A Few Words on the Way Out
by Julia M. Klein
JULY 8, 2010 TAGS:
Confronting a Utah firing squad on March 30, 1960, James Rodgers, convicted of killing a co-worker at a uranium mining camp, was asked if he had any last requests. “Why, yes,” he managed to quip, “a bulletproof vest!”
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Rodgers was not the only felon to laugh in the face of death. “Where’s my stunt double when you need one?” said Vincent Gutierrez, before receiving a lethal injection in Texas on March 28, 2007. Gutierrez had confessed to killing an Air Force officer during a carjacking.
There is not just humor, but also humanity stripped down to its essence in Robert K. Elder’s powerful new compendium, Last Words of the Executed (University of Chicago Press). Those who are about to die salute life. They send love to friends and family, express fervent faith in an afterlife, request absolution from those they have injured, and sometimes insist on their innocence. (Some may even be telling the truth.)
Many blame drink or drugs for their predicament. Others killed as a byproduct of robbery or lust or jealousy. The worst among them murdered for hire or sport, and they generally are the least repentant. In recent decades, Elder notes, America’s soon-to-be-executed have become more politicized -- more apt to attack the court system that convicted and sentenced them, as well as the practice of capital punishment itself.
“Let me be the last person,” Buddy Earl Justus pleaded in a Roanoke, Virginia, radio interview before his Dec. 13, 1990, execution. “There is a better way to deal with crimes than taking peoples’ lives.” Justus, Elder proceeds to inform us, “received multiple death sentences for slaying three women, including a pregnant nurse he raped before killing.”
The juxtaposition is typical of what Elder calls his “apolitical” approach to the subject. First, we read the bold-faced words (and sometimes, it turns out, the bald-faced lies) of the men and (a few) women facing execution. There follows a brief factual account of the crimes involved, supplemented when appropriate by a description of the execution’s historical significance and ramifications. Sometimes our sympathy for the executed is heightened; often, as the heinousness of the offense is revealed, it is undercut.
And sometimes the killers themselves admit the justice of their fate. “I got it coming,” said Bernard Sawicki, who killed four people in Illinois and was electrocuted Jan. 17, 1942. “It looks pretty dark, but if I have to, I guess I can take my medicine,” said Morris Cohen, a barber electrocuted in Illinois on Oct. 13, 1933, after a robbery-murder. He even sounds like a gangster.
The book’s organization – chronological and by method of execution, from the noose and the firing squad to the electric chair, gas chamber and lethal injection – provides a capsule history of capital punishment in the United States. One theme that emerges is the ongoing, somewhat self-contradictory effort to devise more humane approaches to state-sponsored killing. Another is the presence of race and poverty as factors in not just crime, but also capital sentences.
After a brief foreword by the late Studs Terkel, who supported abolition of the death penalty, Last Words of the Executed begins with cases that will make readers shudder – the executions of Quakers who chose to defy their banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. These courageous men and women – the so-called Boston martyrs -- were hanged in the mid-17th century for acts of civil disobedience. “We suffer not as evil doers, but for conscience sake,” declared Marmaduke Stevenson, executed Oct. 27, 1659.
Such nobility of character is the exception, not the rule. But injustice lurks as a question mark throughout this volume. All the big names in capital punishment are here: the famous and the infamous; the abundantly guilty and the possibly innocent; Ted Bundy (“I’d like you to give my love to my family and friends”) and Gary Gilmore, Sacco and Vanzetti, Caryl Chessman, the Rosenbergs.
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the immigrant anarchist electrocuted in 1927 for the murder of two people during a shoe-factory robbery, waxed particularly eloquent in a newspaper account that Elder quotes: “This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice and for man’s understanding of man as we do now by accident. Our words – our lives – our pains – nothing! The taking of our lives – the lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler – all!”
Few in this volume rise to such rhetorical heights. Too many of the worst criminals are inexplicably sure of a safe passage to heaven. Too many remain unrepentant. Some of their statements are repetitive; others are incoherent, or nearly so. And yet it is impossible to read this book, for all its journalistic detachment and lack of polemics, without a tremor of empathy.
“Killing is wrong [sic] when I did it,” said Joseph Carl Shaw, who would die in South Carolina’s electric chair Jan. 11, 1985. “It is wrong when you do it,” he added, addressing the state’s governor, and the rest of us.
