The biggest prison break of 20th century America took place on Labor Day 1940, when 36 convicts, led by trusty guards who turned their guns on other guards, escaped from Arkansas's Cummins prison farm, the institution later made infamous in the memoirs of reform warden Tom Murton and the popular prison film, "Brubaker." Barely six months after their escape, four of these convicts would be unwilling participants in another historic event--Louisiana's last hanging.

In what was to be not only the state's last hanging but also its biggest execution of the century, these four men kept a Friday afternoon appointment with the hangman in the Caldwell Parish Courthouse in Columbia, Louisiana:

William MeHarg, 25

Floyd Boyce, 29

William Landers, 39

William Heard, 43

After the mass breakout from Cummins, later attributed to the terrible living conditions at the old prison farm, the escapees had split into different groups, "taking off in all directions," according to news accounts. Six of them--commandeering and wrecking cars, capturing and releasing hostages along the way--fled into north Louisiana by Monday night, September 2, 1940. Newspapers labeled their spree a two-day "reign of terror," and it appears that every law enforcement officer and half the male citizenry was armed and out looking for them, while the other half stayed home to protect the women and children from the heavily-armed desperados. Even the trusty guards from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola joined in the search. Steve Alford, the state police superintendent, took to an airplane to direct the search from overhead.

The desperados' escape plan--"to go to Mexico"--completely unraveled after they kidnaped three Rayville high school students--Voncille Williams, Gladys Diamond, and Gerry Harrigill--Monday evening. The convicts were repairing a flat tire on their stolen car near Belvue farm north of Columbia about midnight Monday when a group of possemen approached the car with flashlights. Frank Gartman, a prominent Columbia auto dealer, acted as spokesman for the possemen, warning the fugitives that they were surrounded and pleading with them to surrender. The escapees opened fire, killing Gartman as he ran for cover.

One of the leaders of the prison break, Frank Conley, was also wounded in the exchange of gunfire. He was killed by law enforcement officers on Tuesday while attempting to surrender. Conley was waving his gun from the bushes and yelling, "Don't shoot," when he was shot.

Two of the remaining five broke away from the main group, commandeered another car, took the driver hostage, and tried to flee across the Mississippi River bridge at Vicksburg. In a shootout with police, one convict, Bruce Fowler, "got the top of his head blown off." The other convict, Floyd Boyce, surrendered.

The other three convicts--MeHarg, Landers, and Heard, all coincidentally nicknamed "Bill"--and the three hostages were surrounded in a swampy forest northeast of Columbia. They tried to negotiate an exchange--their freedom for the release of the hostages. When that failed, they gave up on Wednesday, September 4. The three hostages, with wild tales to tell of their captivity, were exhausted but unharmed.

The trial of the four surviving convicts began on October 14, 1940, in Columbia. Despite the reign of terror label, their only capital crime in Louisiana was the killing of Frank Gartman. They would continue to maintain, right up to the day of their execution, that they were only trying to escape the brutal conditions of imprisonment at the Cummins prison farm southeast of Pine Bluff, conditions that would eventually result in the entire Arkansas prison system being held in violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment." They said they meant no harm to anyone. They were just trying to get away.

Jury selection in the trial took longer than expected, when some prospective jurors expressed reservations about giving death sentences to all four men when only one, most likely Boyce, had done the killing. More than 125 names were drawn from the jury box before the 12 jurymen were seated.

Trial testimony lasted three days. The undertaker testified that Gartman had 28 bullet wounds, most of them shotgun wounds to the back. The jury deliberated for about a hour Thursday morning before returning a verdict of "guilty as charged" to capital murder. Judge Cass Moss ordered the four hung.

Radio station KMLB of Monroe had arranged to broadcast the criminals' final statements live from the jail, but this plan was canceled the morning of the execution by Louisiana Attorney General Eugene Stanley. Each of the four gave a final interview the morning before the execution. They asked that an Arkansas state investigation into conditions at the Cummins farm continue, and they told their audience that "crime doesn't pay."

