Sodium thiopental does not render a subject unconscious when it is administered subcutaneously instead of entering the bloodstream. However, when allowed to pool in the tissues of the arm, it will cause severe chemical burns. Potassium chloride, similarly, must hit the heart in a large dose to cause cardiac arrest. Vecuronium bromide injected into the flesh of the arm will eventually paralyze you, as it is supposed to. It just takes longer to do the job than it would if it entered the bloodstream.
That means that Chester did not get a proper dose of sedative, and he did not receive the drug that was intended to ensure a quick death, but he did get the drug that paralyzed his lungs and diaphragm, causing him to slowly suffocate while he was conscious and aware, and while this was happening, he was suffering chemical burns the severity of which were analogous to what you would experience if you plunged your arm up to the elbow into the pile of smoldering charcoal briquettes at the bottom of a hot barbecue. In short, Chester March was tortured to death by the state of Tennessee.
This tragedy is the result of several of the problems I warned the Tennessee Supreme Court about. The lethal injection is a complex medical procedure that is administered by executioners who are not medical practitioners. These people have no business inserting intravenous lines or handling such dangerous drugs. Further, Chester was unusually prone to this kind of complication from an IV line because he was eighty years old and had spent thirty-five years in a tiny cell, leading a sedentary lifestyle. He was in poor circulatory health, and as a result, his veins were overly prone to tearing.
Because the state applies its lethal injection protocol uniformly, without regard to the age or health status of any particular inmate, it risks serious complications of this type when it attempts to perform this procedure on inmates who are elderly, infirm, are former intravenous drug users, or are in otherwise poor health. That’s every death row inmate. No one can stay healthy in an environment like that.
I am appalled and traumatized by what I have witnessed, and I am ashamed that I wasn’t able to protect my client from this nightmarish outcome. But Chester March’s death will not be for nothing. I will be petitioning the Tennessee Supreme Court to enjoin all further executions until we can reevaluate the state’s lethal injection protocols. And I will be calling on the governor to put capital punishment in Tennessee on moratorium.
On a personal note, I’m just sickened by this whole debacle. This is the first time I’ve witnessed a botched execution, but working in capital defense, it was as inevitable as it is unnecessary. I’m sorry that you had to see it, and I’m sorry my students had to see it. For that matter, I’m sorry that I had to see it, and I am aggrieved and horrified that Chester had to endure it, but you’ve done a great service by drawing attention to this case. This kind of thing has happened before, with disturbing frequency, and when it does, it generates very little mass outrage, because people don’t care very much about death row inmates. Hopefully it will matter that we’ve brought this injustice to your audience’s attention.
CARLOS WATKINS (NARRATION): I don’t know what I expected to happen when I started reporting this story, but it wasn’t this. Our production team thought Heffernan had better than even odds of winning at least a stay of execution for Chester and that our coverage would conclude on that victory. I thought that Ed had the situation under control that a man like this—educated, eloquent, and white—could get the attention of the people who controlled these systems and make them listen to reason. I never expected that I would end up witnessing a botched and torturous execution firsthand.
And, unfortunately, I do not share Ed’s view that these events or my coverage of them can be a catalyst for real change. Maybe if we had audio or video or photos to show people what death by lethal injection looks like, it might make a difference, but describing it isn’t enough. My suspicion is that Chester March was supposed to be put to death, and he’s dead, and as far as most people are concerned, the system worked within acceptable parameters.
And maybe there will be a temporary moratorium on executions as a result of this, but Tennessee has a Republican governor and a Republican legislature, and those institutions appoint and confirm Republican judges. I suspect Riverbend will be back to executing people sooner than Ed would like to imagine.
I said I would write down Chester’s last words and convey them to you, and I have. Before he got the injection he gave a speech he must have spent quite a while preparing. It was a speech about faith and about forgiveness, about how he forgave the people who were poised to kill him, and about how he hoped to find absolution in the arms of Christ. If that had been the last thing Chester March said, his last words would have been eloquent and dignified. But those were not Chester March’s last words.
