The Executioner's Song

by Norman Mailer

  When he used to be Attorney General—one of the small irritations of Phil Hansen's life these days is that people still kept mixing him up with Bob Hansen—he used to bring in suits as the Attorney General, even called it an Attorney General's suit, on matters affecting the public good. Thinking on it now, his impression was that it might be feasible to start a suit as a citizen of the United States who happened to live in the State of Utah. "Why," he said to Ritter, "do I have to have a title to bring it in? Why can't a citizen just stop the execution?"

  They talked about it awhile, and Hansen finally decided that what with the ACLU sending in a new plea tomorrow after losing this afternoon, he would save his bid for a last resort.

  LOS ANGELES TIMES

  Crochety or Creative?

  Utah Judge Is a Caution

  Salt Lake City—Somewhere between the charge by his enemies that he is a mean-tempered old man and the claim by his friends that he is a creative legal scholar, probably lies the truth about U.S. District Judge Willis W. Ritter.

  For 28 years the controversial Ritter has been a dominant force in Utah legal affairs, despite the fact he is a liberal, anti-Mormon Democrat in a state ruled principally by conservatives and strongly influenced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

  "He has been lord of the manor and Utah has been his fiefdom," former U.S. Atty. Ramon Child said.

  Now, however, the judge, 78, is facing an unprecedented challenge to his authority by federal and state officials.

  State Atty. Gen. Robert B. Hansen has filed petitions with the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver asking that Ritter be disqualified from hearing any cases to which the United States or the state of Utah is a party.

  The petitions accuse Ritter of repeated misconduct on the bench, a strong prejudice against the state and federal governments, and, generally, behaving erratically.

  Utah Sen. Jake Garn, a Republican who has called Ritter a "disgrace to the federal judiciary," is leading efforts in Congress to dilute the judge's authority.

  But in a letter last October to Rep. Peter W. Rodino Jr. (D.N.J.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Ritter outlined how he sees his problems.

  "Malice, Mormonism, McCarthy-Nixon dirty tricks are written all over it by extreme rightist elements in the Republican Party," Ritter wrote.

  "The Mormon church has taken over practically every other public office in the State of Utah. They have been trying for a long time to take over the federal court for the district of Utah."

  Ritter was a law professor at the University of Utah when he was appointed a federal judge in 1949 by President Harry S. Truman, but the appointment was hotly contested by Mormon forces. Ritter was accused of personal immorality and public corruption.

  When Congress mandated age 70 as the retirement age for federal judges in 1958, it exempted 32 sitting chief judges. Ritter is now the lone survivor of that action.

  Bob Hansen was just as annoyed when people mistook him for Phil Hansen. There was no doubt what he thought about Ritter. The Judge, he would say, had real malice of the heart. Of course, Hansen would not argue that Ritter was not brilliant. Maybe he was even a genius. It was possible that if you took guys with brains, Ritter was in the upper one-tenth of one percent among them, but he was also a perpetual fury machine. In fact, Ritter was so violently anti-Mormon that the Church had become, in Hansen's opinion, oversensitive to the idea that when it came to Ritter, they had to lean over backward.

  Hansen considered that a policy of appeasement. He wasn't about to let Ritter take over the Gilmore business if he could find a way to outmaneuver him.

  Chapter 29

  SATURDAY

  On their last visit, Gary gave Mikal a drawing of an old prison shoe.

  "My self portrait," he said. They were still on the phone when Warden Smith came into Gary's booth and began to discuss the exact moment when the hood would have to be put on Gary's head. After Mikal could listen to that no longer, he rapped on the glass and said he would have to leave soon. He had to catch his plane. Would the Warden allow a final handshake?

  At first, Smith refused. Then he said yes, but on condition Mikal agree to a skin search.

  When that was over, two guards brought Gary in. They told Mikal to roll up his sleeve before they shook hands. It could not be, the guards warned, anything more than a handshake. So soon as Gary grasped his palm, however, he squeezed it close to crushing, and a light came into his eyes, and he said, "I guess this is it." He leaned over and kissed Mikal on the mouth. "See you in the darkness," he said.

