconscious in less than a minute. Ten or twenty minutes later, a physician comes in the room and pronounces him or her dead, but the precise moment of death is unknown.

I asked him again—would there be something to understand, not as a reporter gathering facts, but as a person experiencing the event?

Graczyk said he didn't understand why I would want to attend an execution unless I had some personal stake in the case, as the witnesses typically do. He was right: Who would want to watch such a morbid event? Who would want to impinge on the privacy of the families as they mourn? A reporter attends on behalf of the public, to monitor this most powerful symbol of the state's control—its ability to take life. But don't I and every other American have a personal stake in every execution that occurs? How can any of us discover our position on such a law without comprehending its full weight, as we might if we saw it enacted?

The viewing of executions was once essential to their power. In France, the usefulness of the guillotine depended on the crowd and its reaction. During the Revolution, these public executions became such a popular part of life that a crowd of regulars convened daily to watch, the operators were celebrated, songs were
written about the instrument, and a child-size replica with a real blade was a popular children's toy. Public executions ended in France in 1939—three years after the final public execution in the United States—though capital punishment remained legal there until 1981. While in retrospect the guillotine is a stark symbol of state brutality, it was considered the most humane method at the time—a rapid drop of a blade meant to end life as efficiently as possible. Now lethal injection is considered more civilized, but the guillotine was likely a quicker form of death. As Dr. Sarat writes, “The experience of execution by its witnesses—their ‘suffering'—fuels the search for painless death,” more so than the desire to curtail the torture of the convicted.

Graczyk has mostly numbed to the horrors that prompted the executions he reports on. After his reading and writing in detail about hundreds of murders, only parenthood has changed his perspective, giving him a heightened awareness of the vulnerability of his children. When they don't show up on time, he imagines the worst, knowing that the scenarios his mind might invent are more than hypothetical. The worst has happened and will likely happen again to some child.

“You try to tell your kids, without scaring them, that there are bad people out there,” he said.

In Brownsville, the building on East Tyler Street is a reminder of such atrocities. Though inanimate, its voice resonates. Carlos Garcia, the chief of police in Brownsville when the children were killed, told me that, while the Rubio deaths “should teach us a lesson, some will learn and some will never learn.” Garcia kept his composure through nearly an hour of discussion about the crime scene, his
own children, and the violence he's seen in his career. Only when we came back to the role of the building did he break down. “It should remind us that life is precious, that our children are precious to us, and to go home and hug our children every day,” he said tearfully. “If the building stays behind, it will always be a landmark of three children who were never given an opportunity to live, to see the sun rise one more time, to see the moon.”

Larry Lof, who has restored many of Brownsville's most famous buildings, told me that the architecture in a community adds up to more than the sum of its parts. “A historic neighborhood is a collection of buildings. None of them might be the most special building in town, but together they form an
ambiente
, they form a character that defines a neighborhood.”

What would be lost if that voice, an insistent whisper, was silenced? Under Lof's definition, any building the city demolishes represents a small blow to Brownsville's history. I imagined an aging woman's face, then a brow lift, collagen in the lips, stretching of the skin. Now she is unrecognizable.

Though I sometimes thought of John when I looked at the building, and the time both had left, their respective ends were in no way equivalent. To kill a person exists on another plane from the act of dismantling bricks and wood beams. The parallel is found in the satisfaction promised by destruction: to lend the weight of tangibility to the ephemeral. You can take a mallet and bust into the wall of a building. You can load poison into a syringe and inject it into the body of a human being.

You can see them both reduced to absence. Then, we are left with nonexistence, a blank space. A piece of earth can host another
structure, and though it will be different from what came before, it can serve a new purpose. But when a life is gone, it is not replaced.

• • •

I returned to see John a year later. He was still going through post-conviction review, but he likely had less than a decade left in Livingston before he would be taken to nearby Huntsville to be executed.

As I drove toward the prison, the small hills began to get more pronounced, and trees blazed red and yellow on the edges of the road. I didn't feel nervous this time, as I had the last. Still, certain facts were churning in my mind: I wanted to know more about John's spray use, which had been far more excessive than I'd realized, and ask him about the state of the apartment—perpetually filthy in the months before the children died, and shared with other people who were doing drugs and working as prostitutes.

My visit fell on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and several of the visitors at death row were children, ranging from a towheaded toddler with a sparkly headband, to a teenager play-fighting with a younger sibling. The mood was somber, and again the conversations for the most part had little to do with the prison that surrounded us. People seemed intent on pretending that they were not using a telephone to communicate through the thick wall of glass that separated them from their loved ones who sat, depersonalized, in plain white jumpsuits. No, we were just sitting in a cafeteria, munching on pastries from a vending machine, catching up before the holiday. I heard a father talk about car mechanics, and a teenage girl describe getting noticed by boys in the neighborhood.

Stay cool, I love you,
a man said over the phone, putting it on the cradle as he smiled through some private pain.

An hour later, John was brought out and placed in the little booth in front of me. Once the barred door was closed behind him, a guard removed his handcuffs through a hole in the back of the miniature cell. John smiled, and I smiled back. He told me that I looked tired.

“It's a long trip,” I said.

He looked tired, too, though I didn't tell him so. Dark bags were under his eyes, and his skin was pale, his hair shaved close to his skull. His cheeks had a couple of days' worth of stubble, which he said he'd been punished for. He'd gotten in trouble in the past for setting fires in his cell.

John was happy for the break from his quarters, but he seemed fundamentally sad. He asked me how things were, and I told him that I got married a couple of months before, and that I was planning to move away from the valley. He congratulated me. I asked him how he'd been and he said okay. One couldn't expect a better response than that. No one in here was doing “well” or “great.”

I've never huffed paint and asked John what it felt like. He said that huffing was ultimately not about pleasure. It was a distraction, albeit one that lasted only minutes, from an emptiness he'd felt inside in his teens and the first years of his twenties. After graduation, the boundaries of high school, the coaches and the teachers who motivated him to come to practice, study harder, get in shape, were absent. He had no direction at home, and high school was the closest he ever came to thriving. His attention problems and learn
ing disability got in his way, and he was unhappy when bored. Of course, the spray and the pot likely made this worse.