The intentionally mundane nature of these executions usually gives reporters little material to sensationalize, were they so inclined. This suits Graczyk well, as a careful steward of this controversial beat, intent on maintaining impartiality. When asked how the executions weigh on him, the emotions he goes through, or the experience of watching the first execution versus the four hundredth, he said that his work as a reporter preempts any possibility of emotional involvement. He is simply too busy doing his job, often as the only reporter present to record what transpires, to indulge personal revelations.
I asked Graczyk if it would be useful for me to attend an execution as I attempted to understand them better.
“The only thing that you would see or experience for yourself is how quickly it occurs,” he said. Normally, the inmate goes unconscious in less than a minute. Ten or twenty minutes later, a physician comes in the room and pronounces him or her dead, but the precise moment of death is unknown.
I asked him again—would there be something to understand, not as a reporter gathering facts, but as a person experiencing the event?
Graczyk said he didn’t understand why I would want to attend an execution unless I had some personal stake in the case, as the witnesses typically do. He was right: Who would want to watch such a morbid event? Who would want to impinge on the privacy of the families as they mourn? A reporter attends on behalf of the public, to monitor this most powerful symbol of the state’s control—its ability to take life. But don’t I and every other American have a personal stake in every execution that occurs? How can any of us discover our position on such a law without comprehending its full weight, as we might if we saw it enacted?
The viewing of executions was once essential to their power. In France, the usefulness of the guillotine depended on the crowd and its reaction. During the Revolution, these public executions became such a popular part of life that a crowd of regulars convened daily to watch, the operators were celebrated, songs were written about the instrument, and a child-size replica with a real blade was a popular children’s toy. Public executions ended in France in 1939—three years after the final public execution in the United States—though capital punishment remained legal there until 1981. While in retrospect the guillotine is a stark symbol of state brutality, it was considered the most humane method at the time—a rapid drop of a blade meant to end life as efficiently as possible. Now lethal injection is considered more civilized, but the guillotine was likely a quicker form of death. As Dr. Sarat writes, “The experience of execution by its witnesses—their ‘suffering’—fuels the search for painless death,” more so than the desire to curtail the torture of the convicted.
Graczyk has mostly numbed to the horrors that prompted the executions he reports on. After his reading and writing in detail about hundreds of murders, only parenthood has changed his perspective, giving him a heightened awareness of the vulnerability of his children. When they don’t show up on time, he imagines the worst, knowing that the scenarios his mind might invent are more than hypothetical. The worst has happened and will likely happen again to some child.
“You try to tell your kids, without scaring them, that there are bad people out there,” he said.
In Brownsville, the building on East Tyler Street is a reminder of such atrocities. Though inanimate, its voice resonates. Carlos Garcia, the chief of police in Brownsville when the children were killed, told me that, while the Rubio deaths “should teach us a lesson, some will learn and some will never learn.” Garcia kept his composure through nearly an hour of discussion about the crime scene, his own children, and the violence he’s seen in his career. Only when we came back to the role of the building did he break down. “It should remind us that life is precious, that our children are precious to us, and to go home and hug our children every day,” he said tearfully. “If the building stays behind, it will always be a landmark of three children who were never given an opportunity to live, to see the sun rise one more time, to see the moon.”
Larry Lof, who has restored many of Brownsville’s most famous buildings, told me that the architecture in a community adds up to more than the sum of its parts. “A historic neighborhood is a collection of buildings. None of them might be the most special building in town, but together they form an ambiente, they form a character that defines a neighborhood.”
What would be lost if that voice, an insistent whisper, was silenced? Under Lof’s definition, any building the city demolishes represents a small blow to Brownsville’s history. I imagined an aging woman’s face, then a brow lift, collagen in the lips, stretching of the skin. Now she is unrecognizable.
Though I sometimes thought of John when I looked at the building, and the time both had left, their respective ends were in no way equivalent. To kill a person exists on another plane from the act of dismantling bricks and wood beams. The parallel is found in the satisfaction promised by destruction: to lend the weight of tangibility to the ephemeral. You can take a mallet and bust into the wall of a building. You can load poison into a syringe and inject it into the body of a human being.
You can see them both reduced to absence. Then, we are left with nonexistence, a blank space. A piece of earth can host another structure, and though it will be different from what came before, it can serve a new purpose. But when a life is gone, it is not replaced.
• • •
I returned to see John a year later. He was still going through post-conviction review, but he likely had less than a decade left in Livingston before he would be taken to nearby Huntsville to be executed.
As I drove toward the prison, the small hills began to get more pronounced, and trees blazed red and yellow on the edges of the road. I didn’t feel nervous this time, as I had the last. Still, certain facts were churning in my mind: I wanted to know more about John’s spray use, which had been far more excessive than I’d realized, and ask him about the state of the apartment—perpetually filthy in the months before the children died, and shared with other people who were doing drugs and working as prostitutes.
