Chapter 13
The Death Penalty and Covering Executions
By Jenifer Warren

Public Interest in the lives of the condemned is an exception to the general disinterest in prisons and prisoners. Celebrity killers, in particular, command a curiosity that stands the test of time—and sometimes grows stronger as years pass.

When famous criminals are executed, the episode combines society's fascination with notorious killers with America's enduring moral argument over capital punishment. Executions have become commonplace in some states, but they remain controversial. They also generate news stories about clemency petitions and last-minute appeals, analysis pieces, and moving features about perpetrator and victim alike.

Today's debate over the death penalty is punctuated by volatile issues of equity and morality that have roots dating back 200 years. Supporters list capital punishment's principal virtues as retribution, deterrence, and incapacitation. Someone who takes a life should give his own in return. The prospect of a lethal injection will dissuade violent criminals from carrying out brutal acts. A killer who is dead cannot kill again.

Death penalty foes offer equally passionate counter-arguments. One is that only God, and not the state, has the right to take a life, and that government-sanctioned violence sends a dangerous message. Opponents also question the deterrence value of capital punishment. Many murders are committed by people in a rage or under the influence of drugs or alcohol, they note. Are such killers consciously aware of the chance that death by execution could await them if they carry out their crime?

Several other provocative issues surround the death penalty, including the potential for executing the wrongly accused. In 2000, Illinois Governor George Ryan triggered a dramatic turn in death penalty politics when he declared a moratorium on executions in his state. Ryan, a longtime death penalty supporter who himself later was imprisoned for corruption, said he acted after becoming convinced the Illinois system was "fraught with errors." In particular, he cited the release of 13 innocent people from the state's death row over the previous 24 years.

Ryan's action was soon followed by other politicians, as the debate over capital punishment shifted to one of basic fairness. Ultimately, Congress adopted the Justice for All Act of 2004, which, among other things, made it easier for inmates to have DNA evidence tested and used to challenge their convictions.

Although surveys show continued public support for capital punishment, the number of prisoners under sentence of death has been decreasing since 2000. Executions also are dwindling. In 2008, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported, 37 inmates were executed, five fewer than in 2007. Some of the decline was due to an unofficial moratorium in effect while the Supreme Court considered a case on the lethal injection procedure.

Occasionally, reporters on the corrections beat will find themselves asked to serve as a witness to an execution. If you choose to accept the assignment—and it is hard to imagine any editor insisting upon it—be aware that it will likely be among the most memorable and potentially emotional experiences of your career. Regardless of your political or religious views on capital punishment, watching someone put to death is, by definition, traumatic. Neither you nor your editor should take it lightly.

The best prison administrators provide pre-execution counseling for witnesses representing the media and other groups. So it was at San Quentin State Prison in California, where I witnessed the execution of Stanley "Tookie" Williams, co-founder of the "Crips" street gang, 12 days before Christmas in 2005.

My husband had covered an execution, as had several colleagues, so I had a good sense of what to expect. Still, the atmosphere felt decidedly surreal as I joined a handful of reporters and other witnesses in a small prison conference room, several hours before we filed into San Quentin's death chamber to watch Williams receive a lethal injection for committing four murders in 1979.

Outside the prison gates, about 1,000 demonstrators were gathering in the frosty night air to protest the execution, which drew worldwide attention because of Williams' apparent evolution from gang thug to antiviolence crusader nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Joan Baez was there. Supporters as disparate as Desmond Tutu and rapper Snoop Dogg added their voices from afar.

In our little conference room, psychologist Gregory Goldstein informed us that an execution is "a highly unusual event." Don't be surprised, he warned, if you feel panic, anxiety or other emotions similar to those one might experience while "stuck in a natural disaster."

In fact, I did have occasional nightmares for weeks after the execution. And during the pre-dawn hours immediately following it, as I scrambled to make my deadline, I found myself occasionally short of breath and breaking into a cold sweat. It was hard to know whether that was a result of what I had witnessed, a lack of sleep and food, deadline pressure or some combination thereof.

I had taken the assignment because I believed that newspapers have an obligation to be present when the state exercises its ultimate power—the taking of a life. Unless executions are televised, the media are the public's only objective guarantee that the process is carried out according to protocol. And there are a lot of protocols when it comes to executions. From the condemned man's choice of a final meal, to the number of officers and where they stand and the precise administration of the lethal drugs, California delivers its capital punishment according to a meticulously crafted script, much of it resulting from court challenges.

