The Best American Crime Reporting 2008

by Jonathan Kellerman

  Ordinarily, Crittendon, an athletic man of fifty-three, is a model of affability. When he lopes through the prison, he teasingly greets passing guards and inmates—“Look out, now!” and “He ain’t playin’!”—then, when they stop him to register what are sometimes esoteric grievances, he responds with vigorous nods and says “Sheez!” and “Oh, my!” and usually promises a fix, proud of his ability to bend the most rigid of bureaucracies. As a frequent guest on talk shows like “Larry King Live,” Crittendon holds forth with relish on such topics as the crimes of death-row residents whose company the wife-killer Scott Peterson, recently arrived at San Quentin, might enjoy.

  During an execution, though, his demeanor turns profoundly neutral. “Vernell has the hardest role,” the veteran guard John Gladson says. “He has to keep the victims’ families from being pissed off by not appearing too sympathetic to the condemned, but he also has to go back the next day and deal with the inmates on death row, who’ve all had their TVs tuned to Channel 5”—San Francisco’s CBS affiliate—“watching him like they’re reviewing a play.”

  As Morales knew, his attorneys had convinced a U.S. District Court judge, Jeremy Fogel, that two of the three poisons he would receive could cause excruciating pain if the first one to enter his bloodstream, the barbiturate sodium thiopental, didn’t put him under. San Quentin’s execution logs indicate that, during six of the prison’s eleven lethal injections, the condemned may have been partly conscious; similar findings have led eight states to suspend use of the chemical mixture—sometimes called Texas Tea—employed in most of the death-penalty states, including California. To meet Judge Fogel’s concerns, the prison had brought in two anesthesiologists to monitor the procedure. But that night, when the anesthesiologists realized that if Morales regained consciousness they were expected to sedate him again, they told the warden that it would be medically unethical to do so.

  Crittendon had just informed Terri Winchell’s family, who were in seclusion two hundred yards away, that the warden had postponed the execution for a few hours. He tried to radiate what he called “a veil of confidence: ‘Everything is moving forward, justice will be served.’” Then, projecting an attitude he terms “professional but sympathetic,” he says he told Morales of the delay, without explaining further. Morales dropped his face into his hands and said, “Oh, this is going to kill her family. They were prepared for it.”

  “I was speechless,” Crittendon recalls. “I was just moved, for once. I’d never heard a statement of caring about the victim’s survivors from a death-row inmate.” After a slight pause, he told Morales, “I will make sure I keep you informed as this develops.”

  At least, that’s how Crittendon related the event in conversations with me. But the execution team’s log shows that Crittendon never made a 10 P.M. visit, and that Morales didn’t learn of the delay until just after midnight. Crittendon acknowledged that his timetable must be off, but could provide no evidence to support his memory of the vivid exchange.

  When Crittendon went to brief the press on the delay, he shifted his demeanor to appear “professional but indifferent to the eventual outcome.” Believing that the press would try to blame the Judge or the anesthesiologists for the setback, he blandly announced that the warden was going over “some additional training with some of the newer members that have just been added to our team.” Later, he returned to explain that “the warden has reached that level of comfort with all of the members on the execution team,” and they were just awaiting a ruling from the district court on a motion for a stay. Still later, he read a statement of withdrawal from the anesthesiologists, adding—rather at variance with the facts—that “this is a new problem.” Crittendon eventually announced that the prison would carry out the execution the following evening, using only sodium thiopental.

  A single-drug injection had never been attempted, but Crittendon made the improvisation appear fitting and seemly, just as he had done with “citizens that were involved with civil disobedience” who had been arrested outside the East Gate; inmates “restricted to their assigned sleeping areas”—that is, locked down; and the condemned man expecting to partake of “the lethal cocktail.” (In the early nineties, when California used hydrocyanic gas, Crittendon spoke of a “team approach” that would “eventually end in a lethal environment.”) He excels at dispensing just enough information to satisfy reporters, and his sonorous locutions and forbearing gravity discourage further inquiry. Earlier, he had declared that Morales “was interacting with our staff in a very positive way,” and that the condemned man was suggesting that “this is not necessarily a sad affair.”

