David Ellis - Eye of the Beholder

I see David and Maureen Danzinger and feel something float through my stomach. I’ll never forget the looks on their faces after they identified their daughter, Ellie, who had been a sophomore at Mansbury. They had flown back from South Africa immediately upon hearing the news but seemed unable to comprehend the fact until they saw it firsthand, saw their daughter lying dead on a slab with a tremendous gash in her body where her heart used to be. They spent the entire year in town, waiting for the trial, which they attended every day.

Maureen Danzinger approaches and takes my arm. It’s been over seven years now. Seven years, waiting for this day, probably hoping that it would bring some semblance of closure, knowing in her heart that it would not. Her hair has grayed, her eyes sunk, her midsection widened, and she’s probably reconciled herself to the fact that her daughter’s killer was caught and convicted, would be dead in half an hour, and justice would be done. That will have to be enough. People are like that when dealing with such staggering pain. They need hope. They can’t bring their daughter back, so they focus on something that is attainable-justice for the murderer. It won’t untie the knot but hopefully loosens it.

I say hello to her husband, David, as well. He is dressed in a dark suit. That seems to be the attire of choice, funeral chic, which I find interesting, because when you get down to it, no one’s really mourning the loss of this guy, at least no one in this room.

Joel Lightner walks up to me and smirks. Retired police detective, the one who broke the case. Or caught the case that practically fell into his lap, he’d admit after one too many bourbons.

“Bentley’s not coming?” he asks me, a trace of disappointment in his tone.

He’s referring to one of the other victims’ families, the other student besides Ellie, who was murdered. Cassandra Bentley, daughter of Harland and Natalia Lake Bentley. I shake my head no. Harland’s my client now in private practice, we talk on a weekly basis, and we never so much as broached the subject of Terry Burgos’s execution.

“Jackals are in the next room.” Joel says it with disdain out of the corner of his mouth, his reference to the reporters who won the lottery and are inside the compound, but this is a marketing opportunity for his new business as a high-priced private eye. He’ll be sure to throw out some quotes to the media.

I look to my right through the Plexiglas window, where the reporters are sipping drinks or munching on cookies. The warden’s rule-reporters can come but can talk to the official witnesses only if the witnesses are willing. He even designated a separate room for the media until showtime. At the moment, no official witnesses are in there, but that’s probably because I’m late. They’ve probably gotten everything they wanted by now.

Joel nudges me. “Know what he had for his final meal?”

I shake my head, even though I know.

“Tacos,” he says, beaming.

We are led into the official witness room at 11:45. It’s a room no larger than a living room, entirely lacking decor, gray walls and two rows of seats, the second row raised a single step up. No one really knows where to sit, but people seem to be in a hurry to take the back row, as if that provides them with distance from the spectacle. I figure I’ll let the victims’ families make the decision, so I end up sitting front and center, next to Joel on one side and Carolyn Pendry, a television reporter from Newscenter 4, on the other. Looking forward from my seat, there is a floor-to-ceiling window into the neighboring room, currently covered by a pale green curtain.

I can’t shake the analogy, it’s like going to the movies, settling in and waiting for the curtain to part. There is a table with pitchers of water and coffee-as if anyone needs caffeine right now-but otherwise no refreshments. Joel Lightner asked me yesterday if he should bring popcorn.

“What’re you doing after?” Carolyn Pendry, the reporter, whispers, with a tremble in her voice. She’s one of the city’s many reporter babes, tall and blond, high cheekbones. She’s completely made up, like the other reporters who will be going on camera later. She’s making a joke, an attempt to seem cool. Joel and I are going to get a steak afterward, actually, but I’m not going to share that with her.

Carolyn leans into me. “What did he say to you yesterday?”

“No comment” The fine reporter she is, Carolyn learned that Terry Burgos requested that I visit him yesterday. In the last three days before an execution in this state, an inmate is placed in an area known as “Deathwatch,” a group of four cells in the building adjacent to the execution chamber, where he is under twenty-four-hour observation by a team of correctional officers who work twelve-hour shifts. Condemned inmates are allowed two visitors a day over each of the three days. I was the only person to visit. It lasted all of five minutes.

The next several minutes are weird. The Department of Corrections sets a rigorous protocol for executions-from the timing of the final consultations with clergy to the last meal to the “death march” from Deathwatch to Building J to the official phone call to the commissioner, seeing if there are any last-minute stays-but there are no regulations that explain how to watch a man die. People are antsy in their seats. The reporters especially-the ones who are here for their job-are not enjoying themselves. It’s guaranteed airtime for them, maybe a special afterward about the crimes or the death penalty, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to enjoy this.

At about ten to twelve, the curtain on the window parts, pulled manually by prison guards. Carolyn, next to me, jerks. Various noises from the witnesses, gasps and moans and even a sob. The people in the back row are looking at the man who killed their daughters.

It’s a large space, with a small circular room within a room, a pale green-painted octagonal metal box, about six feet wide and eight feet high. The entrance is through a rubber-sealed steel door that has been closed by a large locking wheel. There are windows on all seven other sides, so that each of us in the viewing room can see the condemned prisoner.

Terry Burgos is in white boxers only, sitting in a metal chair, with leather straps across his upper and lower legs, arms, thighs, chest, and forehead. A long Bowles stethoscope is affixed to his hairy chest and leads outside the gas chamber, where a doctor will be able to pronounce Burgos dead without having to enter the chamber.

The forehead restraint is a new thing, after a guy down south split his head open banging it against the steel pole behind the chair while he fought the air hunger. Leave it to our state to want to stop a man from knocking himself unconscious so we can execute him.

If Terry Burgos looks pathetic, a hairy, pudgy man sitting in his underwear, strapped into a chair, with an audience watching the spectacle, he doesn’t reveal any awareness of it whatsoever. He doesn’t show much of anything, moving his eyes from person to person with the wonderment of a child. He has lived almost entirely in isolation for the last seven years, and maybe there is something stimulating about this.

Beneath Burgos’s chair is a bowl filled with sulfuric acid mixed with distilled water. Suspended above the bowl, in a gauze bag, is a pound of sodium cyanide pellets. When the warden gives the signal, the guard outside the gas chamber will pull a lever that will release the cyanide into the liquid, causing a chemical reaction that releases hydrogen cyanide.

Actually, there are three levers that will be pulled simultaneously by three different guards. Two of the levers will not do a damn thing, while the third will lower the pellets into the acidic water. None of the three guards will go to bed tonight knowing that he was the one who killed a man. The state may lack compassion for its killers but not for the executioners.