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Friends United Meeting |
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July 1998
Requiem
by Jodie English
Religious organizing against the death penalty
"For these are all our children. We will all profit by, or pay for, whatever they become."
-James Baldwin
(All God's Children, The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence, by Fox Butterfield, 1995, Frontispiece.)
We drove the five hours to Indiana's death row wrapped in the web of friendship. Gray skies over the hollow hulls of the cornfields. As the walls and razor wire loomed large, we steeled ourselves. I could feel the air between us go dry. Jan Dowling, one of several lawyers representing Gary Burris; myself, lead counsel for Bill Spranger. Both of us hoping that neither would suffer the agony of execution, condemnation to that hell where lawyers wake in the night to revisit what might have been done differently.
Two Clients. Two Lawyers. Two Impending Executions.
A little over a year later, both men are off death row. One executed. The other serving a sentence of sixty years. One, his ashes spread on the grounds of the Bloomington, Indiana Friends Meeting. The other, eking out his existence in the thin hard soil of a maximum security prison. But alive.
Bill Spranger's Crime
Bill Spranger was eighteen when he and a man ten years his senior set in motion the events that would place Bill on death row. It was an evening fueled by alcohol, an evening that accelerated from a simple prank to deadly violence. They'd been out drinking almost until morning when, less than a mile from home, they saw a car parked beside the road.
The older man wanted to break in. Bill was too drunk to disagree. When the town marshal pulled up, Bill just stood there, waiting to be taken away to spend his first night ever in jail. But the man Bill was with felt differently.
Unbeknownst to Bill, this man had been convicted of robbery, and faced serious prison time if he was caught. The man started to fight with the marshal, a fight that very quickly turned ugly. As Bill watched in a drunken stupor, the two men rolled over and over each other all the way across the highway. Finally, the officer got the best of his assailant. But the marshal didn't just put on the handcuffs and finish the arrest. The marshal started beating the man who had fought him. The man lost consciousness, but the beating continued. Days later, his body bore nightstick shaped bruises.
Bill just wanted the beating to stop. He looked around and saw that the marshal's gun had come unholstered during the rolling tussle across the highway. Bill had never held a gun before, but he picked it up and yelled for the marshal to stop the beating. The marshal ignored him. Then Bill cocked the gun, to show the marshal that he really meant for the beating to stop. A split second later, the gun exploded in Bill's hand. The two fled-Bill to the arms of the girl he was engaged to marry, the girl whom he told, within an hour of the shooting, his voice shaking, "I shot him, but I didn't shoot him-the gun just went off."
In 1983, when Bill was sentenced to die for the murder of the officer, the jury never heard what he had told his girlfriend. They never heard that there was something profoundly wrong with the officer's gun-that ballistics testing of the gun confirmed the explosive, hair trigger condition of the firearm. They sentenced him to die based on the testimony of his codefendant, who received a sentence of four years.
Bill's Childhood
Part of representing someone in a capital case is to unearth their past, for the past always bears witness to the reasons the murder took place. As death row inmate Michael Lee Lockhart said on the eve of his own execution, "One thing is certain: God did not create a murderer." (Indianapolis Star, December 9, 1997, pp.1, 12.)
For months, Bill refused to open up. Both his parents had died while he was on death row. What was the point of maligning their memory? It wasn't until I told him something of my own past that I got him to understand that it wasn't a question of blame, or running "the abuse excuse"; it was just a question of telling the jury the truth of who we are.
I told him of one of my parents' drunken arguments when I was nine. At three in the morning, I woke to the alarm of their anger. I huddled close to the heat grate on the floor of my room through which I could see into the room below where they fought. I watched as my father mangled my mother in his strong hands, ripping a clump of hair from her head as she screamed, the ball of her hair moving along the floor in the air from the heat run. The bald spot. How she would comb her hair so carefully to try to hide what had happened.
My past was redeemed by the trust that came to exist between Bill and me. The horrible memories that used to haunt me whenever someone cracked their knuckles or I saw hair cleaned from a brush have less of a hold on me, for without them, I could never have told Bill's story so fully.
