What Good Has Death Done?
by Natalie Pompilio
JULY 27, 2009 TAGS:
Many of the convicts Rev. Carroll “Bud” Pickett escorted to Texas’ death chamber during his 15 years as the Huntsville’s penitentiary’s prison chaplain wanted him to hold their hands.
But he couldn’t, because their hands would be strapped to the lethal injection table. Instead, he usually stood by the man’s right knee, placing one warm hand on his right ankle. Pickett would watch the lethal combination of drugs drip down the tube into the man’s arm and feel the pulse under his fingers go from fast and frantic and fear-filled to a slow throb. Then there was nothing at all.
“It’s really traumatic to watch anybody die. I’ve been with my parents and grandparents, but this is different. This is healthy people,” Pickett said. “It’s legalized murder.”
Pickett watched almost 100 men die this way, deaths completed in a matter of minutes, but ones that have stayed with Pickett for years. His experiences changed his views on capital punishment, making him an outspoken critic of the practice he says can punish the innocent, the mentally handicapped and the reformed for no good reason.
“Practically every one of the men I saw die had been restored. They’d changed. I saw so many people who’d made mistakes, but they didn’t deserve to die,” Pickett said. “It’s not a deterrent. It’s a deterrent for one person.”
His book, Within These Walls: Memoirs of a Death House Chaplain, tells his story. He is also the subject of a documentary, At the Death House Door, which is now available on DVD.
The death penalty, Pickett said, often does not bring comfort to those who have lost loved ones to violence. Instead, it widens the circle of pain.
“The warden was a victim. The guards became victims. The families are both sides became victims,” Pickett said. “The whole state is a victim.”
Pickett, a 75-year-old native Texan, said he didn’t question the death penalty when growing up because “people still believed it was like the Wild West: Hang ’em fast and hang ’em high.” Pickett’s grandfather was murdered when his father was 12, and no one was ever arrested for the crime, leaving the wound open for generations.
As an adult, Pickett became a reverend in a church that formally opposed the practice. Yet his personal experience with crime left him with a feeling that “this is what needed to be done.”
In 1974, two women from his congregation were killed after an 11-day hostage siege inside the penitentiary in Huntsville. Pickett was a local minister at the time, with no ties to the prison. In wrenching detail, his book describes the tense days of waiting with the hostages’ families, then his final phone conversations with the women:
“Judy went straight to the point …. ‘I’m going to die tonight,’ she said. ‘I’ve known for several days this time would come, and I’m prepared. I’m not afraid; please tell my family that I know where I’m going and that God will be there to take care of me.’
“I made a futile attempt to encourage some optimism but was quickly interrupted. ‘I need to talk with you about my funeral,’ she said….”
Before the conversation ended, the woman made one last request of Pickett: Make sure, she said, that her daughter didn’t cancel her upcoming wedding:
“She began to cry softly. ‘Tell her,’ she said, ‘that I wish I could be there.’”
A few days later, Pickett performed that woman’s funeral. A few weeks after that, he officiated at her daughter’s wedding.
When Pickett took the job as prison chaplain at the state’s penitentiary in Huntsville in 1980, Texas still had a moratorium on the death penalty. Pickett ran the prison choir, counseled inmates and faced challenges he’d never encountered as a religious man in the free world. Still, death wasn’t a stranger: He sat at the sick beds of dying inmates, performed funeral rites on the prison grounds.
Two years later, Texas reinstated the death penalty. To meet the Supreme Court’s mandate for a “humane” execution, “Old Sparky,” the infamous electric chair that had killed 361 convicts, was out. Lethal injection was the new way to carry out state-sanctioned death.
“We had no idea what to expect. There were no books to follow, no protocol,” Pickett said. “Nobody knew how a person would physically die.”
In December 1982, Pickett escorted convicted murderer Charlie Brooks Jr. to the death chamber. Brooks had maintained a brave front all day, but died with tears in his eyes, Pickett writes in his book: “The execution has, as promised, taken only minutes – seven to be exact — and, so far as I could tell, it had been as painless and as merciful as possible.”
