Public executions
Kirp, David
As two executions have been carried out in California in recent months, with several more due to take place shortly, these events have assumed a form as predictable as a Noh play. First comes...
...Barely two decades after the U.S...
...What comes next...
...The attorneys may feel better because their client went gently into that good night...
...Next there's the denial of clemency by Governor Pete Wilson, a man never known to agonize over an execution...
...Buried deep in the news accounts of his execution was the revelation that 595 pages of his prison medical treatment records, dating back to 1969—a decade before he committed the crime of passion for which he was put to death—had been concealed by state officials until the last moment...
...What's most troubling is that concentrating on these sideshows has the perverse effect of legitimating the main event—state-sanctioned death—by diverting attention from its deeper barbarities...
...Not just in California but across the United States, this is business as usual, the way capital punishment usually gets carried out...
...For one thing, the state has turned off its gas chamber and now injects poisonous chemicals into the prisoner's sedated body...
...The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has fought for expanded press coverage of executions, on the theory that accounts of a prisoner's next-to-last moments would sway the citizenry against capital punishment...
...Reliance on injected rather than inhaled poison is a distinction without a difference...
...Such news coverage makes for a Foucaultian moment, public hangings in modern guise...
...In another time, he might have been described as a creature of his demons...
...That's just a theory, though, and not an especially plausible one at that...
...According to the civil liberties lawyers who went to court to secure these rights, both of the these changes represent progress, in the form of a more humane, and a more fully reported on, death...
...Danny Williams wasn't a brilliant sociopath, a Hannibal Lecter come to haunt our dreams...
...But he was a diminished man...
...Williams's "evil"—a chemical imbalance in the body, a treatable condition— didn't even rise to the level of the banal...
...Finally, at a minute or two past the chimes of midnight, the anonymous representatives of the State take another life in the name of the People...
...Where such a person would once have been regarded as incurable, that is no longer true...
...Danny Williams never claimed to be innocent in this sense...
...For another, reporters, who during 10 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions the first execution by injection had been allowed to witness only the moment when the lethal chemicals started to flow, were able this time to cover the story from the strapping down of a still-conscious prisoner until the pronouncement of death...
...But the execution a few months back of a forty-eight-yearold convicted murderer named Keith "Danny" Williams was a little different...
...Television cameras in the death cell...
...Meanwhile, civil liberties lawyers measure their victories in reporters' death watches and shuttered gas chambers...
...To the ACLU's presumed consternation, because the Williams execution was carried out without visible signs of pain, the reporters were won over to the cause of death...
...He was just a pathetic figure, California's latest dead man walking...
...A handful of truly innocent men, perhaps more, currently sit on death row...
...The reopening of the Roman amphitheater...
...What Danny Williams really wanted, of course, wasn't a more pleasant death but the chance to live...
...Nor was he another Richard Allen Davis, the California drifter who, having been convicted of two earlier kidnappings, proceeded to kidnap, rape, and murder twelve-year-old Polly Klaas, a crime that incited an entire state to rage—and who, when convicted this summer, gave the jury the finger...
...Supreme Court reversed field and upheld the constitutionality of capital punishment, many men like Danny Williams are waiting to die at the hands of the People, in the name of Justice...
...Those files portray a manic depressive prone to epileptic seizures...
...First comes the flurry of rejected legal appeals...
...Danny Williams was neither innocent nor mad, as the law defines these terms...
...By majorities of better than two-to-one, the people tell poll-takers that they entirely approve...
...They wrote about how "efficient," how thoroughly and becomingly modern, was the process...
...Once diagnosed and given appropriate medication, Williams became a model, manageable prisoner, an unlikely candidate to kill again...
...Most of them (as we have learned from re-tried capital cases resulting in acquittal and vindication) were wrongly convicted by the tainted testimony of a convict—a partner in crime, perhaps, or just a person with a grudge, who bargained away someone else's life for his own freedom, whose perjuries enabled a harried district attorney to reduce, by one, the number of unsolved crimes on the docket...
...FAIL • 1996 • 11...
...The California Supreme Court—no longer a stickler for due process niceties, as it was under its deposed former chief justice, Rose Bird—regularly acknowledges errors in how capital punishment cases are conducted, only cheerfully to dismiss them as "harmless...
...If history is any guide, such public bloodletting is more likely to turn on the crowds than to turn them off...
...Then comes the prayerful protest vigil and the noisy counter-vigil conducted outside the gates of San Quentin...
...Not so...
Vol. 43 • September 1996 • No. 4
