hell out of here.
The condemned is a white man named Phillip Johnson. Twelve years ago, Johnson brutally raped and murdered eight-year-old Tanya Reid no more than ten miles from my house. He did unspeakable things to the child, then dumped her body in a culvert near the South Central community and covered it with brush. A couple of boys looking for frogs in the creek bed discovered Tanya two days later.
I’d been practicing law for only a few years when the crime occurred. I hung out my own shingle in northeast Tennessee as soon as I graduated from the University of Tennessee College of Law, and I wound up practicing criminal defense for many years. I was an outsider looking in during Johnson’s trial, but from everything I heard and read, there was no doubt about his guilt. He was a sex offender who’d already served seven years for fondling a young girl and was on parole, living in nearby Unicoi County, the day he snatched Tanya Reid from her driveway. His semen was found on the little girl’s body, and her blood and hair were all over the backseat of his car.
I’ve been sent here to witness the execution on behalf of the people of the First Judicial District and my boss, the man they elected as their attorney general. His name is Lee Mooney, and he was supposed to do this himself, but he called me into his office yesterday and said he’d decided to attend a conference in Charleston and would be gone until Friday evening. He then assigned this unpleasant task to me. I wasn’t offered the option of refusing.
Tanya Reid’s family is here-her mother, father, and three grandparents-and they smile at me tentatively. I’d introduced myself to them earlier, just as my boss had instructed. They’re simply dressed, quiet, grossly out of place so near this chamber of death. I remember the parents’ pleas on television the day after their child was abducted. They appear to have aged more than double the twelve years it’s taken to bring their daughter’s killer to what they believe is his rightful end. Their hair is gray, their shoulders slumped. They’re languid nearly to the point of being lifeless.
I must admit I’m conflicted about the death penalty. Philosophically, or intellectually, I just can’t cuddle up to the notion that a modern, civilized government that forbids its people from killing should be allowed to kill its people. But when I imagine putting the proverbial shoe on my own foot… well, let’s just say I know in my heart that if someone had kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered either of my children, I’d want them dead. I’d want them to suffer. I also know that I’d be perfectly capable of doing the killing myself. Maybe the state legislature should consider passing a law that allows the victim’s family the option of killing the condemned. They could also give them the option of killing the condemned in the same manner in which the victim was killed. Perhaps that particular form of revenge would provide the closure they seem to crave so deeply.
Sitting in the front row are two representatives from the media back home, both young female newspaper reporters, dressed in their dark business suits. So much time has passed since the crime occurred that the state and national media have moved on to more pressing matters. Tanya Reid is old news, perversely obsolete in our fast-moving society. As I look at them, I can’t help but wonder what kind of effect this is going to have. These young journalists, at once inexperienced and arrogant, have a condescending air about them as they prepare their “concerned” look for the live shot outside the prison later on. I wonder how they’ll feel about their love affair with professional voyeurism after they’ve watched a man die fifteen feet from their notepads.
At precisely the appointed time, they bring Johnson out into the death chamber in a white hospital gown, cuffs, and shackles. A steel wall separates the witnesses from the condemned. There’s a window, much like the one through which newborn babies are viewed in a maternity ward. I muse over the irony for a moment, then put it out of my mind…
Johnson is short and doughy, with neatly cut black hair, a double chin, and a clean-shaven face. The monster is forty-one years old, but he looks no more than thirty. He’s spent nearly half of his life in prison, but if you replaced the hospital gown with a jacket, slacks, and a tie, he’d look like the neighbor who passes the collection plate in church on Sunday mornings.
The prison’s representatives are here, too. Warden Tommy Joe Tester is leading Johnson into the chamber, followed by two massive prison guards in black uniforms. The chaplain, a physician, and two stone-faced medical technicians wearing white coats follow only a pace behind.
Johnson stops his shuffle and looks out over the audience mournfully. No one from his own family has come to watch him die. Until this point, he has at least attempted to remain stoic, but his lips begin to tremble and his shoulders slump. As the guards help him onto the gurney, he begins to weep. The guards remove his cuffs and shackles and replace them with leather straps attached to the gurney. Then they step back against the wall.
“That’s it, cry, you son of a bitch,” I hear Tanya’s father mutter from his front-row seat. “Go out like the coward you are.”
The warden, dressed in a navy blue suit, steps forward holding a piece of paper.
“Phillip Todd Johnson,” the warden says in a nasal Southern twang, “by the power vested in me by the state of Tennessee, I hereby order that the sentence of death handed down by the Criminal Court of Washington County in the matter of State of Tennessee versus Phillip Todd Johnson be carried out immediately. Do you have any last words?”
There’s a brief pause, and then a pitiful wail.
“I’m sorry,” Johnson cries. “I’m so very sorry. I couldn’t help myself. May God forgive me.”
I don’t know what God’s attitude toward him will be, but the state of Tennessee doesn’t seem to be in a forgiving mood.
“May God have mercy on your soul,” the warden says as the executioners efficiently hook an IV into Johnson’s left forearm.
Three different drugs will be injected into his body: five grams of sodium thiopental, which will render him unconscious, followed by one hundred milligrams of pancuronium bromide, which will block the neuromuscular system and cause his breathing to cease, and one hundred milliliters of potassium chloride, which will stop his heart. Each of the three doses would be lethal on its own, but the state wants to make damned sure he’s dead and that he doesn’t feel a thing. Those who are enlightened about such things consider this to be the most humane method of killing a human being.
Johnson continues to cry as the chaplain prays. Suddenly, the microphone inside the death chamber is turned off. All we can do now is watch. The prison physician steps forward while one of the EMTs walks behind a wall, presumably to release the first dose of fatal drugs. I want to close my eyes, but I can’t. Even though I find the entire matter hypocritical and disgusting, I’m riveted. Thirty seconds after the EMT disappears, Johnson’s chest rises, his eyes flutter, and he is still. The thought crosses my mind that the death he’s just been given was so much more serene than the one he doled out to little Tanya. Even so, I wonder how what I’ve just witnessed could possibly be called justice.
I sit in the seat for a moment, feeling awkward, not quite knowing what to do. Then the family rises, and I do the same. The show’s over-figuratively for the audience and literally for Johnson-and I hurry out into the night.
4
I sleep fitfully in the hotel room. The voices that haunt me alternate between Phillip Johnson’s and a young girl’s. Both are begging for their lives, asking me to save them. But I’m frozen in fear, unable to move or even speak. I wake three times during the night, drenched in sweat. Finally, at five thirty, I roll stiffly out of bed, go into the bathroom, and splash cold water on my face. I look into the mirror and wonder whether the nightmares will ever end.
They’ve dogged me for most of my life, these snippets of violence and horror, exploding ordnance, and cries of anguish. They began when I was a young boy and stumbled onto a rape. My teenage uncle was raping my sister, who was only a year older than I. I tried to stop it, but my uncle overpowered me, threw me out of the room, and I wound up lying on the floor, helpless, listening to my sister’s muffled cries.
Later I marched off to the army in a misguided attempt to feel some kind of kinship with my father, who was killed in Vietnam six months after I was conceived. I wound up parachuting into Grenada with two battalions of Rangers from the Seventy- fifth Infantry. The things I saw and did there enter into my subconsciousness randomly, like pop-up targets on a firing range, nearly always when I’m sleeping. The images don’t appear as often as they once did, but when they do, they come complete with digital sound and brilliant color, and they remain as vivid as the day they happened.