After the lethal injection had been administered, when Chester was supposed to be unconscious, he sat partway up on the gurney, and he screamed, “Oh God, why? It wasn’t supposed to hurt so bad!” So, those were Chester March’s last words.
On the way out of the prison, I ran into Buck Schatz. Buck steadfastly refused to meet with me, so throughout my entire coverage of this story, I had never actually seen him, and I was shocked by his appearance. I knew he was ninety, but I hadn’t fully appreciated what it meant that he was so old. When I thought of him, I thought of the detective I saw in those old archival photos. The reality is quite different.
His grandson, William, was helping him move from a wheelchair into the backseat of their Buick, and his wife was sitting in the front passenger seat, staring blankly ahead. She seemed stunned by what we had just witnessed, but Buck, who has seen a lot of carnage in his day, was in high spirits. Nevertheless, I was shocked by his frailty. Chester had said he was never exactly a big man, but age has reduced him, and he seemed tiny. His skin was like parchment. He wore thick glasses and a hearing aid, and when he looked at me, it seems like he looked past me. His hands trembled.
He was wearing a baggy sweatshirt with an NYU logo on it that his grandson must have given him, and a pair of chinos that were too big for him, leaving drapes of fabric falling off his skinny legs. But the detail about him I really wouldn’t have guessed were his shoes. They were slip-on canvas Keds, the kind of kicks you get at a Payless store in a run-down strip mall for fifteen dollars, and there was a hole in the toe of one of them. I’d have guessed Buck Schatz was the kind of guy who spent two hours a week spit-shining his lace-ups.
CARLOS WATKINS: Are you finally going to talk to me, Detective Schatz?
WILLIAM SCHATZ: Piss off, Watkins.
BARUCH SCHATZ: No, I’ll talk to him.
W. SCHATZ: We’ve discussed this. We decided this was a bad idea.
B. SCHATZ: Feh. At this point, what’s the harm?
27
Carlos Watkins looked younger than I expected him to. Listening to his program, I imagined somebody who looked kind of like Bryant Gumbel, but this kid couldn’t have been more than a couple of years older than Tequila.
He was wearing a light-yellow oxford shirt tucked into dark-blue straight-leg jeans, with a navy blazer but no tie. And he was wearing red Converse sneakers that looked exactly like the ones I used to wear to play racquetball at the Jewish Community Center fifty years ago.
He had close-cropped hair, what I’d call a medium complexion if I were describing him to a police sketch artist, and his eyes were red-rimmed like he’d just been crying and was on the verge of crying again. Over a scumbag like Chester March. Wasn’t that something?
“Okay,” I said. “You’ve been wanting to talk to me. So, let’s talk.”
“I think this is a bad idea,” Tequila said.
“My grandson is worried that you’re not going to be … What did he call it? A good-faith interlocutor. Are you going to be a good-faith interlocutor, Mr. Watkins?”
“I intend to be,” he said. He pulled a little recording device out of his pocket and showed it to me, to make sure I knew I was being taped. I nodded at it, and he pushed the button on the side of it.
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“Well, you see there, Limoncello, you’ve got nothing to worry about,” I said to my grandson. “Me and Carlos, here, we’re just a couple of good-faith interlocutors, interlocuting in good faith. It’s a regular meeting of the minds.”
“If this goes off the rails, I am putting a stop to it,” Tequila said.
“However could I survive, without you around to protect me?” I asked my grandson. Then I turned to Watkins. “So what do you need to know so bad that you won’t stop calling me?”
“Did you beat a confession out of Chester March?” Watkins asked.
“No,” I said. This was the truth. I did not strike Chester. He just had a close encounter with an unidentified flying ashtray.
“Did you interrogate Chester after he’d been injured in a car crash, but before he had received medical care.”