The procedure was refined as the state became more accustomed to the process. At one point, prisoners were tied onto the gurney as much as an hour before their scheduled execution. In one case, a convict strapped down for 55 minutes was then given a stay of execution. “That’s cruel and unusual punishment,” Pickett said.
The state refined its procedures, so that the next year, when that prisoner returned to the gurney again, he was only tied down for minutes before death.
Pickett said his job was to “just to take care of them that day and prepare them for those things that were going to take place.” He aspired to be an inmate’s “last friend.” He helped some men prepare their last words, advising them to keep their final statements short.
“Most would say something to families, telling them to be strong or ‘I’m not afraid, I know I’m going to heaven,’ things like that,” Pickett said. Some asked for forgiveness for their crimes. Others proclaimed their innocence until the end.
Some men sought his religious counsel; others were silent. One convict sang “all day long,” Pickett recalled. “We sang every religious song that had ever been written. I was so hoarse and he was still singing and smiling.”
All of the executions wore on Pickett’s psyche. But the execution of Carlos DeLuna – the 33rd execution Picket had witnessed -- reaffirmed his belief that the death penalty was wrong.
Pickett believes DeLuna, convicted of murder, was not guilty. After DeLuna’s death, an investigation by Chicago Tribune journalists found that another man had told multiple people he had committed the crime for which DeLuna was sentenced. Among DeLuna’s final statements was this: “You’re killing an innocent man.”
Over the years, some men had confessed their crimes privately even while publicly proclaiming their innocence, but DeLuna never waivered. Pickett had formed an immediate bond with the childlike DeLuna, who asked to call him “Daddy.” DeLuna was one of the convicts disappointed that Pickett couldn’t hold his hand.
Even as the first drug dripped into his body, DeLuna struggled to sit up. As the second drug coursed into the tube, he tried to speak. Pickett, his hands on the man’s legs, watched helplessly. He could only guess at the message DeLuna was trying to send.
“I’ve decided that what he was trying to say was something positive,” Pickett said. “I feel he was just trying to say, ‘Thank you, Daddy,’ or ‘Help me, Daddy or ‘Goodbye, Daddy,’ but I’ll never know.”
In his book, Pickett notes that DeLuna’s eyes never closed, and “as I looked down on his lifeless body, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of failure.”
That experience, and the belief that the state had killed an innocent men, prompted Pickett to seek therapy.
Still, Pickett stayed on the job. And in 1991, four years before he stepped down, he oversaw a death that put his stance against capital punishment to the test.
The man sentenced to die was Ignacio Cuevas, one of the men responsible for the hostage standoff that had killed two members of Pickett’s congregation. As the execution approached, Pickett found himself more anxious than ever before.
“For the first time,” he wrote in his book, “I would be asked to minister to a man who had dramatically affected my own life, leaving a scar that still remained after seventeen years.”
During the hours Pickett spent with Cuevas, the convict boasted of his life of crime and his ability to manipulate the system.
Twenty minutes before walking to the gurney, he told Pickett that he’d asked God for forgiveness for his crimes every day, yet his last words were “I’m innocent.”
That tore at Pickett. Cuevas had undeniably caused great pain, but was killing him justice? Pickett compared the death of the killer to a death he’d been responsible for:
“Judy died for others, her passing mourned, her memory honored by tributes and scholarships and professions of great admiration. Cuevas had died a cold-blooded murderer, proclaiming a blatant, unforgivable lie to the end, and was hauled away in a pickup truck and destined for a lonely grave.
“Perhaps it was justice, at least as our society and judicial system chose to define it. There had even been a time when I would have agreed. … Still, I wondered what good had been done. And I could find no answer.”
Natalie Pompilio, a freelance writer based in Philadelphia, writes frequently for Obit.