All of them thanked Sheriff George E. Erskine, their jailers, and the townspeople of Columbia, particularly the "little Sunday school girls" who had brought them Christmas gifts.

Floyd Boyce said: "I want to thank all of the good people in and around Columbia for the nice things they did for me. They have made things a great deal more pleasant. My advice to all young people is to avoid crime and sin and try always to live good."

William Heard said: "I think you have a mighty fine sheriff. He has been kind to us . . . . I would like to tell all of the youngsters and old timers, too, that crime does not pay. There is no such thing as `easy money.'"

William Landers also made a final statement, and he gave Sheriff Erskine a dummy pistol made from corrugated cardboard and tin foil. He apparently meant to use it in an escape attempt but never got the opportunity.

William MeHarg gave the longest final statement. He said: "At the beginning I want you to know that I am one of the happiest men in the world. Friends, it may seem strange I can stand before this microphone just a few minutes before my execution and tell you that I am happy. I am happy because I have found the only true happiness in this life. God has spoken to me and has saved me from my sins and I know that where I am going there is only happiness.

"Friends, I have one of the sweetest mothers in all the world, a good Christian, one who has prayed for me, and slaved over the washtub doing other people's laundry that she might give me and other members of the family the necessities. While she was doing this I was in sin, gambling and drinking away the money that I should have given her.

"During the time I was wasting my life in crime and sin my dear mother was praying that I would not be taken from this life in that sinful condition, and I am happy that her prayers

have at last been answered, and she is also happy today to know that I will meet her in Heaven.

"You may wonder how I have come to change my life after having lived so sinful. It is easy to understand. A few days ago I received a letter from my lawyer telling me that everything had been done that could be done in my behalf, and no other steps could be taken. I realized that I had to die. Naturally, I was heartbroken and I didn't know which way to turn.

"Your good sheriff told me to brace up and I wondered if there wasn't some way I could repay my dear mother for all the sorrow I had caused her. It seemed like the Lord spoke to me and told me there was. Then I knew that the dearest gift I could give her was to trust in God. That was the only thing my mother ever asked of me--to turn from sin and be saved. I can remember when I used to come in, regardless of what hour of the day or night, she would always ask me if I was well and safe, and I know now that she is happy knowing I am saved from my sins.

"I want to send this message to all those who are inmates of prisons, young boys in school, and any who are living in crime or thinking of crime: There is no way to win in crime. May look like easy money and pleasure but you see where it got me. My advice is to live clean and honest and turn to God for help, for that truly is the only happiness and pleasure in this world.

"In closing I would like to play my favorite song. A few days ago a group of ladies came up to sing for us. They asked if there was a request, and I called for an officer and tried to request a song that I heard my mother sing many times, `If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again.' Then I realized I could hear my mother pray again, and the song has been a comfort to me in my last days. And so I would like to close by playing this wonderful song on the harmonica and dedicate it to my mother."

The Caldwell Parish Court House was closed all day Friday, March 7, 1941, the day of the hanging. The Caldwell Watchman reported that the four were ready "to walk thirteen steps to the death chamber which surmounts the new Caldwell parish court house. . . . The men are said to be keeping up much courage as the death hour is closely approaching. All four ordered bounteous lunches--fried steak, with all the extra additions--one was so heavily loaded an extra waiter had to be sent up in order to get it all to his cell. They have had spiritual counsel, and the prayers and sincere spiritual advice and instructions have no doubt given them courage to endure the long, anxious hours of suffering and waiting. A number of relatives of the condemned men are here and lending their sympathy and with broken hearts are doing what they know to comfort them."

The hangings started shortly after noon, in accordance with state law. William MeHarg went first, at 12:09 p.m., followed by Floyd Boyce, at 12:39 p.m., William Heard, at 1:13 p.m., and William Landers, at 1:57 p.m. The bodies of Boyce and Heard were buried in the Columbia city cemetery. The body of MeHarg was accompanied back to Missouri by his sister and brother-in-law. The body of William Landers, the last man legally executed by hanging in Louisiana, was carried to Jena, where his brother had arranged for burial.

