Failure™ Magazine

Well Executed?

A haunting new documentary examines the real-world implications of capital punishment.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under Arts & Entertainment, History

But on his first day of work, memories of the siege came flooding back: “I didn’t breathe walking up that ramp [at the prison’s entrance]. I got to the place … where Judy and Yvonne were shot.… In the library there were still bullet holes and you could still see blood stains. I never walked up [those steps] without remembering,” he says. Little did Pickett know, the temporary assignment would eventually become permanent, and his first date with an execution was just around the corner.

***

Initially, Pickett found working inside The Walls (the prison’s moniker is derived from its high brick walls), somewhat less stressful than guiding the Presbyterian Church. For the first three years of his tenure his most emotionally draining obligation involved ministering to inmates confined to the prison’s third-floor hospital, mostly old men suffering from cancer and other terminal conditions. Then one day in November of 1982, Warden Jack Pursley walked in to a staff meeting, took off his cowboy hat, put it on a table and abruptly announced: “We are going to have an execution.”

At the time, Pickett was still an ardent supporter of the death penalty, at least in theory. “My grandfather was murdered and my father was a bitter man. We were taught, ‘Hang ’em fast, hang ’em high’,” he admits, referring to himself and his siblings. But faced with the prospect of participating in a state-sanctioned killing gave him pause. “Nowhere in my job description did it ever say anything about an execution,” he emphasizes, hardly a surprise, as it had been nearly two decades since anyone had been put to death in Texas—Joseph Johnson being the last, by electrocution, on July 30, 1964.

In the intervening years, the U.S. Supreme Court had decided Furman v. Georgia (1972), a landmark case that held that Georgia’s death penalty statute (which gave the jury unbridled sentencing discretion), created a “substantial risk” that the death penalty would be imposed in an “arbitrary and capricious manner.” The Court went on to conclude that such statutes were “cruel and unusual” and violated the Eighth Amendment, a ruling that effectively voided all existing death penalty schemes. Shortly afterwards, all 45 prisoners on death row in Texas—as well as seven held in the state’s county jails—had their sentences commuted to life in prison.

But the state responded to the Court’s decision by revising the Texas Penal Code, paving the way for executions to resume on January 1, 1974. Naturally, the new laws were challenged, but in Gregg v. Georgia (1976), the Court held that the revised death penalty statutes in Florida, Georgia and Texas were constitutional, as they provided sentencing guidelines for the judge and jury when deciding whether to impose death. Among other things, the guidelines provided for bifurcated trials; in other words, separate deliberations for the guilt and penalty phases. They also allowed for the introduction of “aggravating” and “mitigating” factors in determining sentences.

The legal wrangling did nothing to help prepare Pickett & Co. for what was to come, however. Without any experience conducting executions, the warden told his “team” they would have to learn through a process of trial and error.

Page 5 of 18 pages « First < 3 4 5 6 7 > Last »