It is unsettling for everyone then, when things don't go according to plan. Here is an excerpt from my eyewitness account, as reported in the L.A. Times:

"At 12:03 a.m., two guards pulled on surgical gloves as another entered the mint-green chamber with a plastic tub of supplies. Three minutes later, a needle was thrust successfully home into Williams' right arm and connected to an intravenous tube.

The rules, however, require a backup in case one tube is jostled loose or fails. And it was here that the carefully choreographed execution turned messy.

For 12 long minutes, a prison nurse—her brow glistening with sweat—poked the convict's muscular left arm again and again, searching for a vein that would deliver a dose of poison. As his loved ones watched in distress, the inmate visibly winced in pain.

Ultimately, the needle found its mark, a stream of lethal chemicals flowed, and Williams—convicted of murdering four people with a shotgun in 1979—drew his final breath."

For most of us in the room, that was enough. But the strange midnight episode was not over. The account continues:

"Surprising many, he did not leave a statement for the warden to read. But his closest supporters made sure his departure from the world was not a quiet one. Filing out after witnessing the execution, they yelled a message in unison:

"The state of California just killed an innocent man!"

The startling cry pierced the silence that had cloaked the small observation room, and relatives of Williams' victims appeared shaken. Lora Owens, whose stepson, Albert, was gunned down at a West Whittier convenience store, hunched forward in her brown metal chair and wept. Another woman wrapped her in an embrace."

Fifteen years earlier, I sat in the rewrite chair and chronicled the execution of another murderer. The death of this man, Robert Alton Harris, marked the first execution in California in 25 years.

My Los Angeles Times colleague, Dan Morain, was the eyewitness that day. And as it went with Tookie Williams, the end of Harris' life was far from smooth.

In this case, an extraordinary bicoastal judicial duel temporarily interrupted the death process after Harris was strapped into the gas chamber's chair. Here is an excerpt from Morain's excellent account, published April 22, 1992:

SAN QUENTIN—The hiss of flowing liquid was our sign that the execution of Robert Alton Harris had begun.

Sulfuric acid filled the two vats beneath his seat. He peered down, between his knees, into his personal abyss. In seconds, he knew, cyanide pellets would drop, react with the acid, and the gas would rise. This was it—he was a dead man.

Then, a phone beside the gas chamber rang twice. The sound was loud enough that Harris must have heard it.

"Oh, God," a voice said from where the families of Harris' murder victims stood. It took me a minute to figure out what was happening. It was a stay—the fourth of this long night, the night on which the state of California was to resume executions after a 25-year break.

We, the 48 official witnesses to the execution of Robert Harris, soon learned what the delay was about. But inside the gas chamber, the antihero of this drama seemed puzzled. He sat in the metal chair, facing away from us, but aware that all eyes were trained on him.

He looked around, the picture of confusion and nerves. His arms were strapped down, but he tried to motion with his hands and seemed to mouth a plea: "Let's pull it."

Time seemed to slow, even for the witnesses. My mouth turned dry, a symptom of stress. Air could be heard blowing through ducts in this half-century-old building inside San Quentin, next to North Block, downstairs from Death Row.

There were the sounds of an old prison: the rattling of keys, the opening of doors, footsteps on the dark green, slickly waxed tile floor of the gas chamber witness room.

The prison describes the color of the gas chamber as "apple green." In truth, it's the green of an apple no one on this Earth has tasted. At 4 a.m. Tuesday morning, with the lights inside shining brightly on Robert Harris, the green looked almost fluorescent.

The scene was all the more striking because the three bulbs above us in the witness area were so dim and the beige walls so drab.

By all rights, Harris surely realized, this contraption installed 52 years ago should have done its business by now. A sad smile came over his face. He looked up and down, wrinkled his brow, and glanced over his left shoulder to where his older brother, Randy, stood. He looked then at a friend, a guard, who stood braced against the waist-high rail that keeps the witnesses a step back from this riveted death chamber.

As we watched, Harris raised his brow quizzically, as if to ask: What gives? He rolled his eyes and swiveled his head to look out the window to the right, toward a friendly face. With a look of futility he said, "I can't move."

Finally, the sounds of flushing and machinery whirring were heard again. The vats of sulfuric acid beneath Harris were being pumped empty—made safe against an accidental triggering of the gas. That done, guards opened the chamber door.

He was back from the dead. The guards unleashed Harris and walked him back to a nearby cell, to wait for his death to start all over again.

In the ghoulish history of the San Quentin gas chamber, no one had ever been removed alive."