  “To hear it from Vernell,” Kevin Fagan, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter who has covered seven executions, says, “everyone goes to his maker the same way: ‘calm, happily fed, and at peace with his fate.’”

  CRITTENDON, WHO RETIRED IN DECEMBER, always sought to navigate a clean line through the acrimonious confusion surrounding the death penalty. The public broadly endorses the penalty—by about sixty-five per cent in most polls—but many capital cases are beset by doubt, mitigating circumstances, or evidence of the condemned’s remorse or redemption. California has a particularly thorough appellate process, and the result, on death row at San Quentin, is agonizing stasis: six hundred and twenty-nine men, the nation’s largest assembly of the condemned, now sit for an average of more than twenty-two years before their sentence is carried out.

  Vernell Crittendon would seem to have been the ideal proxy for a citizenry that wished to see justice done but did not want to look too closely at its slow, and then suddenly swift, final workings. Yet Crittendon’s studied professionalism about executions that occur (or, mysteriously, don’t) behind stone walls late at night was greatly complicated by his role—largely unknown to the media or to inmates—in actually carrying them out. Though Crittendon was a mere lieutenant, he essentially ran the show—“the conductor of the orchestra” for executions, as one of the wardens he served under put it. Another warden says, “He trained everyone, he did everything, he choreographed it all.” Crittendon would often answer reporters’ procedural inquiries by saying, “I’ll have to check with the warden”—although he knew exactly what was going on because he had arranged it so, and was, in effect, serving as the spokesman for himself. “As long as you keep enough fire and smoke going,” he told me, “they don’t pay attention to the man behind the curtain.”

  Crittendon wrote much of the prison’s lethal-injection manual, known as Procedure 770. At the weekly “special event” meetings in the warden’s office, he set the schedule for practice sessions by the execution team, for the inmate’s psychological evaluations, even for the tracing of the inmate’s veins to establish where the two I.V.s should go. The execution team itself was not in his purview, but he helped coördinate the prison’s Tactical and Investigative Services units, and selected and supervised a thirty-five-person Internal Security team who worked the night of an execution, evaluating them afterward for post-traumatic stress (a fairly common problem). Together with the prison’s litigation coördinator, he dealt with the state attorney general’s office about the progress of last-minute appeals. And he solicitously escorted the victims’ families to and from the prison—even as the officers he’d stationed outside the chamber were prepared to remove them if they caused a disturbance.

  Crittendon would visit the condemned man at least once a week in the final months, studying him, under cover of bringing his mail and inquiring about his needs. As the prisoner was transferred from death row to a secluded cell under twenty-four-hour observation and, finally, to the deathwatch cell, he was weaned from the custody of officers he knew well to those he got to know briefly, to those, on the final evening, he didn’t know and never would. Crittendon took pains to insure that the emotional atmosphere around the condemned was gradually muffled as well, as if an institutional rheostat were being dimmed. “I tell everyone to keep your voice low, don’t laugh, and avoid all confrontation,” he said
, adding that the soothing tone was “directed to the deserved outcome of getting the inmate to walk into the chamber without a struggle, hop up on the chair, lie still, and take the ultimate punishment.” Yet, he observed, “If they tell you pretty blondes in short miniskirts are going to put you to death, you’re still going to feel stress when you hear those keys jingling. When I’d take the condemned to the death-watch cell that evening, I’d see it hit them. All of a sudden, they’d walk with little steps, like when you tell a child, ‘Go to your room.’”

