San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Death penalty compounds the pain
I’ve struggled for most of my adult life with the issue of capital punishment.
Despite what its strongest adherents argue, I’ve never believed that the death penalty — as opposed to life in prison — served as a real deterrent to violent crime.
There’s also the permanence of the act: the fact that an execution eliminates any possibility of righting a legal injustice if new evidence emerges to exonerate that inmate. Over the past 50 years, nearly 200 people wrongly convicted and sentenced to death have been exonerated, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
But in murder cases where guilt is not in dispute, my sympathies have always been with the victims and their families.
I don’t know how much compassion I could ever muster for an individual who took the life of one of my loved ones, and I never begrudge anyone for seeking the most severe retribution against a criminal who caused that level of pain for their family.
A few weeks ago, however, I saw something that made me think about the death penalty in a new way.
It was a new film called “Hometown Prison,” by celebrated Texas writer-director Richard Linklater (“Dazed and Confused, “Boyhood,” “Slacker”).
Linklater’s contribution to a three-part HBO Max documentary series based on Lawrence Wright’s 2018 book, “God Save Texas,” the film follows Linklater as he returns to his hometown of Huntsville.
This is a place where incarceration is the big industry, a town often referred to as the execution capital of the world.
Since 1982, Texas has executed nearly 600 inmates by lethal injection, all of them behind the red brick walls of the Huntsville Unit of the state penitentiary.
The issue is personal for
Linklater. He had one stepfather who worked as a prison guard and another who did time in prison. He had teenage friends who got jobs with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, or TDCJ, and others who drifted into a life of crime.
“It seemed like the prison just had this gravitational inevitability to it,” Linklater says in the film. “Not only pulling so many into its workforce, but also into a life behind bars.”
Fred Allen, who played football with Linklater at Huntsville High School, spent 16 years working at the state penitentiary. As a member of the tie-down team, he helped strap 130 death row inmates on gurneys for their executions, generally taking care of the left leg.
Those inmates would spend their final hours with Allen. He recalls playing chess with one and talking about pro football with another.
“You keep on doing that and eventually you’re going to break,” Allen says in the film.
For Allen, the breaking point came with the case of Karla
Faye Tucker, who in 1998 became the first woman put to death in Texas in 135 years. As a young woman, Tucker had brutally murdered two people in Houston.
During her years of incarceration, she became a bornagain Christian and, by Allen’s reckoning, a reformed person. He believed that allowing her to live and counsel other women behind bars would be a greater service to society than putting her to death.
Two days after witnessing her execution, Allen fell to pieces. The next day, he quit his job. He once supported the death penalty, but he now opposes it.
In the film, we also meet Michelle Lyons, the former chief spokesperson for TDCJ. Lyons witnessed more than 280 executions and says no more than three of those 280 executed individuals fought on their way to the gurney.
“I just found it so incredibly upsetting and contrary to what you would think a human would do,” she says. “It really unnerved me to see how docile and resigned they were to it.”
Lyons thought she was good at compartmentalizing her feelings, but she ultimately realized how much those executions had affected her. She says nobody wins with the death penalty.
And that’s what stuck with me about Linklater’s film. Beyond the question of whether capital punishment is ethical or just, there’s the fact that it inflicts immeasurable trauma on so many innocent people (family members of both the inmates and the victims; criminal justice workers and their families; attorneys and their families). And for what purpose?
“The death penalty,” Linklater says, “takes one tragedy, a murder, and expands the pain and suffering to include so many others.”
If we can’t reconsider capital punishment for the sake of those put to death, maybe we should think about what it’s doing to those of us who have to live with it.