The 1940 Louisiana legislature had changed the method of execution, providing that effective June 1, 1941, executions were to be carried out by electrocution. Eugene Johnson, a black man convicted of robbing and murdering Steven Bench, a white farmer who lived near Albany, was electrocuted in the Livingston Parish Jail on September 11, 1941, the first use of Louisiana's portable electric chair. It was the first of 87 electrocutions over the next 50 years.
 
 

Defense attorney Michele Fournet has waited for stays of execution from the governor, and then counted down the last hours of her client's life in the prison death house. She also has helped an innocent man walk out of Angola prison, 14 years after he was sentenced to death. Neither case produced a penny of compensation for the Baton Rouge lawyer with 23 years of experience. These days, though, Fournet isn't taking on any cases from death row, despite her disdain for capital punishment and the system behind it.
 

"It's a financial stain on my practice and an emotional strain on me," she said. "It's very depressing to have to deal with the attitudes of judges and prosecutors in capital cases." Fournet's departure from the small circle of lawyers willing to take on Louisiana's toughest cases comes at a time when 14 men on the state's death row are without attorneys, including Phillip Anthony, who was convicted for the grisly 1996 triple slaying at the Louisiana Pizza Kitchen. His case joins a staggering backlog of post-conviction appeals, according to a new state-funded agency in New Orleans that tracks the cases involving inmates on death row.
 

Aside from the financial pressures of running a law practice, the complex--and often notorious-- cases require years of lawyering, an expertise in federal court procedures, and the ability to deal with a client's imminent death. "The need is as high as it's ever been," said lawyer Nick Trenticosta, who ran the Loyola Death Penalty Resource Center until the money ran out in 1999 and it closed. He now does only post-conviction work as part of the Center for Equal Justice and understands why lawyers like Fournet decide to step aside. "People like Michele have done heroic work, but it doesn't surprise me that they get to a point where they cannot continue to do so," he said. "It's not like they're giving the time for free; they're losing money every time they open the file."
 

After Congress pulled federal funding for post-conviction appeals in 1996, the number of capital cases in Louisiana kept climbing and defense lawyers working pro bono for death row inmates already were scarce. With urging by the Louisiana Supreme Court, which has put specific death penalty appeals on hold until the defendants had lawyers, the state responded in 1999 and enacted a law that gives those on death row the right to representation. But legislators didn't provide the $1.3 million they themselves said was needed for the program. Instead, they ordered the Louisiana Indigent Defense Assistance Board to finance the new project out of its $7.5 million annual budget, which hasn't changed since the agency began seven years ago.
 

Two years later, in March, the Capital Post-Conviction Project opened in a South Rampart Street office under the direction of lawyer Denise LeBoeuf. The project was allotted $780,000 per year, with some of the money once reserved for public defenders in trials, and has four lawyers on staff, including LeBoeuf. A fifth is expected to start work in November. The average salary is $50,000, and grants will help pay for two of the lawyers. Handling a dozen appeals and consulting on another dozen capital cases, the office is already fully booked and unable to take on any new work.
 

Louisiana's death row population, meanwhile, more than doubled between 1996 and 2000, and now stands at 92. Trenticosta, who has done post-conviction appeals since 1987 and was LeBoeuf's law partner for nine years, said the 1999 state law didn't even begin to fairly finance capital post-conviction appeals. "It's not enough funding or resources to ensure people on death row are represented by competent counsel," he said. Nor is the 1999 law retroactive, meaning inmates already on death row when it was enacted aren't eligible for state-funded counsel, the Louisiana Indigent Defense Assistance Board said.
 