Bill was the tenth child, born in as many years. With his father either absent working two jobs or drunk, and his mother gone for months at a time caring for one of Bill's brothers who spent most of his childhood in hospitals due to kidney failure, Bill got very little. There was grinding poverty. There were times they ate popcorn for dinner. Times the family of twelve drove to church at the rescue mission all packed into a rusting VW bug. The only thing there seemed to be enough of was alcohol. Bill's father thought nothing of letting Bill have sips of his liquor as a child, and openly shared his booze with Bill as a teenager. In the Spranger household, intoxication was manly. And intoxication was the catalyst for violence. Sometimes as a teenager, Bill would try to intervene-try to stop the beatings with whatever was at hand. It was a pattern that was repeated the night of the marshal's death.
Gary Burris
Gary was tall, rail thin, black, with musing, caring, questioning eyes. Abandoned as a baby in a trash dumpster, Gary would never know the identity of his parents. He was raised by the pimp who rescued him from the refuse, by prostitutes and thieves. At six he brought clean washcloths to the girls to wipe themselves for the next trick. At seven he helped sell liquor to the clientele of the whorehouse that was his home. Even though there were several police raids at the brothel, the law never cared that a nameless little black boy was living in squalor.
When the state finally placed him in foster care, Gary was described as quiet and good. Always appreciative. His only request for Christmas each year was for a birth certificate. He wanted to find out who he was, to have a birth date, some day of his own to celebrate. It was as if he foresaw, as Eliot has written, "In my beginning is my end." ("East Coker," in Four Quartets, 1943.)
For a man denied the knowledge of the date he was born, Gary came to know several dates by which he was to die for his crime of killing a cab driver. In the decade and a half over which these appointments were set, scrubbed and rescheduled, he became something of a philosopher, reading constantly. His gentle manner disarmed those who guarded him. He was made a trustee on the row. When others lost their self control, his was a voice of reason. Around him, some peace was possible.
Two years ago, when he came very close to being executed, some guards came to Jan, and with tears in their eyes, asked her to tell him goodbye for them. Faced with the possibility of imminent execution, Gary thought mostly of others' feelings, telling Jan that perhaps he should take his last words from the old Mr. Wizard, Tutor Turtle cartoon. Tutor would find himself in some awful jam and yell for help to his wise friend Mr. Wizard, who, waving his magic wand, would quietly intone: "Drizzle, drazzle, dradle, drone. Time for this one to come home." Then Tutor would be spirited back to safety. Gary hoped his levity would bring some sanity to the superintendent of the prison, who-though he was a strong supporter of the death penalty-did not believe Gary deserved to die.
Bill's Trial
The prosecution chartered a bus to ensure that the courtroom would be packed with law enforcement officers. By closing arguments, the courtroom was bursting with police. Standing room only. Wall to wall, an ocean of uniforms in navy blue and brown.
I hadn't foreseen this. A modern day Roman coliseum, the roar of the crowd, thumbs down. I hadn't anticipated that I would be able to count the friendly faces in the courtroom on less than the fingers of one hand. But my fear dissipated in the face of the overriding need to tell Bill's story. Against their weapons, their anger, and the popular public hue and cry for vengeance, I armed myself with Bill's story. The story of the accidental shooting, the defective weapon. The story of how his father had started Bill drinking at age eight, and helped to make Bill a full blown alcoholic by age sixteen. The story of his efforts to make the best of himself on death row-including testimony from his GED tutor, who, though her daughter was married to our chief of police, nevertheless described Bill's determination and hard work as greater than any other prisoner she had tutored. I felt the unmistakable sense of calling that comes when the Spirit moves me to speak in Meeting, but I didn't know if Bill's story would be enough.
Pictures at an Execution
The witnesses are confined to the chapel. The wait is interminable, much longer than officials had represented. Instead of it being thirty minutes before the end of his world, it has been over an hour. Schedules adjust, but only as to the moment of his ending, not the fact of his extermination. Death-that much is certain.
The witnesses are ushered to their seats. The curtains open. The body strapped, almost straitjacketed. The long fingers that decades ago caressed a woman's cheek, that once grasped a gun as a man was left to die, now lift slowly and flutter his goodbye. The head turns. These are the last minutes of the world for him. And the witnesses, who will never be as innocent and free again, will order the events of their lives by the bookmark of this execution. No one speaks. No one moves. It is so absolutely quiet that each witness can hear the heartbeat of the person beside.
