The Last Face You'll Ever See: The Private Life of the American Death Penalty
By Ivan Solotaroff. HarperCollins, 232 pages, $25.00
Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America's Future By Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.; Jesse L. Jackson, Jr.; and Bruce Shapiro. New Press, 174 pages, $22.95
Ivan Solotaroff states early on in The Last Face You'll Ever See that he is agnostic on the subject of the death penalty. His book, he writes, will make no attempt to answer the question of whether the death penalty is moral or not; he instead will focus on "the motive of capital punishment." He asks: "Is an execution a rational mechanism--i.e., a tool of deterrence, punishment, or jurisprudence... ? Or is it something altogether different--an expression of an irrational urge far more subterranean than the will to justice?"
In posing such a question, Solotaroff has put his finger on one of the mostimportant moral quandaries in the debate. Yet he wants his readers to know thathe didn't write the book to persuade them one way or the other. And for the mostpart, he pulls it off. His agnosticism is apparent throughout; he is always areporter, always presenting facts as straightforwardly as possible, withoutjudgment. But as I read, I was reminded of books about war that are seen to beantiwar--All Quiet on the Western Front, for example. What writer who understands combat well enough to write about it escapes without some tinge of antiwar outrage?
Solotaroff, a magazine journalist and the author of a book of essays, providesa brief and intelligent narration of the recent legal history of the deathpenalty, going back to the 1970s. He introduces us to M. Watt Espy, who runs the"unfunded, unaffiliated, one-man attempt to collect every available fact aboutthe American death penalty" known as the Capital Punishment Research Project outof his wood-frame house in Headland, Alabama. Espy, at the time of LastFace's publication, had chronicled the details of 18,812 executions by "hanging, shooting, electrocution, gassing, lethal injection, burning, beheading, entombment, gibbeting, breaking on the wheel, boiling in oil, roasting, drowning," and other means, and can recite from memory dozens of examples of botched executions and the condemned's last words. The conversation with Espy, who comes off as having more a sense of academic detachment than a bent for thrill seeking, nevertheless does much to remind the reader of the strange subculture that has sprung up around murderers in our country.
But this is primarily the story of two executioners, Colonel Donald Hocutt andformer warden Donald Cabana. Both served for years at Mississippi StatePenitentiary at Parchman and participated in several executions. Hocutt's life istraced from when he was a small boy, riding by the penitentiary on a train, tohis time inside (including a description of a drunken brawl he instigated as aguard at Parchman that came perilously close to ending in just the kind of murderthat puts people on death row). Cabana--whose own book, Death at Midnight:The Confession of an Executioner, is an eloquent, openly anti-death-penalty work--spent years in corrections before becoming warden at Parchman in 1984.
On the cover of The Last Face You'll Ever See, Hocutt stands in a white prison-guard's uniform, scowling, with his huge arms folded, at the door of a gas chamber. His face looks young, perhaps fortyish, but his hair is white. It's hard to read the scowl on his face: He seems a little defiant, angry, determined; there's even a bit of "look what you made me do," but without any trace of remorse. He resembles the death penalty in America today--haggard, unhealthy, but still doing a job. Or more accurately: Like the death penalty, he looks like whatever you want to see.
Hocutt worked at Parchman for 20 years before retiring in 1995. By way ofintroduction, we're told that Hocutt is "easily 300 pounds, with thick, baby-facefeatures that cloud over dramatically when he concentrates or falls into one ofhis moods." He experiences a "weird 'crackling' that comes into his head everytime he's in [Parchman] now," he drives too fast, he carries a .45 loaded withhollow-point bullets (he doesn't want to die, he says, trying to get his gunloaded), and he suffers from "gout, maturity-onset diabetes, diverticulitis,arthritis in his upper body, [and] partial deafness in one ear," Solotaroffreports. "His mind hasn't been right for years. Depressions steal over him, andfor weeks he finds it almost impossible to get out of bed... . At the slightestprovocation, he falls into rages." State-sponsored killing, we see, takes itstoll, even on tough men like Hocutt.
Solotaroff's ability to bring to life the guards who work at the Parchmanpenitentiary as well as the men imprisoned there gives the executions hedescribes a harrowing power. We are meant to understand why the executionerschose this work; while that might not be possible, it is as if we are in the roomwith them as they do it. Hocutt tells of the 1983 gassing of Jimmy Lee Gray forthe 1976 rape and murder of three-year-old Deressa Jean Scales. The executionwent horribly wrong (there were even rumors that Thomas Bruce, who oversaw it,was drunk at the time). Gray was finally pronounced dead after 47 minutes, havingfoamed at the mouth and beaten his head violently against a metal pole justbehind the chair.