LeBoeuf, who is one of the country's leading lawyers in post-conviction capital appeals, said the lack of government financing puts a fallible and problematic system on even shakier ground. Victims' advocates in Louisiana also want the system financed appropriately, saying a sloppy legal process only drags out the appeals. "It doesn't do the victim, much less society, any good to have someone who is not guilty convicted or even a guilty person convicted with an improper trial and then have the case exposed to being appealed endlessly or even overturned on appeal," said Sandy Krasnoff, director of Victims and Citizens Against Crime. Krasnoff, though, supports the death penalty and said ensuring the fairness of the legal system is a way to keep it on the law books.
 

Post-conviction appeals in capital cases begin after the state Supreme Court upholds a jury's verdict. While the Supreme Court reviews only the trial record, post-conviction is the time when new evidence may be presented. If a capital conviction is affirmed at the highest state level, attorneys may take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which typically refuses to hear it. At that point, a death row inmate has one year to file in federal district court--whether he has a lawyer or not. The one-year deadline can create a Catch-22 for many death row inmates, because they have a right to an appellate lawyer in federal court, but hadn't had one in state court until Louisiana passed the 1999 law. The backlog of cases, though, further complicates things. If the year long window closes, the only chance to have a federal judge review a case is lost. At least one man on Louisiana's death row has missed the deadline, according to lawyer John Holdridge, who would not disclose the name because he said the inmate is likely unaware of his predicament.
 

"America's death rows are so large, it's virtually impossible to find enough lawyers," said Holdridge, who worked with Fournet in freeing two wrongly convicted men, Michael Ray Graham Jr. and Ronnie Burrell, from Louisiana's death row in December. Holdridge followed his conscience into death row work. In 1990 he left a prestigious Wall Street firm for the South to take on cases no one else wanted. He worked on the Graham and Burrell cases for almost a decade and was awarded the 2001 Life in the Balance Award from the National Legal Aid and Defender Association. But in May, Holdridge closed up shop here and returned to his home state of Connecticut, where he handles direct appeals in capital cases. Money was certainly a factor in making the switch, he said, considering he earns $85,000 a year, far more than he would make working for Louisiana's appellate project. Along with the raise came a lighter caseload and a much different political climate concerning the death penalty. Connecticut's death row has seven inmates, and the state hasn't executed anyone since 1960. "It doesn't matter if you make a lot of money if you're working on a million cases. It doesn't do your client justice," Holdridge said.
 

The debate over the death penalty has intensified in recent years, as more inmates once sentenced to death have been given life sentences, or outright exonerated. Illinois placed a moratorium on state executions, and Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg have made public statements questioning whether the penalty is fairly applied.
 

Louisiana's push for a moratorium folded abruptly this year when victims' families and their advocates clashed with death penalty abolitionists in a vitriolic legislative hearing. Emotions spilled and the bill was pulled. But this nationwide second look at the death penalty hasn't removed the stigma attached to lawyers who represent those on death row, or the pressure to build a clientele while delivering the billable hours needed for a firm to grow. "If you have these big corporate clients, they'e not impressed by you representing some guy on death row," Fournet said. "Not favorably anyway."
 

For lawyers who take the plunge, a single death penalty case can consume their entire practice and require new investigations. With age, a capital case withers. Witnesses can die or disappear, evidence can be destroyed and leads dry up. On a personal level, for defending the least sympathetic criminals, lawyers working death row are considered pariahs by those who want to see convicted killers die. They are accused of making martyrs out of murderers and losing sight of the victims.
 

In Louisiana, Feltus Taylor was the last person executed. He died on the state's gurney June 6, 2000, nine years after he attacked two employees at a Baton Rouge fast-food restaurant from which he had recently been fired, demanding cash and his old job back. Donna Ponsano, 31, died from five gunshots to the head and arm. Keith Clark was left paralyzed from the four gunshot wounds to the head. Taylor, 39, was spared five times by reprieves--including one so close in 1999 that he was served a final supper. He was Fournet's last death row case.
 