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review. Her 2009 work for Obit has been awarded first prize for online features by the Greater Philadelphia Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Rodgers was not the only felon to laugh in the face of death. “Where’s my stunt double when you need one?” said Vincent Gutierrez, before receiving a lethal injection in Texas on March 28, 2007. Gutierrez had confessed to killing an Air Force officer during a carjacking.There is not just humor, but also humanity stripped down to its essence in Robert K. Elder’s powerful new compendium, Last Words of the Executed (University of Chicago Press). Those who are about to die salute life. They send love to friends and family, express fervent faith in an afterlife, request absolution from those they have injured, and sometimes insist on their innocence. (Some may even be telling the truth.)
Many blame drink or drugs for their predicament. Others killed as a byproduct of robbery or lust or jealousy. The worst among them murdered for hire or sport, and they generally are the least repentant. In recent decades, Elder notes, America’s soon-to-be-executed have become more politicized -- more apt to attack the court system that convicted and sentenced them, as well as the practice of capital punishment itself.
“Let me be the last person,” Buddy Earl Justus pleaded in a Roanoke, Virginia, radio interview before his Dec. 13, 1990, execution. “There is a better way to deal with crimes than taking peoples’ lives.” Justus, Elder proceeds to inform us, “received multiple death sentences for slaying three women, including a pregnant nurse he raped before killing.”
The juxtaposition is typical of what Elder calls his “apolitical” approach to the subject. First, we read the bold-faced words (and sometimes, it turns out, the bald-faced lies) of the men and (a few) women facing execution. There follows a brief factual account of the crimes involved, supplemented when appropriate by a description of the execution’s historical significance and ramifications. Sometimes our sympathy for the executed is heightened; often, as the heinousness of the offense is revealed, it is undercut.
And sometimes the killers themselves admit the justice of their fate. “I got it coming,” said Bernard Sawicki, who killed four people in Illinois and was electrocuted Jan. 17, 1942. “It looks pretty dark, but if I have to, I guess I can take my medicine,” said Morris Cohen, a barber electrocuted in Illinois on Oct. 13, 1933, after a robbery-murder. He even sounds like a gangster. The book’s organization – chronological and by method of execution, from the noose and the firing squad to the electric chair, gas chamber and lethal injection – provides a capsule history of capital punishment in the United States. One theme that emerges is the ongoing, somewhat self-contradictory effort to devise more humane approaches to state-sponsored killing. Another is the presence of race and poverty as factors in not just crime, but also capital sentences.
After a brief foreword by the late Studs Terkel, who supported abolition of the death penalty, Last Words of the Executed begins with cases that will make readers shudder – the executions of Quakers who chose to defy their banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. These courageous men and women – the so-called Boston martyrs -- were hanged in the mid-17th century for acts of civil disobedience. “We suffer not as evil doers, but for conscience sake,” declared Marmaduke Stevenson, executed Oct. 27, 1659.
Such nobility of character is the exception, not the rule. But injustice lurks as a question mark throughout this volume. All the big names in capital punishment are here: the famous and the infamous; the abundantly guilty and the possibly innocent; Ted Bundy (“I’d like you to give my love to my family and friends”) and Gary Gilmore, Sacco and Vanzetti, Caryl Chessman, the Rosenbergs.
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the immigrant anarchist electrocuted in 1927 for the murder of two people during a shoe-factory robbery, waxed particularly eloquent in a newspaper account that Elder quotes: “This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice and for man’s understanding of man as we do now by accident. Our words – our lives – our pains – nothing! The taking of our lives – the lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler – all!”Few in this volume rise to such rhetorical heights. Too many of the worst criminals are inexplicably sure of a safe passage to heaven. Too many remain unrepentant. Some of their statements are repetitive; others are incoherent, or nearly so. And yet it is impossible to read this book, for all its journalistic detachment and lack of polemics, without a tremor of empathy.
“Killing is wrong [sic] when I did it,” said Joseph Carl Shaw, who would die in South Carolina’s electric chair Jan. 11, 1985. “It is wrong when you do it,” he added, addressing the state’s governor, and the rest of us.
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review. Her 2009 work for Obit has been awarded first prize for online features by the Greater Philadelphia Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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COMMENTS (1)
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John H. Tidyman wrote on December 2, 2010 3:51pm
Executing each other is just one more indulgence of blood lust. This way, however, allows it to be entertaining, too. [Report Comment]
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