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opinion dimond
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Executions Have Begun Again: Is that Ok With You?
By Diane Dimond
Of the Journal
I was standing in the death chamber. My hand was resting on the side of a flat white bed, on one of the leather cuffs where the condemned are buckled in right before the needle goes in their arm. I noted the eye-level window through which witnesses watch executions. The bed was covered in white; the walls of the spare chamber were white. The light was too bright and everything smelled of antiseptic. It was cold.
I was at the so-called, “Execution Capitol of the World,” inside the prison at Huntsville, Texas, and about to commit to videotape one of the hardest appearances I've ever made on television. My “stand-up” would be brief but I thought it was important to take viewers inside the place where society kills people.
This column is neither for nor against executions. This column is to shine a spotlight on what we do as a nation and to ask the question — is it OK with you?
Make no mistake about it — death rows are filled with bad people. I have interviewed some of the more notorious. They are convicted killers who have committed the most unthinkable crimes. They've murdered policemen, mothers and their babies, complete strangers, their own parents or siblings. These are usually not easy deaths. Torture or rape of the victim often occurs beforehand. Yes, these are very bad people.
But as we know from advances in DNA forensics some of those convicted are innocent. In the state of Texas alone nearly three dozen convicts have been released after forensic tests proved they were wrongfully convicted. James Woodard was the latest convicted murderer cleared and released from prison after 27 years.
Our system makes mistakes. And, it begs the question — What if we have executed an innocent person. Is that OK with you?
It has been about a month since the U.S. Supreme Court ended a seven-month moratorium on lethal injections. The highest court in the land put the practice on hold while it decided whether the chemical concoction used in executions constituted cruel and unusual punishment. The justices decided it did not.
So, America is back in the execution business. All 36 capital punishment states are gearing up again, getting out their calendars, filling in the names of those who have exhausted their appeals.
And the decades-long debate will rehash whether execution is a just punishment that deters other criminals or a barbaric practice that makes society no better than the criminal.
This past Tuesday, the state of Georgia was the first to resume executions, putting to death 53-year-old William Lynd. He was convicted of shooting his girlfriend in the face during a fight and shooting her twice more as she lay dying in the trunk of his car. After he dumped Ginger Moore's body he stopped on the side of the road and killed another woman.
On Tuesday I thought of Lynd entering a chamber like the one I'd been in, being strapped down in the bright white light, being injected and watched by others until he died. But I also thought about Ginger Moore, the other dead woman and the families they left bereft. I felt profound pity and a sense of too many lives wasted.
The states of Virginia, Texas, Louisiana and South Dakota are next in the execution schedule. Two dozen death sentences are set to be carried out in six states between now and October.
I wish citizens in all those states fully realized what executions are all about. I wish they had the opportunity to stand in the chamber and look down at the bed on which, in the Texas example, 405 people have died since the United States took up the practice in the mid-'70s. In Virginia, state-sponsored executions have taken 98 lives during that time. I wish everyone could bear the glare of the room, touch the shackles, breathe in the air.
It is a profound experience and it left me forever wondering why we as a people don't talk about it more.
It left me wondering which is worse for prisoners: killing them or making them live every day of the rest of their lives locked up.
If catching, convicting and imprisoning an immoral person is about the punishment, consider the quote from the nation's oldest living death row inmate. Seventy-year-old Jack Harry Smith recently talked about his impending execution with the New York Times.
“Death is death,” he said. “A life sentence is a whole lot worse — it's torture.”
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