Hocutt remembers stopping afterward for a hamburger at a nearby McDonald's andlistening to people talk about the Gray execution. "To call what he had donetwelve hours earlier a job," Solotaroff writes, "was absurd. That had nothing todo with employment. To say it was 'the law' either evaded the truth or missed thepoint altogether. What he had done was the right thing to do. And it wasn't someabstract will of the people that he'd carried out. It was the will of the peoplein that McDonald's."
We see, as well, Cabana visiting with condemned inmate Edward Earl Johnsonbefore Johnson's execution in 1987. When Cabana asked if Johnson wanted alast-minute injection of Valium before going to his death, Johnson "blinkedslowly, like a curtain coming down," and responded: "I want a clear mind when youwalk me in there... . Will you be needing one for yourself?... I want you to knowexactly what you're doing when you execute me. I want you to remember every lastdetail, because I'm innocent, Mr. Cabana. I'm innocent."
Later that year, Connie Ray Evans was strapped into the chair in the gaschamber and asked if he had any last words. He replied that he did, but only forWarden Cabana. Cabana stepped back into the chamber and Evans said to him: "Fromone Christian to another, I love you. You can bet I'm going to tell the Man howgood you are."
"In the classic image," Solotaroff writes, "a part of the executioner dieswith his prisoner. Now it was palpable. Cabana felt a part of his life slipaway."
People often say that they'd volunteer to be executioner, and one of the mostchilling aspects of Solotaroff's book is the difference in attitude between themen who actually participate in executions and the prosecutors who seek them. Inone scene, two Mississippi prosecutors discuss the death penalty. They say a lotof things that death penalty advocates say, such as how they'd have no troublepulling the switch themselves. "I'd pull the switch and eat spaghetti.Bzzzzzzzzz," one of them remarks.
In the end, Solotaroff, the agnostic, comes to a conclusion: "We execute toexert power over what horrifies us most supremely," he tells us. "And we executeimperfectly--randomly, cruelly, unusually--because murder itself seems exactly soto civilized eyes." Recent Harris Poll results showed that 94 percent ofAmericans believe that innocent people are sometimes convicted of murder and that67 percent support the death penalty nonetheless. That support, along with thestaggering randomness of executions--fewer than a hundred a year in a societythat suffers 16,000 homicides annually--gives credence to Solotaroff'sconclusion.
That the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson and his son, Illinois Congressman Jesse L.Jackson, Jr., are anything but agnostic on the death penalty is evident at oncefrom the title of the book they've written with Bruce Shapiro: Legal Lynching. The authors wish this book to be a "tool for all Americans engaged in the new debate over the death penalty." Indeed, it reads like a strong, comprehensive speech about how the death penalty debate has changed in the last four years. Each chapter tackles a different facet of the argument--from "A Question of Innocence" to "Deadly Numbers: Race and the Geography of Execution" to "Sleeping Lawyer Syndrome and Other Tales of Justice for the Poor." The book provides both important historical context and a summary of the latest information on the topic. The text of Representative Jackson's National Death Penalty Moratorium Act of 2001 is included at the end.
The Reverend Jackson's preface takes us to the center of one of the moretroubling executions of the last decade, that of Gary Graham in June of 2000.Graham, as Jackson points out, was 17 at the time of the murder for which he wasconvicted, was identified by only one witness (there was no corroboratingphysical evidence), and had a "low-rent" trial lawyer. Jackson spent an hour withGraham on his final day and was a witness to the execution. In urging his readersto find the courage to "stand with those on death row," Jackson acknowledges hisown moments of uncertainty "when the violence of which individuals are capableseems overwhelming." This acknowledgment, rare among the most committed activistsin the anti-death-penalty movement, is a vital part of the message of thebook--because it is a vital part of the national ambivalence about the deathpenalty. As chapter after chapter unfolds, outlining the history of the deathpenalty and the myriad problems with the system as it exists today, the readercan't help thinking back to the preface and hoping that Jackson is correct when,echoing Dr. Martin Luther King, he argues that there isn't any reason to believethat the death penalty is immune to the same "long arc of education, activism,and reform" that ended apartheid in South Africa.
Legal Lynching includes some sloppy errors (for example, Oklahoma City bombing victim Julie Marie Welch is called Jennifer here). But its passion and its detailed arguments make the book important. We are in a time when random murderous violence can seem overwhelming, a time of heightened anger against that which "horrifies us most supremely." Almost certainly, this will make moral arguments against the death penalty more difficult. Still, Legal Lynching makes a strong case that the American system of capital punishment is too gravely flawed to be morally acceptable.