--
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But he couldn’t, because their hands would be strapped to the lethal injection table. Instead, he usually stood by the man’s right knee, placing one warm hand on his right ankle. Pickett would watch the lethal combination of drugs drip down the tube into the man’s arm and feel the pulse under his fingers go from fast and frantic and fear-filled to a slow throb. Then there was nothing at all. “It’s really traumatic to watch anybody die. I’ve been with my parents and grandparents, but this is different. This is healthy people,” Pickett said. “It’s legalized murder.”
Pickett watched almost 100 men die this way, deaths completed in a matter of minutes, but ones that have stayed with Pickett for years. His experiences changed his views on capital punishment, making him an outspoken critic of the practice he says can punish the innocent, the mentally handicapped and the reformed for no good reason.
“Practically every one of the men I saw die had been restored. They’d changed. I saw so many people who’d made mistakes, but they didn’t deserve to die,” Pickett said. “It’s not a deterrent. It’s a deterrent for one person.”
His book, Within These Walls: Memoirs of a Death House Chaplain, tells his story. He is also the subject of a documentary, At the Death House Door, which is now available on DVD.The death penalty, Pickett said, often does not bring comfort to those who have lost loved ones to violence. Instead, it widens the circle of pain.
“The warden was a victim. The guards became victims. The families are both sides became victims,” Pickett said. “The whole state is a victim.”
Pickett, a 75-year-old native Texan, said he didn’t question the death penalty when growing up because “people still believed it was like the Wild West: Hang ’em fast and hang ’em high.” Pickett’s grandfather was murdered when his father was 12, and no one was ever arrested for the crime, leaving the wound open for generations.
As an adult, Pickett became a reverend in a church that formally opposed the practice. Yet his personal experience with crime left him with a feeling that “this is what needed to be done.”
In 1974, two women from his congregation were killed after an 11-day hostage siege inside the penitentiary in Huntsville. Pickett was a local minister at the time, with no ties to the prison. In wrenching detail, his book describes the tense days of waiting with the hostages’ families, then his final phone conversations with the women:
“Judy went straight to the point …. ‘I’m going to die tonight,’ she said. ‘I’ve known for several days this time would come, and I’m prepared. I’m not afraid; please tell my family that I know where I’m going and that God will be there to take care of me.’
“I made a futile attempt to encourage some optimism but was quickly interrupted. ‘I need to talk with you about my funeral,’ she said….”Before the conversation ended, the woman made one last request of Pickett: Make sure, she said, that her daughter didn’t cancel her upcoming wedding:
“She began to cry softly. ‘Tell her,’ she said, ‘that I wish I could be there.’”
A few days later, Pickett performed that woman’s funeral. A few weeks after that, he officiated at her daughter’s wedding.
When Pickett took the job as prison chaplain at the state’s penitentiary in Huntsville in 1980, Texas still had a moratorium on the death penalty. Pickett ran the prison choir, counseled inmates and faced challenges he’d never encountered as a religious man in the free world. Still, death wasn’t a stranger: He sat at the sick beds of dying inmates, performed funeral rites on the prison grounds.
Two years later, Texas reinstated the death penalty. To meet the Supreme Court’s mandate for a “humane” execution, “Old Sparky,” the infamous electric chair that had killed 361 convicts, was out. Lethal injection was the new way to carry out state-sanctioned death.
“We had no idea what to expect. There were no books to follow, no protocol,” Pickett said. “Nobody knew how a person would physically die.”
In December 1982, Pickett escorted convicted murderer Charlie Brooks Jr. to the death chamber. Brooks had maintained a brave front all day, but died with tears in his eyes, Pickett writes in his book: “The execution has, as promised, taken only minutes – seven to be exact — and, so far as I could tell, it had been as painless and as merciful as possible.”
The procedure was refined as the state became more accustomed to the process. At one point, prisoners were tied onto the gurney as much as an hour before their scheduled execution. In one case, a convict strapped down for 55 minutes was then given a stay of execution. “That’s cruel and unusual punishment,” Pickett said.
The state refined its procedures, so that the next year, when that prisoner returned to the gurney again, he was only tied down for minutes before death.