 

Years before she helped win a U.S. Supreme Court decision that ultimately freed a man from Louisiana's death row, Denise LeBoeuf held court behind a French Quarter bar. She had arrived in New Orleans in 1973 with a philosophy degree and a taste for social activism, acquired from the anti-war protests and feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Law school didn't cross her mind during the 12 years she spent tending bar and booking bands to pay the bills. It took a left-handed compliment from one of her regulars to spark the career change that turned LeBoeuf into the street-smart defense lawyer on the anti-death penalty front line. The guy told her philosophy was a great background for law school. "And he said, "You're one of the most opinionated broads I've ever met," LeBoeuf recalled, laughing.
 

She started at Tulane Law School in 1984, working two jobs in addition to her studies. By 1990, she was a public defender in Jefferson Parish taking on the grim murder cases that can quickly inspire a good lawyer to head for private practice and a lucrative living. LeBoeuf, however, stuck to small firms, the toughest cases and the poorest defendants.
 

Thirteen years after passing the bar, LeBoeuf, 53, was named director of the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana, which opened in March to represent indigent convicts on death row. "The way this works is a dirty little secret," she said in a recent interview at her South Rampart Street office. "This is about killing poor people, people of color, and the state using every dime of its resources while a tiny trickle of resources are on the other side. It's not a fair fight, it never has been."
 

Born in Detroit and raised in Seattle, LeBoeuf moved to New York in time for high school and the philosophy department at Hunter College, where she earned a bachelor's degree in 1970. She went on to teach while enrolled in a doctoral program, but soon after left the city for a less structured life, based out of New Orleans when she wasn't traveling. LeBoeuf helped one-time death row inmate Curtis Kyles win a new trial and then his freedom. She has successfully persuaded juries to give convicted murderers a life sentence instead of the death penalty. She also has witnessed one client's execution.
 

She learned long ago what it's like to represent someone who is publicly despised. Now she and attorney Nick Trenticosta are working to get the notorious cop-turned-killer Antoinette Frank a new sentencing hearing, at which they would tell a jury of Frank's childhood sexual abuse. Frank was sentenced to death for the triple murder at the Kim Anh Restaurant in 1995.
 

Behind the lawyer's pose, LeBoeuf holds tight to an activist's optimism. And while many lawyers burn out from the intense rigors of capital trials and death row appeals, LeBoeuf presses on. She still works too much, she said, but has learned to maintain a "spiritual practice" in her life as well. The steely lawyer who has lectured at Yale Law School also sings alto with the city's symphony chorus and takes in the occasional yoga workshop. LeBoeuf finds those spiritual rewards in criminal defense law as well. "There's no gap between my heart and my work; it's seamless. The downside is my heart is in it and my heart gets broken," she said. "I'm very privileged to do work that I wholeheartedly believe in. That's a gift."
 
 

A commentary on David Von Drehle's Among the Lowest of the Dead: The Culture of Death Row, Random House, 1995.
 

No one likes to remember misery. It was so long ago-a different age, a different world. I thought death row was forever behind me, lost in the mists of memory, never to be revisited. But when I cracked open Among the Lowest of the Dead, I hurtled backward in a time tunnel. Unwilling-yet marveling at David Von Drehle's ability to take me back to where I once belonged.
 

The America of today is strikingly different from what it was just thirty years ago. Even prisons and those they confine are far removed from what they were then. But, somehow, the little world of those who dance with death seems almost unaffected by time. Drehle's profile of Florida's modern execution system-the attorneys, prosecutors, governors, and judges who shape it, and the condemned at the state prison who are its fodder-differs little from the death row culture I knew in Louisiana in 1966.
 

Louisiana's state penitentiary at Angola in the early 1960s was a human jungle. Only cold steel and force of character afforded protection. The strong ruled while the weak served and suffered, or perished. I found myself facing another prisoner in a situation where neither could back down. I stabbed him before he could stab me, and I woke up on death row.
 