  CRITTENDON LEARNED THE fate of Michael Morales the next day at 5:30 P.M., two hours before the rescheduled execution was to occur, when the warden told him that the prison would not be able, by the midnight deadline, to find a court-approved medical practitioner willing to inject Morales with an overdose of barbiturates. (Since that day, there has been a statewide stay of executions; in May, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, or C.D.C.R., announced that it would build a new lethal-injection chamber at San Quentin, and that it would overhaul staff training and tweak the chemical mixture to address Judge Fogel’s concerns.) After Crittendon told his staff, he went to the visiting room, where Morales was meeting with three of his lawyers. Crittendon approached their Plexiglas booth, turned to face Morales, and said, “I have been instructed to inform you that the warden is standing down from the execution.”

  The lawyers stood in confusion. “What does that mean?” one lawyer asked, three times.

  “He knows what that means,” Crittendon finally replied, indicating Morales with his chin. Then he turned away.

  David Senior, one of the lawyers, recalls that Crittendon faced him rather than Morales, and says, “Vernell delivered the information in such a way—hands behind him, nose to a crack in the Plexiglas—that you could read zero personal feelings in it.”

  When I told Crittendon that Senior had been struck by his detachment at the moment of reprieve, he said, sharply, “The moment I showed emotion, his attorneys would use it for their agenda, and my staff, who were also watching, would interpret that and they would allow their emotions to be seen, and then we are an embarrassment to the State of California.”

  Every conversation between a guard and an inmate is circumscribed by tactical concerns. (You never give an inmate bad news when he’s not secured in his cell, or on a weekend, when fewer staff are on duty, and you never confide anything intimate; to be guilty of “overfamiliarity”—of a sympathy or engagement that prevents you from enforcing the rules—is an unforgivable lapse.) Still, Crittendon couldn’t help revisiting that exchange. Had Morales understood from the angling of the spokesman’s body that he was trying to speak only to him, to convey a kind of solidarity? Did he grasp the constraints the spokesman was under? “I was not able to have the kind of interaction with a human being I’d like,” Crittendon said. “I’d have wanted to sit down next to him, with no barrier between us.”

  The morning after an execution, Crittendon was always at his desk by nine—right back at it, when some on the execution team would take a permitted five-day leave. Crittendon was such a “tower of strength,” as a former warden, Jeanne Wood-ford, puts it, that his colleagues were convinced that he both approved of capital punishment and shrugged off its impact. Yet immediately after an execution he would always linger until everyone had left and then sit in his truck in the deserted parking lot, thinking.

  On the morning after the reprieve of Michael Morales, the prisoner was held in a stainless-steel shower stall on death row while guards returned his belongings to his regular cell. He was visited by Eric Messick, Crittendon’s deputy, who knew that he would have to answer questions about Morales’s state of mind. Messick, who is as direct and artless as Crittendon is strategic, asked Morales how he was doing.

  “A lot better than yesterday,” Morales said.

  “So now you’re just like the rest of us,” Messick said. Morales looked up quizzically, and Messick said, “Now you don’t know when you’re going to die, either.”

  Morales thought that over, smiling a little, then said, “Yeah, but this is not finished.” Still, he was touched by the visit, saying later, “They’re usually very concerned that you’re doing fine before they kill you—not after they don’t kill you.”

  WHEN YOU PASS through the sally port at San Quentin, you feel as if you’d walked into an old Warner Bros. prison movie, the kind where Jimmy Cagney rattles his cage. Built in 1852, during the Gold Rush, this barrow of crumbling granite on the former Bay of Skulls has held Black Bart, Caryl Chessman, Sirhan Sirhan, Charles Manson, and Richard (the Night Stalker) Ramirez, among many others, and the ferocity of their hatreds seems to linger in the air.

  Steven Ornoski, who was warden during the Morales matter, calls it “the worst prison in the California system: it’s old, filthy, noisy, poorly laid out, and understaffed. I told people I’d been dropped on the Titanic—after it had hit the iceberg.” When a federal health-care receiver visited San Quentin last spring, he found that its emergency room had lacked gauze and sutures for four months.