Pickett said his job was to “just to take care of them that day and prepare them for those things that were going to take place.” He aspired to be an inmate’s “last friend.” He helped some men prepare their last words, advising them to keep their final statements short. “Most would say something to families, telling them to be strong or ‘I’m not afraid, I know I’m going to heaven,’ things like that,” Pickett said. Some asked for forgiveness for their crimes. Others proclaimed their innocence until the end.
Some men sought his religious counsel; others were silent. One convict sang “all day long,” Pickett recalled. “We sang every religious song that had ever been written. I was so hoarse and he was still singing and smiling.”
All of the executions wore on Pickett’s psyche. But the execution of Carlos DeLuna – the 33rd execution Picket had witnessed -- reaffirmed his belief that the death penalty was wrong.
Pickett believes DeLuna, convicted of murder, was not guilty. After DeLuna’s death, an investigation by Chicago Tribune journalists found that another man had told multiple people he had committed the crime for which DeLuna was sentenced. Among DeLuna’s final statements was this: “You’re killing an innocent man.”
Over the years, some men had confessed their crimes privately even while publicly proclaiming their innocence, but DeLuna never waivered. Pickett had formed an immediate bond with the childlike DeLuna, who asked to call him “Daddy.” DeLuna was one of the convicts disappointed that Pickett couldn’t hold his hand.
Even as the first drug dripped into his body, DeLuna struggled to sit up. As the second drug coursed into the tube, he tried to speak. Pickett, his hands on the man’s legs, watched helplessly. He could only guess at the message DeLuna was trying to send.
“I’ve decided that what he was trying to say was something positive,” Pickett said. “I feel he was just trying to say, ‘Thank you, Daddy,’ or ‘Help me, Daddy or ‘Goodbye, Daddy,’ but I’ll never know.”
In his book, Pickett notes that DeLuna’s eyes never closed, and “as I looked down on his lifeless body, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of failure.”
That experience, and the belief that the state had killed an innocent men, prompted Pickett to seek therapy.
Still, Pickett stayed on the job. And in 1991, four years before he stepped down, he oversaw a death that put his stance against capital punishment to the test.
The man sentenced to die was Ignacio Cuevas, one of the men responsible for the hostage standoff that had killed two members of Pickett’s congregation. As the execution approached, Pickett found himself more anxious than ever before.
“For the first time,” he wrote in his book, “I would be asked to minister to a man who had dramatically affected my own life, leaving a scar that still remained after seventeen years.”
During the hours Pickett spent with Cuevas, the convict boasted of his life of crime and his ability to manipulate the system.
Twenty minutes before walking to the gurney, he told Pickett that he’d asked God for forgiveness for his crimes every day, yet his last words were “I’m innocent.”
That tore at Pickett. Cuevas had undeniably caused great pain, but was killing him justice? Pickett compared the death of the killer to a death he’d been responsible for:
“Judy died for others, her passing mourned, her memory honored by tributes and scholarships and professions of great admiration. Cuevas had died a cold-blooded murderer, proclaiming a blatant, unforgivable lie to the end, and was hauled away in a pickup truck and destined for a lonely grave.
“Perhaps it was justice, at least as our society and judicial system chose to define it. There had even been a time when I would have agreed. … Still, I wondered what good had been done. And I could find no answer.”
Natalie Pompilio, a freelance writer based in Philadelphia, writes frequently for Obit.
--
Related Stories
The Death Penalty in Texasby Natalie Pompilio
An old adage promises that the only definite things in life are death and taxes. Wrongdoers in the Lone Star state may read that differently: The only thing guaranteed in this life is “death in Texas.”
The Inverted Iconoclastby Krishna Andavolu
What Robert Blecker doesn’t teach us about the Death Penalty.
A Blunt Intstrumentby Thomas Fitzgerald
Long before New Jersey legislators voted to repeal the state's death penalty last week, the ultimate punishment had become the political equivalent of the human appendix, a vestigial organ that performs no useful function.
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