That was more than thirty years ago and his face, still twisted with hate, haunts my memory. How foolish and hell-bent on self-destruction we were. And how typical that is of the men who wind up in the shadow of the electric chair.
 

A wretched time, restlessly pacing a cell the size of a walk-in closet, trying to think of a way out of the trap I had dug for myself. Voices of fourteen other condemned men on the tier boomed in my ears, reflected from pitted, tomb-gray concrete walls that amplified the slightest sound, fracturing my thoughts. I tried to block it out, never quite succeeded.
 

Sometimes I wanted to scream in frustration, "Shut the fuck up!" But didn't. Undereducated school dropouts and rather dim, they chattered endlessly about anything that came to mind. It was a way to push aside, for a time, the specter of death. Mind-rotting boredom.
 

Drehle covered death row for the Miami Herald and tells of Florida condemned men who spend two hours bent over their toilet washing a pair of socks, just to be doing something. At least they get out for exercise an hour a day. We only got out of our tiny tombs twice a week for fifteen minutes apiece, one at a time, to shave, shower, do whatever. It was the only time we saw each other's faces.
 

Drehle paints the men on death row as losers. Accurate enough. The worst among us defied description: reptile-brain psychopaths who killed without provocation and did not know why, or care, and a baby-raper/killer whose sorry ass would pollute a cesspool. For the most part, we were white trash and poor blacks, born of marginal stock into marginal homes, destined for marginal existence. Run-of-the-mill rapists and murderers propelled by liquor, drugs, asocial attitudes, and, above all, a formless rage to destroy the lives of others as a way of transcending or destroying our own.
 

How callous and self-serving that sounds. It is not meant to be. Accuracy is my intent, not mitigation. One lesson death row teaches is that evil comes in degrees. The worst of us were not all of us. With an irony that eluded us, we lived together quite peaceably at a time when civil disobedience wracked the South as people fought, bled, and died to end a century of official racial apartheid. Death row, in fact, was the only integrated part of Louisiana. We had enough misery to go around without injecting racism into the mix. Our concrete house trapped heat and cold with equal tenacity. During the summer we baked, never a breath of fresh air or the slightest breeze. Our naked bodies poured perspiration. We slept on smelly wet sheets and breathed stale sulphurous air. In winter, rime covered the walls and we shivered inside ragged old blankets. We went days without taking a dump rather than put naked ass on icy porcelain.
 

Convict guards, petty and brutal fellow inmates put over us and despised for it, ruled our world. They slung food trays under our cell doors, tormented the weak and feebleminded among us, intimidated a man on my tier into sucking their dicks and bending over and taking it in the ass through the bars. We ground our teeth as they chortled at his pleas and whimpers. Like human attack dogs, they beat us down when we misbehaved, and sometimes when we didn't, then dragged us off to the blacked-out punishment cell we called the hole. They were corrupt, charging whatever the traffic would bear to provide books, magazines, drugs, pills, stolen foodstuffs we'd cook in cans over tightly rolled toilet-paper "burners," and buckshot yeast we'd mix with fruit cocktail and canteen-bought sugar to make a near-toxic brew we called "beer." On a scale of ten, it didn't even register. But it waffled our brains, desensitizing us to where we were and why.
 

Normally, people change with time and circumstance. Adversity toughens some, crushes others, but most of the men I knew on death row merely endured. They hunkered down, hiding within themselves like soldiers in foxholes, hoping only to survive. A few did much more than that; they managed for the first time in their lives to get in sync with society. Through reading and reflection, educating themselves, their conscience and consciousness expanded. They grew up.
 

A striking example of self-growth was a man on my tier-Wilbert Rideau. After the Supreme Court threw out the death penalty in 1972 because it was unfairly and inconsistently imposed, Rideau and the rest of us were resentenced to life terms. Within a few years he became editor of Angola's newsmagazine, the Angolite, and won prestigious journalism awards. From a young thug who killed a teller during a botched bank robbery, Rideau made such a remarkable turnaround that Life magazine in March 1993 dubbed him "The Most Rehabilitated Prisoner in America."
 

