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.
I RAN 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.
The warden squeezed the bridge of his nose. One of the guards wiped his eyes with his forearm. Henry looked at the warden. He said, That’s it.
The warden seemed lost for a moment. Then he took a copy of the death warrant and read it out loud. He asked Henry if he had a statement. Henry said, Warden, I’m ready.
The newspaper the next day would say that Henry started softly to sing a Psalm. It wasn’t a Psalm. I recognized it. It was a Tracy Chapman song. He was singing about saving a space in your heart. But who was he singing to? Dorris? The children? Was he saving the space, or was someone else supposed to save it for him? These are the questions I wanted to ask. He turned his head and faced the window separating him from me. Could he see through it, or was he seeing his reflection? I think I might have shaken my head. He smiled, like it was a joke. He had to be able to see me. He said, Thank you, man. Thank you. Then he faced the ceiling and sang again.
This could not be happening. We had an appeal pending. My head fell against the window, like a Muslim in prayer. The warden nodded at someone, and instantly a guard was behind me, his hand on my shoulder. I said to no one, We have an appeal still pending. Could anybody hear me?
He seemed to relax. I said, I’m here, Henry. I’m here. I’m standing right here.
He turned his head toward me. He mouthed,
No.
I slumped down onto the floor, my back against the wall separating me from him. I heard a chaplain repeating a monotonous prayer. I watched him play with his beads. I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. I did not look down to see who it was.
At 11:37 p.m. the doctor pronounced him dead.
EARLIER I SAID life has no lessons. That’s not exactly true. There are lessons, but only for the wise. If you don’t learn them, you have only yourself to blame. There might not be anything you can do about it, but it’s still your own fault. Fault and free will are unrelated ideas.
We represented a death-row inmate named Darrin Grand. The judge who presided over his trial had carried on an affair for more than ten years with the district attorney who prosecuted Grand. At the time, each was married to someone else. They kept their relationship secret.
People don’t care about murderers, or about the constitutional rights of men like Darrin Grand, but right and wrong aren’t a matter of popular sentiment. If you were getting a divorce, and you found out the judge was sleeping with your spouse’s lawyer, how confident would you be that the judge was fair? Maybe you can’t imagine getting a divorce. Do you want the pitcher’s father calling balls and strikes when your kid is standing at the plate?
Two weeks before Grand was supposed to be executed, an assistant district attorney gave us an affidavit confirming that his boss had been sleeping with the judge. We filed an appeal citing the alleged affair. The court of appeals ruled against us, saying that all we had was rumor and statements from third parties. They demanded proof of the affair with firsthand evidence. The appellate court’s theory boiled down to this: Since the trial judge and the DA weren’t talking, the state could go ahead and execute Mr. Grand, even if everyone else in the courthouse, from the other judges all the way down to the nighttime cleanup crew, swore the affair had gone on.
Some days murderers steal my spirit. Most of the time, though, it’s judges.
But for every ten or twenty gutless panderers, there’s a soul that houses righteous indignation. One of them lived north of Dallas, and we won the lotto when our case was randomly assigned to his court. He ordered the former judge and prosecutor to sit for depositions. One of law’s mysteries is the power of the oath. Witnesses swear to tell the truth, and they usually do. Even presidents can’t resist. The DA and the trial judge both admitted to the affair.
But none of that happened until many months later, and it never would have happened at all if Grand hadn’t managed to escape being executed on the night the court of appeals turned us down. After the state court denied our request for a stay at eight o’clock in the evening, we decided to file something else. We more or less made it up as we were writing it. It had no chance of succeeding. None. It was such a feeble theory that, as I write these words, I can’t even remember what it was. All I know is that it was like heaving the ball toward the hoop after all the fans have left the arena, the lights have been dimmed, and the officials have taken the basket down.
Pursuit of futility, however, is not necessarily a futile pursuit. By the time the other side filed its response, and by the time the appellate court ruled against us yet again, it was half past eleven. Prison officials said they could not carry out the execution in the remaining half hour. They put Grand back in the van and returned him to death row.
We had run out the clock. We kept Grand alive for a little longer, and in that time we stole, we proved what the judges on the court of appeals probably thought—what they secretly hoped—we never would, which is why Grand is still alive today. There is no such thing as delay for the sake of delay, because delay’s shadow is where relief often lurks.
