THE LAST WORD
Brasfield, Philip
THE LAST WORD Philip Brasfield When the State Ki Two months have passed since the state of Texas took the life of Charles Brooks. He was the sixth man, and the first black, to be executed in the...
...I've become familiar with that kind of death...
...None of us can run from the tragic implications of the death penalty...
...Experts told all of us on death row that the end would be "almost instantaneous," but it took sixteen minutes, after the first of three plungers was depressed, for Charles Brooks to be declared dead...
...the bloody history of our world—state-sanctioned murder is as old as the state—should tell us so...
...I'm biased, to be sure...
...Though I no longer bear a three-digit execution number behind my name, I am still haunted day to day and night to night by the thought of being strapped to the hard surface of a hospital gurney cart and injected with a concoction of drugs until dead...
...Somehow, all this seems more important to me than the continuing debate about the methods used by Americans when they legally put other Americans to death...
...I know the time it is supposed to take for the stuff to work its way through a dying body, killing the heart, the lungs, the brain...
...I have few illusions left after spending six seasons in the Texas prison system, but I would still like to believe that Charles Brooks might be alive today if these various officials had concentrated more on the person Charles Brooks was, and less on the authority vested in them in their own positions of power...
...Eventually it led him to become a convert to Islam, and shortly after I left death row he legally changed his name to Shariff Ahmad Abdul-Rahmin...
...This is his first contribution to The Progressive...
...The newspapers reported that he went to his death as a religious man who had found peace...
...The night Texas killed my friend, I came in from the second shift of my prison job as a data processor and turned on the radio...
...If Charles Brooks's life could be ended by the will of the people, capital punishment can be ended by the will of the people...
...And now his whole life is past...
...Letters from friends still on death row tell me he was able to maintain his self-respect and the respect of all others in the final days before he died...
...We don't have to continue killing those we've found guilty of killing others (just as we don't have to perpetuate the arms race and other life-negating American nightmares...
...To argue that capital punishment acts as a deterrent to future crimes is absurd...
...He was the first man to be put to death in Texas in eighteen years, and the first to die by lethal injection...
...And we talked about our lives before we were on death row...
...Philip Brasfield is serving a life sentence, now on appeal, at Tennessee Colony, Texas...
...I'd look at the finger-smudged, wrinkled photographs of his sons, Derek and Adrian, and understand his stories about his past life...
...I didn't know...
...I knew him as a man engaged in relentless self-exploration...
...He was my friend...
...Brooks's life-long friend, Woodie Loudres, was also convicted of the murder and also sentenced to death, but he won a reversal in 1980 and after plea-bargaining received a forty-year prison sentence...
...From time to time, one or another asked if I was all right...
...Friends gathered around me, waiting in the near-silence of our cell block...
...It was only after the radio reported that Charles Brooks was dead that I almost lost control...
...In Huntsville, where the execution took place, the scene was described as "like a football rally...
...Good ends canFRANCES JETTER not be served by evil means...
...The governor of Texas, the Board of Pardons and Paroles, and various state and Federal judges elected not to grant Charles Brooks a stay of execution...
...To take a life, regardless of the rationale, can't induce respect and reverence for life...
...We can't escape the culpability we share when the state deliberately snuffs out a human life...
...We once lived within fifteen feet of each other on death row...
...When any one of them is executed, totalitarian arrogance snatches at the dignity of a human life and drags all of us down...
...We played half-hearted games of volleyball and walked up and down together in the tiny outdoor recreation pen, something like the dog runs you see near a kennel...
...I couldn't say...
...My friend Charles Brooks went to his death professing his innocence...
...He was the sixth man, and the first black, to be executed in the United States since the Supreme Court gave the states a green light to reinstate the death penalty...
...I've had the experience of being under sentence of death, of dreading the day when Texas would reactivate its death machine...
...There are 1,100 men and women on America's death rows...
...Nobody can be sure beyond a reasonable doubt that he pulled the trigger of the gun that ended the life of a used-car salesman...
...But if we can't rid ourselves of the guilt, we can stop fueling it with more killings...
...It simply doesn't work...
...His prose and poetry have appeared in The Texas Observer, Fellowship, the Colorado Poetry Quarterly, and other publications...
Vol. 47 • March 1983 • No. 3