Others grew, too. I like to think I did. Like Rideau, I devoured books and fancied myself a writer. I also came to realize, as he did, the havoc I had created in the lives of others. And to regret it, to wish I could undo the irrevocable and make their pain and grief disappear.
 

People don't like to think of death. People on death row think of little else. It invaded my dreams, a faceless demon reaching out, irresistibly, to crush me. I would lunge awake, muscles clenched, trembling, afraid to go back to sleep. Sometimes I heard others cry out in the night as they too fought with phantoms. They never talked about it, though. Nor did I. Some escaped into insanity, or had brought it to death row with them. If they were quietly mad, caused no problems for the guards, they were left to stew in the rhapsodies of their misfiring brain cells.
 

One day a middle-aged black man moved into our world, transferred from another tier. He sat in the middle of his bunk staring into space, mumbling to himself. Unpredictably, night or day, he leaped to the bars in a frenzy, baying and howling like a dog with his leg caught in barbed wire. It drove everyone batty. Our complaints availed nothing. There's nowhere else to put him, said the guards.
 

There it might have ended, had the man not taken to saving his feces and mixing it with urine to throw on the guard passing his cell at count time. A squad of convict guards beat him down and dragged him off to the hole. Ten days later he returned, and the cycle repeated. Finally he disappeared for six months to the criminal ward of the state insane asylum, where they gifted him with daily doses of electro-shock.
 

After they brought him back, he sat and stared as before. Instead of going berserk, he drooled a lot. Once a week a convict guard led him to the shower and hosed him down. Some on our tier speculated he might now be immune to the electric chair. "Man," said one, "they shot enough juice to him to fry us all. And he's still walking around." Gallows humor, and not very kind, but it illustrates the tunnel vision of those waiting in the executioner's antechamber.
 

Death row is a limited-access, maximum-security area. Yet a startling number of outside visitors ventured into our tucked-away little world. Preachermen wearing shiny Montgomery Ward suits saying, "Forget these lawyers and the courts, put it all in the hands of the Lord." We paid lip service to these well-meaning, foolish men, hoping it might inspire them to intercede for us with someone, anyone. Not that they could, or would, but desperate people don't let straws drift away. Lawyers saying, "Don't worry, we're working on it." Pacifying, never listening. Finally getting to the point: "You sure your momma ain't got no money? It sure would help." Some were young, right out of law school, and scared to death. We wondered how they could save anyone's ass. Dedicated, professional, anti-capital punishment lawyers like those featured in Drehle's account were few and far between in Louisiana.
 

Civil righters responded with sympathy to blacks' requests for help, saying the struggle outside prison was for them too. As if integrating lunch counters would erase death sentences. Anti-death penalty people held our hands, burned candles, and marched in protest to send a message imploring mercy of the people who wanted to kill us. We feared that would only piss them off, making them want to return the message in the form of our dead bodies.
 

So many people peddling hope; we lapped it up like water in the Sahara, unmindful that the peddlers came to death row to fill their own needs, not ours. The only people who really cared about the condemned, our families, were too crippled by ignorance and fear of authority to do anything useful. White or black, they shared the Grapes of Wrath heritage. Nothing in their lives had taught them, the downtrodden, how to deal with authority except by blindly obeying or fleeing.
 

Drehle defines those destined to dance with death as being those who had murdered blameless white victims and were represented by indifferent or inexperienced defense attorneys. He missed two other factors. Under the modern death penalty, which dates from the Supreme Court's 1976 reapproval of executions, traditional anti-black sentiment has been joined by scorn for out-of-state drifters, as reflected in their disproportionate number on death rows. Southern hospitality has limits. It ends when outsiders tell them what to do or commit crimes against them. Drifters have no roots in the community, no help. Local boys can get breaks, but an outsider is in deep shit. He feels the full hammer of the law; he gets it all.
 