  From 2004 to 2006, San Quentin was run by a bewildering procession of nine wardens and might well have been closed, had there been somewhere for its occupants to go. California’s thirty-three prisons hold a hundred and seventy-three thousand inmates, twice as many as they were built for. Nineteen thousand inmates now sleep in hallways and gyms, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently classified the prisons as being in a state of emergency. The system’s faulty health care has been blamed for one inmate death per week, and a state law requiring that prisoners be brought to a ninth-grade reading level by the time they’re paroled is basically ignored. Sixty-six percent of California’s released inmates return to prison within three years, twice the national average, but rehabilitation programs are nearly nonexistent: most prisoners are never introduced to anything more remedial than a barbell.

  On this conveyor belt to nowhere, San Quentin is the only California prison with both accredited high-school and college programs; four hundred and fifty pass-holding volunteers from the Bay Area regularly instruct its inmates in everything from Hooked on Phonics to yoga. In a deeply conservative environment—the vast majority of the thousand guards who work in the prison grumble about “Camp San Quentin” and “hug a thug” mollycoddling—the flourishing of these programs is almost unaccountable.

  They owe their survival, in large part, to Vernell Crittendon. As wardens cycled through, Crittendon became the institution’s memory, conscience, and consigliere; the duties he took on included everything from organizing inmate walkathons for charity to running the prison museum. “Vernell seemed to know everyone in the whole United States,” Jill Brown, a recent warden, said, “and which exact person to go to to help the prison—from who to call at the Mexican consulate to who to contact among Louis Farrakhan’s people if there was an issue in our Muslim community. He was Mr. San Quentin.”

  Crittendon led many lives at the prison. Early in his career, he became widely known and feared as a member of the prison’s “goon squad”—a buccaneering unit that beat down prisoners to gain compliance. But in the years after he was promoted to the administrative staff, in 1988, he began to trade upon that reputation in order to rehabilitate the men whose heads he had so often pummelled. It was a delicate balancing act; nearly every time he made a decision, either the guards or the inmates would complain that he was favoring the other side. Even as he publicly lauded the prison’s punitive strictures, he privately began to encourage a multiracial group of inmate leaders to quit “the game”: he’d ask about their families, allow them to make off-hours phone calls to their children, introduce them to reporters as “our success stories,” even organize memorial services for their cellmates. Felix Lucero, a lifer, said, “You always want to feel you can be rehabilitated, that you’re not an animal, and Crittendon makes you feel that way. He treated me like we were sort of…friends.”

  Crittendon helped oversee inmate self-help programs like No More
Tears and the Vietnam Veterans Group, and was an adviser to many others. Every other Friday, as the centerpiece of a program called Real Choices, which tries to set wayward urban kids on responsible paths, he would escort a group of ten-to-eighteen-year-olds into the prison to meet lifers, who tried to talk—or shout—some sense into them. Crittendon, who is married to a nurse and has a fifteen-year-old son, inaugurated Real Choices in 2001, but, characteristically, he encouraged the inmates to speak of the program as their own creation. Once, he had hoped to become warden himself, but as warden after warden fell to internal politics within the C.D.C.R. he came to understand the uses of stealth. When he publicly declared that the Crips gang co-founder Stanley Tookie Williams—one of the prison’s most famous inmates—was a con man whose later good works were intended solely to avoid execution, he lost the trust of many inmates he’d so carefully cultivated. The Williams matter nags at Crittendon still.

  Crittendon’s approval, on the other hand, can open doors. Of the fifteen lifers he originally used in Real Choices, four have been paroled, an unusually high percentage. Crittendon had written to the Board of Parole Hearings on those inmates’ behalf because each met his five criteria: being responsible while at San Quentin; pursuing an education; serving as a volunteer; having a solid support system on the outside; and believing in God or a higher power. He asked Jerry Dean Stipe, a bearded Vietnam veteran known as Wolf, to be a co-founder of Real Choices—yet he didn’t write a letter for Stipe, he told me, “because he was an atheist.” Crittendon said, “Without a belief in something larger than yourself, you backslide. I don’t help the men to be a nice guy or to make them into nice guys. The inmate’s going to benefit from being rehabilitated, but it’s really about protecting the decent people out in society who he’d victimize.”