Then he vomits. Over and over. Purging himself of their last supper. The witnesses, forewarned that they will be banished if they speak out, barred from honoring his last wish for their presence, struggle to silence themselves, struggle not to gag. Tears fall, knuckles tighten, some fight to not throw themselves like birds against the plate glass of the execution chamber. In his mind's eye, one witness sees himself grabbing a weapon, freeing the man bound to the gurney, the poison poised on the brink of coursing through his veins, ripping out the IV lines, running...free.
With the vomit cleaned from his face, the ship of death has righted itself. This is the final act. The final curtain. All is as clinical and sanitary as the showers at Auschwitz. His eyelashes, so long they brush his ashen cheeks, flutter, then still. The moth's wings shudder from the camphor. The specimen is pinned. That of God that existed in him is dead.
The ashes are spread by a tree. Those who knew him, who fought with the simple hope of knowing him still, stand beneath the branches. Some feel his presence, some are even sure he is there. For a decade and a half he'd longed to see a tree. None ever grew in the yard on death row. By spring, he will be part of the greening.
Not all of the lawyers who knew him were able to go on. One left the practice of law, left the state that murdered him. When the idea of writing this article was first raised, her reaction brought back the words of the Russian poet, Anna Akhma-tova, who like so many thousands of others had lost her loved ones to executioners:
"I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad.... Beside me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips....she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there): 'Can you describe this?' And I said: 'Yes, I can.' And then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once been her face."
"Requiem" (Selected Poems, 1976, p.87)
But even she has begun to move on. She hears his voice sometimes while walking in the mountains. After years of stooping to pick up the five smooth stones to slay Goliath, she bends to no one. She wakes early, follows the sunrise, and at times, carries him with her. And through her, freedom and love call in answer to the shrouded heart.
I'm Alive
When the judge uttered the words that meant he would live, the man just broke down and cried. His face was lit from deep within, he looked as innocent as a child, aglow with joy and he became new. The man who had struggled to breathe in the iron lung of a death sentence year after brutal, lonely year, was reborn. There is a childlike awe in his gaze as he whispers, over and over, the tears falling, "I'm alive. Oh my God, I'm alive."
His lawyer knew then, for the first time, what he had endured. How he had held his breath all those years in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. And she knew what she had lived under, not knowing all that past year whether she had been working on a cadaver, dictating an autopsy report, or whether her patient would survive.
"To have saved one life, it is as though you have saved the entire world."
The Talmud
Quakers and the Death Penalty
I wrote this article without telling you which of our clients lived and which was executed because I didn't want this to be merely a piece about just my success or failure in saving Bill's life. I didn't want Quakers to conclude that a hard working lawyer, or a Quaker lawyer, could solve the problems inherent in the death penalty's profoundly arbitrary calculus of determining who should live or die.
It is easy to be against war when there is no war. And even easier to believe in forgiveness when there is no great horror to forgive. When I was seeking a faith that could sustain me, I was looking for a people who believed in nonviolence even during war, reconciliation even for the condemned, in short, a people who love rather than kill their enemies.
Jesus was once asked to support the death penalty, the stoning of an adulteress. His answer was unequivocal: "Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone." (John 8:7) Would you have stoned both men to death? Probably not, as Quakers. But would you have read of the imminence of their stoning in the newspapers and done nothing, offered no protest, spoken no truth to this lethal power?
The Killing Fields
Over three thousand men and women await execution in America. "I should like to call you all by name...." (Akhmatova, p. 95) Some have no lawyers, and their fate is assured. Others are represented by hard fighting but soul-weary teams of lawyers and investigators, some of whom I know and care for deeply. Everywhere around me, eyes I love are closing on this final horror.
I don't know how to stop the bloodbath, the killing of our, not God's, mistakes. Those of us with any sense know we can't hunt murderers to extinction when, every day, society's indifference breeds murderers anew.