  Mikal knew he couldn't stop crying and turned away. He didn't t want Gary to see it. The guard handed over The Man in Black, a book by Johnny Cash, that Gary wished to give to Bessie, and then a drawing of Nicole. Mikal could feel Gary's eyes following him toward the double gate. "Give my love to Mom," Gary called, "and put on some weight. You're still too skinny."

  This same Saturday morning Schiller had been listening to the tape of the lawyers talking to Gary on Friday afternoon. There had been quite a bit about Melvin Belli's rhinestone cowboy boots, "He buys his clothes," Gary said, "at Nudi's in Hollywood."

  "What is," asked Stanger, "the biggest item you ever smuggled into a cell?"

  "A 340-pound Norwegian woman wrestler."

  They all laughed.

  Schiller listened to talk about good guards and bad guards and what made the Warden tick. Schiller heard conversation about legal moves, and personally inscribed Bibles that came to Gary in the mail.

  Then Stanger dropped by the TraveLodge and asked what Larry thought of the interview.

  "Stanger," Schiller shouted, "why don't you get off your ass?"

  "You, Schiller," Stanger replied, "can stick it up your ass." He stormed out.

  "I'm never going to speak to Schiller again," said Stanger on the drive out to the prison. He was seething. Stanger considered himself a damn good cross-examiner. So was Bob Moody. Either one of them could rip through Gilmore, cut him left and right, exactly how Larry wanted. But there were a couple of things in the way. One was the questions Schiller and Farrell were so proud of. They seemed stupid to Stanger. Bore very little relation, from his point of view, to what Gilmore was all about.

  Schiller had this huge operation going, and might end up with too little, and Ron could see the point of Schiller's worries, but his job was to build up, not break down Gilmore's confidence.

  Gilmore was his client, and he was there to fill his wants, Larry looked for questions that would make Gilmore react. Stanger didn't feel like going out to prison to get the guy angry. It was okay to seek information, but not all right to probe Gary like a lab rat and keep poking wires into him. Gary was already caged up all day long.

  "I'm not going to interview him today," said Stanger to Moody.

  "Goddammit," said Moody, "if we're going to do a job, we're going to do it."

  That was probably as large a difference between them as ever shared on any trip to Maximum.

  Moody also thought they were doing a hell of a job, under the circumstances, even if Schiller and Farrell didn't agree. All the same, Schiller was right. There were only two days left and all kinds of valuable material to get. Moody sighed.

  GILMORE Look . . . is this on the recorder?

  MOODY Yes, uh huh.

  GILMORE The Warden told me I could invite five people. I named 'em and he said, "Don't you want any clergymen there?"

  MOODY The statute's very clear that you're entitled to two clergymen and in addition, five people.

  GILMORE I don't want the clergymen to get barred. They've been looking forward to this all along.

  MOODY Come on, as if anybody looks forward to it. I think ah . . . it would make them feel they were fulfilling their duties.

  GILMORE I don't care what their motives are. They both want to come.

  MOODY It's just gonna be a damn painful forty-eight hours for everybody.

  GILMORE Man, I'm not in pain.

  MOODY I kno
w you're not, but others are. Your Uncle Vern, your Aunt Ida are going through hell. (pause) Others are physically ill.

  GILMORE Who?

  MOODY Well, I am, Rod Stanger is, Father Meersman.

  GILMORE It's no big deal.

  MOODY We know it's no big deal, but it's empathy for you.

  GILMORE I'd like to see Nicole. The sucker won't give me an answer.

  MOODY I think that's your answer, you're just not going to face reality.

  GILMORE I didn't hear.

  MOODY I think that's the Warden's answer. He's not going to answer you. Period. That's no reason to shut out everything else. You still have forty-eight hours to live. Well, live it.

  GILMORE Shit. Up until the last hours I only had one guard, and if I didn't talk to him, he didn't have nobody to talk to. So it was quiet.

  MOODY Yeah . . .

  GILMORE Now they've put two of them fools out there. All they do is talk to each other and play cards.