My visit fell on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and several of the visitors at death row were children, ranging from a towheaded toddler with a sparkly headband, to a teenager play-fighting with a younger sibling. The mood was somber, and again the conversations for the most part had little to do with the prison that surrounded us. People seemed intent on pretending that they were not using a telephone to communicate through the thick wall of glass that separated them from their loved ones who sat, depersonalized, in plain white jumpsuits. No, we were just sitting in a cafeteria, munching on pastries from a vending machine, catching up before the holiday. I heard a father talk about car mechanics, and a teenage girl describe getting noticed by boys in the neighborhood.
Stay cool, I love you, a man said over the phone, putting it on the cradle as he smiled through some private pain.
An hour later, John was brought out and placed in the little booth in front of me. Once the barred door was closed behind him, a guard removed his handcuffs through a hole in the back of the miniature cell. John smiled, and I smiled back. He told me that I looked tired.
“It’s a long trip,” I said.
He looked tired, too, though I didn’t tell him so. Dark bags were under his eyes, and his skin was pale, his hair shaved close to his skull. His cheeks had a couple of days’ worth of stubble, which he said he’d been punished for. He’d gotten in trouble in the past for setting fires in his cell.
John was happy for the break from his quarters, but he seemed fundamentally sad. He asked me how things were, and I told him that I got married a couple of months before, and that I was planning to move away from the valley. He congratulated me. I asked him how he’d been and he said okay. One couldn’t expect a better response than that. No one in here was doing “well” or “great.”
I’ve never huffed paint and asked John what it felt like. He said that huffing
was ultimately not about pleasure. It was a distraction, albeit one that lasted only minutes, from an emptiness he’d felt inside in his teens and the first years of his twenties. After graduation, the boundaries of high school, the coaches and the teachers who motivated him to come to practice, study harder, get in shape, were absent. He had no direction at home, and high school was the closest he ever came to thriving. His attention problems and learning disability got in his way, and he was unhappy when bored. Of course, the spray and the pot likely made this worse.
John remembered how his attention problems had made it difficult for him to concentrate on the tedious, repetitive jobs required at fast-food restaurants. He wanted to be challenged, but he seemed to lack the ability to create manageable challenges for himself. The army, he felt, was the solution. But the test required for entrance necessitated three hours of intense concentration, and this obstacle, he said, was impossible for him to overcome.
When John graduated from high school, life was unstructured, and perhaps like a typical eighteen-year-old, he thought this freedom was exactly what he wanted. He could spend his days having sex, doing drugs, with few responsibilities. Though never medicated for a mental illness before prison, John was deeply depressed, and when Gina broke up with him, the malaise deepened. Drugs were a coping mechanism, and he relied on them more and more. His brief stint with prostitution, he said, was something he tried to get out of his funk, in addition to earning money.
John looked back at his teenage self, regarding his behavior as both juvenile and entirely explainable. He could see why the army seemed like a good fit, why he needed boundaries more than most kids his age. But when he was young, he didn’t understand why he was turning to drugs, why he needed but rejected structure. He remembered his special-education teacher, Ms. Treviño, the one he had called Mom. John wrote to me:
She cared and scalded me for slaking off, saying I could do better. It was because she believed in me that I tried harder than I felt like doing. I wanted her to be proud of me as my own mother did not praise me for the good I would do, often anyway.
He had been eager to settle down—having two common-law wives in quick succession—but was also restless. With both Gina and Angela, John took on not only a relationship, but an instant family as well. With Angela, that meant both a one-year-old daughter and an infant on the way. These children were the brightest spot in John’s life; maybe they represented a way to fill the void, to create a sense of purpose.
Shortly after John’s arrest, and his diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, he was put on several medications. He told me he was taking Prozac, for depression, Benadryl, and Risperdal, an antipsychotic. This made it hard for me to know what an unmedicated John sounded like. He said he had occasional visions, what some might call hallucinations, but these days he tried to ignore them, a self-preservation technique schizophrenics sometimes use to deal with an illness that can be manageable but is never curable. He said that the two years following the crimes, the visions were much worse, and his sincere wish was to die and join his children in heaven.
I did not get the sense that John was trying to manipulate me, but I’m not a psychiatrist. I can’t be sure of the authenticity of John’s presentation. I can only go on what experts told me, and what I’ve read.
I bought him some food during this second visit; a guard delivered it again. On John’s forearm was a tattoo, angie in wavy letters. John said he’d got it inked a couple years after his incarceration. Now, long after Angela had stopped communicating with him, she still remained in his sight line every time he looked toward his hands.
