THE LAST WORD
Jendrzejczyk, Mike
THE LAST WORD The chair Mike Jendrzejczyk The chair stood, smooth and straight-backed, leather straps hanging from the arm rests and wires dangling from one leg. Two people stood on either side....
...About 150 of us participated, each wearing a sign representing a man or woman condemned to die in the State of Florida...
...Thirty-eight states now have capital punishment laws...
...At a recent strategy meeting in South Carolina, some 100 prosecutors from twenty-three states explored ways to remove the legal roadblocks that have temporarily halted the impending rush of executions...
...I can still remember those sights and sounds from a mock execution I attended more than a year ago at the Supreme Court building in Washington...
...And while we pounded, the condemned man's mother sat in the hot sun outside the mansion, quietly pleading for her son's life...
...The American Medical Association has asked that physicians be excused from administering capital punishment, but they would be permitted to train others to give the injections...
...For many of us, the demonstration evoked memories of the flickering candles we lit outside the Governor's mansion in Tallahassee during the long nightly vigils preceding the execution of John Spenkelink in the spring of 1979...
...The body writhed for a few minutes, then went limp...
...The struggles against the dealth penalty will occur in the coming years as small, isolated battles in a larger panorama of social violence, frustration, and fear...
...The number of men and women sentenced to die has climbed to 718, the highest number in U.S...
...While courts continue to debate the technicalities of who may properly be executed, prosecutors in death-penalty states grow ever more anxious to carry out "the will of the people...
...Seeing her again in the visitors' gallery at Madison Square Garden, I was reminded of her calmness, courage, and dignity...
...Spenkelink, a drifter who killed his partner in a motel-room struggle, became the focus of national and international efforts to stop the death penalty...
...I tried to look into their eyes but they were engrossed in their work...
...We did this after Florida's Governor, Bob Graham, had carried out the state's first execution in fifteen years...
...Four states have decided to execute prisoners by injecting them with lethal drugs—a cheaper and supposedly more palatable way of exacting the supreme penalty...
...Moralisms dull our recognition of the futility of such remedies: Even if killing the criminals won't stop crime, they still deserve to die...
...She had come, she told me, not in vengeance but in the hope of sparing other mothers of prisoners on death row the suffering she had endured...
...And last July, the state of Georgia came close to implementing a death penalty statute signed by former Governor Jimmy Carter when Jack Potts, long a victim of mistreatment and brutality on death row, temporarily abandoned his appeals...
...Since Spenkelink, another man, Jesse Bishop, has gone to his death in the gas chamber in Nevada...
...After the mock executions, some of us were carried to the foot of the Supreme Court steps, where our bodies were deposited—visible reminders of the bodies on death row...
...He was an unlikely target for a law-and- order crusade, but once his death warrant had been signed, Governor Graham became known as "Bloody Bob" and vowed to carry out more executions to "uphold the value of human life...
...The fingers stiffened, the legs jerked...
...Florida, where 130 await execution, remains the most visible target of those who continue to oppose the death penalty...
...With Lois Spenkelink, I pray that the cries for mercy, reason, and justice may still be heard...
...His screams were muffled by a black hood pulled down over his head...
...I closed my eyes...
...history...
...I will never forget the final, frustrating hours in Tallahassee when a crowd jammed into Graham's office at the state capitol and pounded on the walls, pleading with him to halt the preparations...
...At the Democratic National Convention in New York, where Governor Graham had been chosen to give the first nominating speech for Jimmy Carter, Spenkelink's mother, Lois, was among those who came to confront him...
...As Governor Graham mounted the podium, delegates from around the hall rose to greet him with signs and banners urging an end to capital punishment...
...Looking back over the past year's events and ahead to an uncertain future, I see the death penalty as the symptom of a tendency to reach for simple solutions to complex problems...
...I opened my eyes just as the executioner, standing behind the chair, his face also concealed by a black hood, raised his arm and pulled the switch...
...I could hear the man in front of me quietly praying...
...Under Ronald Reagan, a major push is expected for a Federal death penalty law...
...There was a noise of scuffling feet as they dragged him to the chair, strapped him in, and clamped electrodes to his skull and thigh...
...The television cameras caught glimpses of people standing motionless in black executioners' hoods— and of a woman seated in the New York delegation before a yellow banner which read: "Governor Graham: You Killed My Son...
...We search for swift and decisive remedies: a nuclear first-strike, a desert commando raid, an execution...
...The figure shuddered in the chair, lunged forward against the straps, and shook with convulsions...
...He was a quiet-spoken man who claimed self-defense, a convert to Christianity while on death row, a model prisoner at the Florida penitentiary...
...Some polls show public support for the death penalty at an all-time high of 82 per cent...
...Mike Jendrzejczyk is an activist in People Against Executions (PAX), a project of the Fellowship of Reconciliation...
Vol. 45 • February 1981 • No. 2
