Reflections on an execution

December 13, 2005 Reflections on an execution

All day I?ve been haunted by a feeling I carried away from Tookie?s
execution last night, unable to quite identify the nature of it. Since I
did not know him personally, I did not experience quite the stabbing pain
in my heart that I felt when the authorities in Alabama strapped my friend
Freddie Wright into the electric chair in early 2000. I only knew that Stan
Williams was a strong brave man, and I believed that his strength would not
desert him in the last hour. So it was less a feeling of personal loss than
a profound sense of horror, of standing in the midst of an inexorable evil
and not resisting.

That ?s it. We stood for hours there at the gate of the Death House, not
just a handful or even a couple hundred people, but over a thousand of us,
hoping with however weak a hope for a miracle: passive, polite, waiting
for the inexorable evil to transpire. And when the needle penetrated the
tough black skin of the beautifully formed, powerful arm of that young
vital man, we held our breath and prayed for it to be over soon, helpless.
What else, after all, could we do?

A while earlier, as the speeches and the readings followed one after
another and the crowd listened quietly except for occasional responses of
agreement, one young man behind me began to rave and harangue the crowd for
its acquiescence in the event, for doing nothing to stop it. No one
responded, seeing that he was no threat although unbalanced; yet one could
hardly deny the justice of his complaint. Here we were, a thousandfold,
maybe two thousand, our necks stretched out like sheep for the slaughter.

And I remembered the video I had watched the day before of the
Venezuelans in the streets of Caracas demanding the return of their
president after the U.S.-inspired coup, and later seeing the upper strata
in the streets in a counter-demonstration. I thought how unlikely to see my
own countrymen take the streets like that, unless driven by floods or an
earthquake; what political cause would so drive us?

Yet here we were. We had walked some distance, having had to park our
cars far from the prison, then crowded past gates between walls of police
cars and blathering motorcycles, under the blanketing racket of helicopters
circling overhead, for what? A political purpose, for sure, a non-violent
protest against the ultimate state violence of capital punishment.

And now it finally strikes me, half a day later, what this feeling of
horror is that has gripped me since the vigil ended and we retreated
somberly to our distant cars and slowly made our escape from that house of
doom by the bay.

What is it, after all, for one man to die, like this?

Many die daily, from bombs and snipers in Iraq, from floods in New
Orleans, earthquakes and cold in Pakistan, from heart attacks and bullets
and traffic accidents nearby. Death is common. It happens every day.
Everyone must die. Tookie was as ready for death as I can ever hope to be.

So what is it then, really? What is the essence of the sense of horror I
feel?

I can tell you now: It is that we did not resist. Like the Jews quietly
detraining at the concentration camps. What else could they do. What could
we do. What that befuddled angry young man was suggesting?logical as it was
in essence?would have evoked a massacre. The artillery with which we were
surrounded could have reduced a thousand plus people concentrated in that
small area to mush in a matter of minutes. And few of us were ready for
that sacrifice.

And what is the message from this execution that lingers obscurely in my
heart and mind till now?

That the State is all-powerful. It has the power not yet to create life
but certainly to take it away. What else can be the intent and purpose of
the death penalty?

Millie Barnet
December 2005