David Dow - The Autobiography of an Execution

But I remembered something. Fifteen years earlier, the Supreme Court had agreed to hear the appeal of a Texas death-row inmate, and after the Court announced that decision, a trial court scheduled the inmate’s execution. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stepped in and granted the inmate a stay. According to the Texas court, if the Supreme Court had agreed to hear the case, then it would be unseemly for the State of Texas to carry out an execution in the interim. I said to Kassie, We have to file something in state court and ask for a stay so that the Supreme Court can consider the appeal. I told her of another case where we had made a similar argument, so she and the others could work off those pleadings as a template. I said, Call me as soon as it’s filed.

Then I called the attorney general. Charles Allred was the assistant assigned to the case. I’d met him once. He looked barely old enough to shave. People who are so young that they still believe themselves to be immortal should be barred from facilitating death. I told him we intended to file something and explained our theory. I said, I know your usual practice is not to go forward with an execution while an appeal is pending, and I just want to make sure that you all will wait to go forward until our appeal is disposed of.

But nothing is pending yet, right?

It will be within the next few minutes.

It was ten fifty. He said, I’ll give you until eleven, and he hung up.

After the fiasco surrounding the Buckley execution, when the court of appeals had closed before we could file our papers, that court instituted a system for electronic filings. Kassie called. She said, It’s short, and it’s not very good, but it’s ready. Do you want to look at it? I told her just to file it and then to call Allred.

I said, Thanks for getting it done. Call me as soon as you hear something.

I had been standing in the courtyard, right beside the door that opened into the area for the inmate’s witnesses. There were separate doors leading to other areas for witnesses related to the victim, and for the press. There were no witnesses for the victims, so both those rooms were being used for press. A reporter named Marcus Godbold walked outside and said to me, Aren’t you going to come in? They’re getting ready to start.

Are you sure?

Well, they just opened the curtain, and your guy’s on the gurney.

ONCE ON THE LOWER Guadalupe River, a five-mile stretch of whitewater in central Texas that’s mellow except when it’s flooded, one of the kayakers in a group a quarter mile downriver from me missed his roll three times on the swollen river and had to swim. He got pinned between his boat and a massive tree. Water was pouring over his head. He was screaming, I don’t want to drown, don’t let me die. I was running the river with Craig. We both had throw ropes, and I had taken a swift-water-rescue course, but that was pretend. My real-life experience with treacherous rescues was nil. Craig paddled into a two-boat eddy behind a boulder as big as a truck. I followed him in. He pointed to a spot on the bank, and said, Let’s set up rescue lines there. It was so loud I wasn’t sure I had heard him. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear him. He wedged his boat between two rocks and went scurrying toward the spot.

Two hours later, we were at the takeout, washing down Snickers bars with bottles of Fat Tire, which tastes a lot better than it sounds. I was glad Craig had been there. If it had been up to me, I might just have paddled on, hoping the guy would make it, leaving his rescue to his buddies and the EMTs. I would have read the papers and checked out the whitewater paddling Web sites, looking for news. It would have bothered me forever. I don’t know anybody who wants to be paralyzed by panic.

Maybe I learned something from that experience. But like I said, lessons lose something in translation. When the reporter told me Henry was on the gurney, I had no idea what to do.

INMATES ARE EXECUTED by a cocktail of three chemicals. The first is a barbiturate that makes the inmate go to sleep. The second causes paralysis. The third induces cardiac arrest. They give the second drug for the sake of the witnesses. If the inmate were not paralyzed, he would flop around like a fish out of water when the third drug stopped his heart. The first drug is for the sake of the inmate. If he doesn’t get enough of it, he will feel himself suffocating to death after his diaphragm is paralyzed from drug number two, and the third drug will inflict excruciating pain, like pouring muriatic acid into an open wound.

Two executioners sit in a separate room and watch for the warden’s signal through a strip of one-way glass. The warden stands at the inmate’s feet, next to a phone. He reads the death warrant out loud, and before he nods to get things under way, he calls the attorney general and the governor’s office to make sure it’s appropriate to proceed.

I called the office. Gary answered. I said, Get the goddamned thing filed.

It’s almost done.

They’ve got Quaker on the gurney. Just file it.

He said, Hold on. I heard him shout to Kassie.

Impotence is unremarkable. Of the millions of Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust, some of them were children who died while their powerless parents watched. Hundreds of people a year get executed in China, Iran, Iraq, and Sudan, and the government bills the family for the cost of the bullet to the brain. I read about a woman who was watching her husband and their two children climb a mountain in Austria. The daughter fell, their arrest lines snapped, and all three plunged to their deaths. Did she scream? Did she run toward them? I read about a man holding his twin boys on a roof in Haiti during a hurricane. One slipped and the raging flood waters carried him away. Did the man think about jumping in after him? Did he cover his other son’s eyes?

Is there any shame in not going through meaningless motions? You can throw yourself into the gears, but most of the times jet engines suck in a bunch of birds, the plane keeps on flying.

I called Connie, the warden’s assistant, and asked her how I could call the phone in the chamber. She said she didn’t know. I did not believe her, but I didn’t have time to argue. I called the one judge on the court of appeals whose cell number I know and got her voice mail. I called Allred’s office and got his, too. Who else could I call? What could I do? I couldn’t think. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do a thing. I called Allred’s boss. After the fourth ring, Marcus Godbold opened the door to the courtyard again. He said, You better hurry up.

IRAN INTO THE WITNESS ROOM. I said, I’m here, Henry, but I had no idea whether he could hear me. I heard him talking to the men who were next to him.

He was saying, I truly am innocent. One day, I hope somebody will prove that. Dorris was the love of my life. Daniel and Charisse were our greatest joys. I could never have harmed them, and their deaths destroyed me. Not a single minute of a single day has gone by that I haven’t missed them terribly. He looked at me. He said, And you believed me.

I could see a single tear spill out of each of his eyes. He looked at the two guards standing on either side of him. He looked into the room where the executioners were. He looked at the warden. He said, When the truth comes out, I do not want any of you to feel guilty for what is happening here tonight. I mean it sincerely. You all have treated me fairly and with respect. You’ve done what you had to do. I respect that. This is not your doing, or your fault, or in your control.