Psychiatrists who evaluated John for the trials found him to be narcissistic, and to have delusions about his life. At times John made statements that seemed self-aggrandizing, mentioning, for example, that he was the good one in his family, and that since he’d left, depriving them of their moral center, they had fallen apart. He didn’t seem to appreciate the irony that perhaps his action rather than his absence might have destroyed them.
Dr. Valverde said John had a “naivety” and that he was a “childlike soul.” Though John occasionally got confused, Dr. Valverde said he never felt that John was lying to him, but merely searching for someone who would agree that what he did was “the only course of action he could have possibly taken given the circumstances.” Dr. Welner testified that John had “a very interesting vulnerable charm that doesn’t hit you until you’ve been with him for a little more than an hour, and then you really recognize yourself, as an interviewer, that you feel really taken by him.”
Even while looking out for and recognizing that “charm,” which suggests within it an ability to manipulate, I found it difficult to feel any vengeance or vitriol toward John, even long after I again drove away from the prison. It was easy to be angered, even sickened, by twenty-two-year-old John, and how his reckless choices had culminated in destruction all around him, but his life now was limited and marked at every corner by these failures. He hadn’t outrun them; rather he dwelled inside them and would never escape. Maybe these fantasies of grandeur were a symptom of his illness. Maybe they were an escape mechanism that sometimes succeeded in granting temporary relief. On this visit, John seemed to be in mourning for all that was irretrievably lost.
The main message he tried to convey to me, one that he’d talked about during our first visit, was that he was never the calculating killer he’d been portrayed to be by the prosecution at his trials. He was guilty, and he didn’t evade his guilt. He didn’t necessarily think of himself as mentally ill, though it is common for paranoid schizophrenics to lack insight into their own illness. He wasn’t ultimately sure if he’d killed the children because they were actually possessed, or what else might have catalyzed the event. But, he insisted, none of what transpired was premeditated, and it filled him only with sorrow and regret.
John didn’t testify about the murders themselves during either of his trials, which is common in criminal cases. If he had, he might have asserted this position—that he did not believe himself to be insane—or a medicated John may simply have seemed too coherent to square with a jury’s idea of what a crazy person sounds like. It was frustrating for him to sit in the courtroom listening to an evaluation of his life and his actions with no ability to weigh in.
During our conversations, John never “acted crazy.” The little tells he gave, such as the way he sometimes smiled inappropriately when we approached a difficult topic, or his somewhat flat affect, didn’t surprise me. Dr. Valverde said at trial that John’s constricted affect was normal for people suffering from schizophrenia, who might have difficulty demonstrating to the world what they feel on the inside.
• • •
The jury did not have the option of sentencing John to life without parole at either trial, a choice now available in all states that have the death penalty. This change has added momentum to a quiet consensus that the abundance of deficiencies with the implementation of capital punishment—racial discrimination, wrongful conviction, botched execution, and high cost—outweigh the personal belief that putting a person to death in retribution for a crime is just.
“The result is that the death penalty is withering,” Dr. Sarat told me. “It’s dying on the vine.”
Though the use of the death penalty has significantly decreased, the likelihood of abolition remains distant. It would require us to reckon with a different set of questions.
At the second trial, attorney Ed Stapleton finished his closing argument to the jury by introducing the concept of the “magic mirror.”
“I meet someone and I hate them. And the tendency will be that I will hate them because of defects that I myself have. I think that guy thinks he’s smarter than he is. See how it works? I meet someone and I love them. And what I see in them is qualities that maybe I have a little bit of.” Stapleton implored the jury to look inside themselves and then look at John, “a man who has steeped himself in fear or
been steeped in fear since infancy. His primary emotion, I would submit to you, from the evidence, is fear. And to allow that to be my primary emotion in dealing with him would not do justice. I would submit to myself. I need to look to the better parts of myself if I’m going to look at him and make a decision about whether or not there is any sufficient mitigation to save the man’s life.”
Stapleton spoke to a jury that stood in for the rest of us.
The death penalty has grown more deceptive over time. A person falls asleep. His neck is not snapped, he is not stoned or sliced apart by a falling blade. But the endgame is the same: he or she is dead, and as a society we must accept responsibility for the death, as the application of death as punishment is hardly a foregone conclusion. Of course, most of the time, the person on the gurney is also responsible. They’ve set this series of events in motion long ago. But acts do not exist in isolation in our world, and we can’t expect to repair the misconduct of the past tidily, believing our response to also be contained. We are connected—invisibly, intricately, marvelously, and tragically—and those connections cannot be willed away. It would be satisfyingly simple to see an act as abominable as murder cured or avenged by putting the perpetrator of that crime to death. But the killings continue. They amp up—into school shootings, terrorist acts, wars that rage for decades. The question is whether one death addresses another, or whether they circle into a frenzy.
The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts Page 18