But this paper is meant to be more than a voyeur's glimpse at the profanity of the death penalty. It is a call to action. We are one hundred thousand strong. We stopped a war once. In the Quaker stronghold of Pennsylvania, the ranks of death row grew last year at the highest rate of any state in America. I implore you, make a strong stand for life. These cases are being tried in your cities and towns. Your county prosecutors are pursuing these death sentences, sentences that are the vote of your neighbors. The death penalty is the greatest act of domestic violence, the ultimate example of our society modeling violence as a solution to violence. As Quakers, it must be our sacred calling to see this societally sanctioned slaughter abolished.
Jodie English is a Quaker, a criminal defense attorney, and a training consultant for the defense bar. She lives in Richmond, Indiana, with her husband, Lonnie Valentine, associate professor of Peace and Justice at the Earlham School of Religion and their two beloved children, Cady and Ben.
Religious Organizing Against the Death Penalty
The movement for death-penalty abolition received a boost in the United States in November 1997. More than 500 people from every portion of the United States and many faith traditions joined together in a conference to inaugurate the "Religious Organizing Against the Death Penalty Project." Kurt Rosenberg, editor of The Quaker Abolitionist, wrote, "It was probably the largest anti-death penalty conference ever held in the United States."
Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking and one of the organizers, said, "The role of the religious community is to reconcile what seems irreconcilable: love for death row inmates and their human dignity, and love for murder victims and their dignity-and compassion for the hurt of their family members. Our spiritual energy can unite and combine what ideology alone can never bring together."
The Project seeks to build a coalition of faith-based activists. It plans to organize a thousand study groups using the book and movie Dead Man Walking and study packet. It is developing resources such as a compilation of sermons, religious statements on the death penalty and a quarterly newsletter.
The project is coordinated by the American Friends Service Committee. For information, contact the Religious Organizing Project, c/o AFSC, 1501 Cherry St., Philadelphia PA 19102; (215) 241-7130; e-mail Pclark@afsc.org.
Other key resources:
Friends Committee To Abolish the Death Penalty, 3721 Midvale Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19129; (215) 241-7124; e-mail fcadp@aol.com; publishes The Quaker Abolitionist (subscriptions $15/year in the USA) and web site: http://www.quaker.org/fcadp.
Friends Committee on National Legislation, 245 Second Street, NE, Washington DC 20002; (202) 547-6000; e-mail fcnl@agc.apc.org; http://www.fcnl.org/pub/fcnl. "The Death Penalty Information Packet" (G-779-DOM) is a very useful source of information and further contacts.
Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation, PO Box 208, Atlantic VA 23303-0208; (757) 824-0948.
Amnesty International USA Program To Abolish the Death Penalty, 322 8th
Ave., New York NY 10001; (212) 633-4200.
Action Suggestions:
- Work for the Religious Organizing Project (see sidebar, page 5 for addresses), and facilitate a death penalty study group.
- Hold forums in your Meeting; sermons on the death penalty.
- Join Friends Committee To Abolish the Death Penalty. State coordinators are needed in 34 states (including Indiana).
- Write state and federal officials opposing the death penalty.
- Speak out against individual executions. Write letters of gratitude to judges and prosecutors who forego imposing or pursuing a death penalty.
- Meet with local prosecutors, police and prison employees to make the case for abolition.
- Attend court in support of defendants on trial for their lives.
- Assist family members of prisoners on death row in visiting.
- Minister to those on death row. See that the religious needs of death row prisoners are honored. Ministries such as the Indiana death row ministry of Church of the Brethren Reverend Wanda Callahan, 2726 W. 700 N., Wawaka IN 46794 need support.
- Support The Last Wish Trust, c/o Jodie English, Attorney at Law, 707 South A Street, Richmond IN 47374, established to defray unreimbursed expenses of representing death row inmates in clemency petitions, the expenses of the prisoners' families in visitation prior to execution, and burial expenses.
- Respond to requests for assistance from defense lawyers.
- Revise one's will to provide that should death come by violent means, no state or federal prosecutor has permission to pursue a death penalty in the decedent's name.
- Protest or symbolically withhold tax payments to governments which have a death penalty.
- Support national Quaker organizations (FCNL, AFSC, FCADP) in their work against the death penalty (addresses, above).
- There are many local and state organizations working to oppose the death penalty, such as the Indiana Coalition To Abolish the Death Penalty, c/o Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center, 500 E. 42nd Street, Indianapolis IN 46205.
Copyright (c) 1998 Friends United Meeting
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