“Yes,” I said. “He was a murder suspect. He crashed his car trying to escape from police pursuers and flee across the state line. He had a hostage he’d kidnapped in the trunk of his car. His injuries didn’t appear immediately life-threatening, and we decided to question him before we sent him to the hospital.”
“Were you aware, when you interrogated Chester, that he was in a diminished cognitive state as a result of a serious head injury?”
“I asked Chester what he did with his wife, and he told me. We went out and dug where he said he buried her, and we found her remains. Maybe he only told me that because he bumped his head, but I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.” I found my cigarettes and lighter in the seat pocket. I lit one. “You want one of these?” I asked.
“We’re not supposed to use tobacco products on prison grounds,” Watkins said.
“What are they going to do? Lock us up?”
“Well, maybe not you, because you’re a ninety-year-old retired cop. But I am a black man, so, very possibly.”
“All right,” I said. “Point taken.” I threw the cigarette on the ground and stepped on it, and stuck the pack back into the seat.
“Can you see the direct line between your decision to interrogate Chester without treating his injuries and what happened here tonight?” Watkins asked.
“I see a direct line between Chester’s decision to murder three women and what happened here tonight.”
Watkins sat down in the wheelchair. “I don’t know why you’re being so flip with me, man. Can you at least agree that what we just saw was horrifying?”
“Sure it was horrifying,” I said. “But I’ve seen a hundred years of horrifying things, and a lot of those things happened to people who were a lot nicer than Chester March. The crime scene where I discovered Evelyn Duhrer’s body partially dissolved in sulfuric acid was a horrifying thing. The corpse was so fragile that it broke apart in transit to the morgue, which made it difficult to ascertain which injuries had killed her, and I needed a confession to make sure that her murderer got justice. So, when I had to consider whether to interrogate that woman’s killer or send him to the hospital and let him have time to recuperate and get his lies straight, it wasn’t a hard decision for me. Why are you so much more horrified by the execution of Chester March than you are by the murder of Evelyn Duhrer?”
“Because Evelyn Duhrer’s murder wasn’t systemic,” Watkins said.
“What difference does that make?”
“Dismantling corrupt and oppressive systems is the definition of justice.”
“Jesus Christ,” Tequila said. “Grandpa, I’ve heard enough of this. Let’s go get chicken.”
“Hold on,” I said. “Isn’t the pursuit and capture of a man who beats a woman to death with a fireplace poker and tries to dissolve her body in a tub of acid also justice?”
“No,” Watkins said. “That’s the operation of a coercive system. You’re exacting retribution on the symptom while you’re working in the service of the disease.”
“So you want to let men like Chester get away with murdering women?”
“No. In a just world, Chester wouldn’t feel a need to murder women.”
“Wait a second,” I said. “You think Chester had to murder Evelyn Duhrer because he didn’t inherit a large enough fortune from his cotton-baron father?”
“No, but I think systemic causes can explain Chester’s alleged crimes,” Watkins told me. “If you repair or dismantle oppressive systems, you solve your Chester problem. But torturing Chester to death does nothing to fix any systemic problems.”
“Let me tell you a story about fixing systems,” I said. “My father was a communist. He worked down on the Memphis waterfront. He hauled freight all day, and at night he looked around and imagined how the world could be a better place.
“At that time, the labor union that represented the longshoremen was pretty ineffectual. They’d go to the bosses and ask for more money, and the bosses would threaten to fire them all and bring in black workers who would happily do their jobs for less pay. The bosses never actually did it; whenever they came close, old Mr. Crump would intervene. Crump was the mayor in those days, but he was more than that. He was the boss. He was the bosses’ boss. And how he said things were going to be, things were. When it came down to it, the unions and their votes were his, and he wasn’t going to let them get pushed out by the blacks. But he made sure they never got the wages they deserved either, by hanging the threat over their heads that black replacements were ready to walk onto the site the moment the white workers became more trouble than they were worth.