  MOODY Well, they tell us that's part of an execution.

  GILMORE Man, ah . . .

  MOODY When you get an execution, you get a deathwatch. That's what you're undergoing right now.

  GILMORE Well, I don't like to listen to the cocksuckers right in front of me.

  MOODY You may not, but it's part of your sentence.

  GILMORE Well, okay then.

  MOODY If you're gonna get shot, you're gonna have a deathwatch too. That's part of it.

  GILMORE Yeah (pause) Okay, man.

  MOODY Do you want me to send these questions in?

  GILMORE I'm not really all that choked up about answering any more.

  MOODY Okay.

  GILMORE It, man, is so noisy. If I could have some quiet during these last fucking hours.

  MOODY You doing your exercises or anything like that to pass the time?

  GILMORE Yeah . . . I do all that.

  MOODY You reading any?

  GILMORE No, uh . . . I don't read anymore. I've real all I'm gonna read.

  MOODY Draw anymore?

  GILMORE No.

  MOODY You going to draw that self-portrait?

  GILMORE Don't have a mirror.

  MOODY Well, I guess you don't have much of anything, do you?

  GILMORE I've got myself. (long pause) I don't want to ah, fuck around with writing the answers to these questions. I guess he deserves answers, but God damn it I don't like the way Schiller does some things.

  MOODY Well, there are lots of times we don't like the way he does things, but his is a style, and he's in a tough racket and you develop a style like his.

  GILMORE Is everybody just supposed to accept that?

  MOODY No, I don't think so. But he's got a damn difficult job. He's trying to do it. That's all. He's working his ass off.

  GILMORE I asked him not to read those letters and he did.

  MOODY Okay. (long pause) Don't you feel that you owe Larry something?

  GILMORE Go ahead and read the questions. I'll answer 'em. I want Larry to understand that he don't have the right to say who the fuck I can or can't speak to. My brother asked me to talk to a friend of his, and I told him yeah. I know who Moyers is. I wouldn't have answered anything that you wouldn't have wanted me to say.

  MOODY You're really splitting hairs over nothing. 'Cause there's no way in hell Moyers is going to get in to talk.

  GILMORE I know that. I was pissed off because Mike was unhappy:

  MOODY Okay.

  GILMORE All right.

  MOODY The next question has been asked a number of times. Have you ever killed anyone before Bushnell and Jensen? . . . How about this guy that you beat with the pipe?

  GILMORE He lived. (sigh) Kind of altered his life, though.

  MOODY Don't you find shooting pretty damn grotesque?

  GILMORE What's grotesque is the fact that you have to be strapped in the chair with the hood, and all that horseshit.

  MOODY Doesn't the blood and guts of a shooting appeal to you?

  GILMORE (laughs) Fuck you, Larry . . . the blood and guts . . . Yeah, man, that really appeals to me. I'm gonna take a spoon.

  The questions went on. No breakthrough.

  From the two executions Father Meersman had previously attended, he had learned things could go badly wrong. The person to be executed might become so upset he would lose his own particular kind of calmness. Father Meersman always tried to keep a man in such a state ahead of the execution, tried to let him know what was going to be done. He figured if the man more or less knew you went to this place, point A, and from point A you were moved to point B, and then, at a certain time, you would go to point C, and so forth, he wouldn't have to say, "Where are we going now?" and maybe get upset over it. Some little thing like that could bother a man much too much.

  Whereas, if they knew ahead, so they could go through it sort of smoothly, and if everybody leading them was calm, then that could prove a contributing factor to their own calmness, just knowing more or less how the mechanics were going to be. You didn't want anything of a surprise to happen. Everybody was very tense when an execution was taking place, and you didn't want anything to get out of step or make the man balk.

  Meersman always felt he was the one who succeeded in explaining to Gary why they put the hood on. It wasn't personal, he told him, just that you wanted to be very still, so the target didn't move the slightest bit. Any slight movement could throw the bullets off. If Gary wanted to die with dignity, then he had to respect that very, very simple thing about the hood. It was there for practicality to allow the thing to run very dignified, and no movement. Gary listened in silence.

