[DP] Fwd: A Must Read

[Carole Johnson]

>From: Nancy Bailey <nlbailey at earthlink.net>
>>Subject: [TCADP-BOARD01] A Must Read
>Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2003 16:03:58 -0500
>
>National Catholic Reporter, July 4, 2003
>
>LIVING NEXT DOOR TO THE DEATH HOUSE
>
>By Virginia S. & David C. Owens
>Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 234 pages, $28
>An inside look at life in the nation’s execution capital
>
>Reviewed by JAMES MEGIVERN
>
>In the year 2000 Huntsville, Texas, was rated as one of America’s “dream
>towns,” a quiet community with a high quality of life, a good
>university, and many pleasant cultural assets. And yet, “the only
>picture most people have of Huntsville” is due to a single room at the
>Walls prison compound -- the death chamber. “The effect of what goes on
>in that small room reaches out like tentacles to touch the lives of
>everyone who lives there.”  Such is the thesis of an impressive new book
>examining the reality of Living Next Door to the Death House. Its main
>voice is that of Virginia Stem Owens, whose lifelong association with
>the town is the basis for both its title and its uniqueness. What makes
>this far more than a personal memoir, however, is the fact that she and
>her husband, David, consistently interweave their own perceptive
>insights into a series of extended interviews with townspeople.
>
>The reader is progressively introduced to an entire cast of local folks
>involved in all aspects of the capital punishment system. The result is
>a broad awareness of how the constant performance of state killings has
>to affect a community, even though few want to talk about it openly. The
>direct way in which the hard questions are asked and the conversations
>are conducted makes the book an unusually interesting and informative
>work. It especially shows how completely the system focuses on
>punishment, making the criminal the center of attention, while victims
>are reduced to “merely evidence … little more than pawns in the game of
>justice.”
>
>Relevant anecdotes deliver much of the book’s impact, especially in the
>interviewing of professional insiders. Two seasoned defense attorneys
>reveal aspects of their cases that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme
>Court, ultimately to no avail. Wardens and guards tell of how the system
>has changed dramatically since the 1982 start of the “new” death penalty
>with its clinical lethal injection apparatus. The hard-nosed
>vindictiveness that has now become the system’s trademark was not always
>the prevailing sentiment. But with 300 executions performed in
>Huntsville in the last 20 years, far more than anyplace else in the
>country, the town somehow borders on the unreal. How can such an
>“industry” fail to generate a community marked by a great deal of bad
>faith?
>
>Some of those responsible for doing the dirty work began their
>employment long after Old Sparky had been retired and consigned to a
>museum and the death chamber was empty and inactive. One of these men,
>late in his career, became head warden and in three years had to
>supervise the demise of no less than 89 prisoners.  With deeply
>conflicted feelings, he admitted to the Owenses that the found
>intentional killing of human beings an “unnatural act,” and that he was
>especially bothered by the realization that some convicts had changed
>their lives and “were not the same men who committed the crime,” while
>others, he was convinced, were actually innocent, the hapless victims of
>a badly flawed system that its functionaries have to pretend is beyond
>valid criticism.  This particular interview led the authors to observe,
>“The system is intentionally designed to so distribute the
>accountability for executions that no single individual need ever feel
>the full force of responsibility,” from the governor who signs the death
>warrant down to the technicians who insert the poison-bearing needles.
>It is crucial for its survival that the process be kept completely
>impersonal so that nobody has to take the blame for what is being done.
>
>Another interview was with a man who had been on the “tie-down” team for
>10 years. As one of four officers -- each responsible for securing one
>of the prisoner’s limbs to the gurney -- he had played this minor role
>in carrying out a grand total of 130 executions. The last time, however,
>the prisoner was not a man but the first woman to be killed in the Walls
>death chamber, Karla Faye Tucker (Feb. 3, 1998). He recalled that she
>went to her death “with a smile on her face. … She looked at me and
>said, ‘We’re going to all be forgiven.’ ”  Two days later he broke down
>in public and quit his job, telling the warden, “I can’t do it no more!
>... Just because it’s the law doesn’t make it right. … It’s not right,
>it’s just not right.”
>
>Another insider who was present in the death chamber for even more
>executions was a prison chaplain who had stood beside the gurney for a
>total of 160 executions, “his hand resting just below the knee of the
>condemned, the last human touch they ever felt in this world.” Whatever
>the chaplain’s deeper sentiments about all this, the authors indicate
>that he was reassigned after making critical remarks to the media
>following Karla Faye Tucker’s death.  In his new position he serves as a
>mediator between victims and offenders, trying to heal at least parts of
>badly broken lives instead of just watching them being snuffed out by
>the vindictive order of the state. Such a shift requires a very
>different paradigm.  “Currently we ask who did it and how can we punish
>them,” he said. “But it makes more sense to ask who was hurt and how can
>we restore them.”
>
>The Owenses end their reflections on Huntsville, the death penalty
>capital of the country, with a positive and “most astounding discovery.”
>Those they have met and interviewed in depth are in positions to know,
>and they “testify to the fact that many offenders do deeply desire … to
>‘come clean.’ ” The great tragedy is that the system, the state, the
>culture, the politicians and the media are so totally fixed on exacting
>revenge that there is no room for even considering any other policy than
>routinely killing killers. What would be needed for anything else to be
>tried would be for a critical core of people with enough imagination to
>envision an alternate society, one that can learn how to “ do justly and
>to love mercy” rather than abdicating their humanity and going along
>with a system that disposes of fellow human beings as so much garbage.
>
>The book is not an assault on the death penalty as such but a challenge
>to those who would accept death-dealing as a valid part of the state’s
>ordinary business. Living Next Door to the Death House can indeed result
>in mindless complacency. But it can also, ironically, lead to a more
>intense realization of how much the system depends on people agreeing to
>wear the masks of “bad faith.”  As the Owenses illustrate, one way to be
>a conscientious resident of Huntsville (or anyplace else) is to foster
>“good faith” efforts to find a better way to practice justice. Their
>book is certainly a welcome contribution to that effort.
>  ------------------
>
>James J. Megivern is professor emeritus at the University of North
>Carolina at Wilmington.
>www.natcath.org/NCR/Online/archieves/2/2003c/070403/070403n.php
>National Catholic Reporter, July 4, 2003
>Copyright  * The National Catholic Reporter Publishing
>Company, 115 E. Armour Blvd., Kansas City, MO   64111
>
>
>

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