“So, my father got the idea that what the union should do was let in the blacks. The fight, in his view, wasn’t between the white man and the colored, but between those who lived by the labor of their hands and those that controlled the purse strings—the ones who operate the systems, as you put it. If workers of all races could unite, they could all negotiate for a fair wage together, and the bosses couldn’t use them against each other. But it was 1927, and my father was a little bit ahead of his time.
“He went to the union hall, and he told them his big idea, and they threw their beer mugs at him. And a week later, somebody ran his car off the road. His body was ten feet from the wreck. He was drowned in a shallow ditch. The police called it an accident. Just a Jew who couldn’t keep his mouth shut, even when his head was underwater.
“My mother never believed Mr. Crump was behind that. It was too brazen to be the work of a man with so much to lose. It was the workers, the ones my dad was trying to elevate. They were so disgusted by the idea that they might be equal to the blacks that they lynched my father for trying to teach them about class solidarity. That’s what happens when you try to fix systems. You get distracted by your ideals, and you don’t see a couple of mean, dumb, white-trash longshoremen coming up behind you. Systems didn’t kill my father. Small, petty violent men did. And men like that are a problem I know how to solve.”
“That’s the Buck Schatz origin story?” Watkins asked. “That’s why you think crime isn’t systemic? That story is about nothing but systems. Racism is a system. Capitalism is a system. Man, the Crump machine is the very definition of a corrupt system. It’s all systems within systems, turning people against each other for the benefit of the operators. Those longshoremen were so blinded to their own interests by the workings of networks of corrupt systems that they killed your father so Crump didn’t even have to deal with him. And then you spent your whole life trying to get your hands on the longshoremen and serving the same interests in the process. Your father understood how the world works better than you do. You’ve spent ninety years going backwards. All those decades, going after the longshoremen, going after Chester, going after whoever. And what did you accomplish?”
“I got him,” I said. “I got him and several hundred others like him. He died tonight for what he did, and he spent thirty-five years in a cage waiting for it. If it hadn’t been for me, he might be out there somewhere right now, drinking champagne and plotting another murder.”
“He died screaming,” Watkins said. “His damn arm melted. It was the wor
st thing I’ve ever seen.”
“It wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” I said.
“No, I guess it wouldn’t be. Your whole life has been a cavalcade of horrors.”
He had me there. That was indisputably true.
“Why did Chester March kill Cecilia Tompkins?” I asked. “What systems explain that?”
“She was a black sex worker. She was the most marginalized possible victim,” Watkins said.
“But why was he looking for a victim in the first place?”
“Capitalism.”
I shook my head. “Capitalism had nothing to do with it. He didn’t make a thin dime off that killing. He had nothing to gain from it, except maybe it got his rocks off. He was just a goddamn psycho, and he’d be a psycho if he was rich or if he was poor. He’d be a psycho in your communist paradise, or in whatever kind of utopia you think you can build. There are always going to be monsters. The systems don’t make them. We make the systems to protect the rest of us from them.”
“Look, man, you can beat the shit out of Chester and everyone like him for as long as you want, and you’ll never make any headway against solving the real problem. All the heads you busted, all the men you arrested, all the lethal injections—what have they accomplished? You kill one monster and another takes his place, and the system persists. How is that justice?”
“I did the best I could,” I said. “I saw men like the ones who killed my father and men like Chester out there, doing the things they do, and I thought somebody ought to stop them. Somebody ought to get them. So I went out and I got them. That was justice as I understood it, and I meted out as much of it as I could. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I spent my whole career trying to get my hands around the problem, and I retired without solving it. If you’ve got your own idea of justice, who am I to tell you whether it’s right or not? I wouldn’t have ever let anyone tell me justice was anything other than what I felt it was in my guts, and I don’t suppose you should either. All you can do is fight for whatever you believe in until you’re too old to fight anymore, and then you can take a look around and see if any of it made a damn bit of difference.”
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