  On Saturday afternoon, Gil Athay came out of Judge Lewis's chambers in the Federal Building and faced the press in the corridor.

  The reporters were frantic. Judge Lewis's regular courtroom was in the Tenth Circuit Court, Denver, and his chambers here, while commodious, had simply not been large enough. Many had not been able to jam in for the proceedings.

  So now there was chaos, and cameras flashing, and the call letters of microphones from foreign and domestic radio stations in his eyes. Athay felt as if he were marching into one of the rings of the circus.

  If was hard not to resent such an atmosphere. For days he had been fighting his way down corridors made narrow by the bodies of reporters. It had gotten out of hand. He was a dapper man with eyeglasses and a brush mustache, and he was not tall enough to avoid getting swarmed over in crowds. So at this point he said, "I'll be happy to make a statement, but it has to be downstairs." There remained a complete pandemonium. In his ears, he could still hear Judge Lewis saying, "You make it very difficult for me, Mr. Athay, to place it all on my shoulders, you know. If you'd given us time, there could have been three Judges to hear this." But Athay by then had been sufficiently keyed up to answer, "Well, I think, Your Honor, that's true, but we have to make the decision, and can't hide behind the committee." Had he really said that? The case of Dale Pierre must have tightened his temper.

  He had come to believe that his client, Dale Pierre on Death Row, was innocent. That was an extraordinary belief to most. The public was convinced Dale Pierre was one of the hi-fi killers who had poured Drano down people's throats and stuck ball-point pens in their ears. The wife of a prominent gynecologist had been killed in that record store, and her son's brain had been permanently damaged. Stove-in by the killers. A horror of a case, but Athay had come slowly to the conclusion that Dale Pierre was innocent and had been convicted by the Jury because he was black, a condition to avoid in the State of Utah. In Utah a black man couldn't become a priest in the Mormon Church.

  So Athay had embarked on a crusade. In fact it had cost the full price of a crusade. When he ran for Attorney General in the last election, Bob Hansen, his opponent, had made Dale Pierre one of his most powerful talking points and won by a good margin. Would-you-want-this-man-who-defends-clients-who-stick-ball-point-pens-in-middle-aged-women's-ears-to-be-your-next-Attorney-General had been the whispered theme of the campaign.
Nothing Athay could do. You couldn't tell every voter that he had been made Pierre's lawyer by Court appointment, nor that in the beginning, in fact, he had seen it as an unpleasant duty, and only later had become convinced of Pierre's innocence. You couldn't tell the voters that Dale Pierre was a complex man, a difficult man, but now, to Gil Athay, rather a beautiful black man, and besides, Athay had always hated capital punishment.

  He was ready to argue there was no rational way you could justify the death penalty, except to admit it was absolute revenge. If that, he would say, was the foundation of the criminal justice system, then we had a pretty sick system.

  So he had worked with the ACLU on this Gilmore business, and today had entered an appeal which had been audacious in the extreme.

  After standard opening remarks that the lack of mandatory appeal in the Utah statute was unconstitutional, Athay had introduced his legal novelty. Let one execution be carried out under a defective law, he argued, and it would be hard in the future to find a higher Court ready to declare that same statute unconstitutional. No Judge would want to say to a fellow Judge, "You know, you executed that man in error." Gary Gilmore's death threatened, therefore, the life of Dale Pierre. An interesting argument, but difficult. To get the Court's attention, you had to make your language virtually insulting.

  In the meeting on January 10, the ACLU therefore put Athay's venture next to last on their list. But by Friday afternoon, with the sad word coming from Giauque that Mikal Gilmore was not signing any papers, Gil Athay went to Judge Anderson's Court. Anderson was a rigid Mormon, but he was also the only Judge available at that hour. While there was hardly any realistic hope, Athay got caught up, nonetheless, in his own reasoning, and came to feel he had a good shot. Judge Anderson had listened carefully. The basic problem, however, remained. Nobody wanted to face the sinister merits of the argument. Judge Anderson turned him down.