John Spenkelink, the first man to be executed against his will under the modern death penalty, was a classic outsider in the deep South. Among the Lowest of the Dead portrays him as more pathetic than dangerous. Florida prosecutors admitted he should not have been sentenced to death. A drifter and small-time crook, he shot and stabbed his crime partner in a seedy Tallahassee motel in 1973. Undisputed evidence showed the victim to be a career criminal who had served many years in prison and had brutalized Spenkelink physically and psychically. After turning down a plea bargain that would have given him a life sentence with parole eligibility after seven years, Spenkelink took the stand thinking he could explain what happened and walk away a free man. "As with most men on death row," writes Drehle, "thinking was not Spenkelink's strong suit." He was strapped into the state's electric chair on May 18, 1979, and executed.
 

Everyone at the time thought his death heralded the breaking of the dike, that a flood of executions would follow. They just didn't get it. "The Spenkelink legacy was not certainty," Drehle points out, "but rather a great big mess, a legal jumble, an emotional tempest." It took six years and "oceans of money and brains and energy" to execute a man who freely confessed, who made no allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, who was not insane. Five years elapsed before another man was executed in Florida against his will. Other states did no better. Despite overwhelming public support for the death penalty, it hardly seems worth the trouble.
 

Many studies have sought solid evidence of deterrent value in executions. All failed, without exception. The seemingly sensible notion of deterrence has always been a flawed concept. What I learned on death row is that people invariably murder in the heat of an emotional firestorm, and simply do not care at the time whether they will be caught or not. Drehle discovered essentially the same thing: "It assumes killers calculate risk and reward... [M]urderers are not clear-thinking people. They are impulsive, self-centered, often warped; overwhelmingly they are products of violent homes; frequently they are addled by booze or drugs; and most of them are deeply anti-social."
 

I suppose just about everyone believes some crimes are so horrible, so despicable, or cause so much harm that those who commit them deserve to die. The list is long: serial killers Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, "Night Stalker" Richard Ramirez, and their ilk, assassins Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, war criminals like Hitler and Adolf Eichmann, and, recently, the Oklahoma bombers. Their crimes aroused such disgust and outrage that it coalesced, it seems to me, into the core force driving current support for capital punishment.
 

In addition, murder victims' survivors cry vengeance, their anguish a raw wound in the body of society. Eye for eye, life for life, they say, will bring them "closure." Whatever that means. Nowhere do these people speak more loudly, in voices more rich with emotion, more sincerely or more often, than in capital murder cases. They say they want justice, but seek only revenge. The problem with vendetta justice is the same as with killing even the most outrageous killers. While strongly appealing on a gut level, it reduces society to the level of the lowest criminal. Society adopts depravity, legitimizes it. A T-shirt endorsing "Bundy-Burgers" is on the same frequency as Jeffrey Dahmer stir-frying human genitalia for supper. "It seems uncivilized," Drehle concludes, "atavistic, base. Qualities that ennoble society-mercy, restraint, judgment-are lost."
 

Besides, where should the line be drawn? "The modern death penalty demands that distinctions be drawn among murderers," observes Drehle. "What about the more ordinary murderer?" This question has vexed the courts. They turn down one man's appeal, grant another based on the same argument, then deny it again in a third case. The law is not immutable. It won't hold still; it backs and fills like a demented ditch-digger.
 

Life or death decisions are too often molded in the crucible of constituent concern. Prosecutors, who generally are elected, have absolute authority in the bringing of criminal charges. Putting one person on trial for his life while allowing another to plead for a life term, or less, has a little to do with the strength of the evidence in hand and a lot to do with how "high-profile" the crime is. Florida judges are elected, and Drehle discovered they often overrode jury recommendations for mercy with death sentences. Nobody ever lost a vote pandering to public fears.
 

If America insists on having capital punishment, the system should at least operate with reasonable equity and efficiency. "Possibly a narrow death penalty could work," Drehle suggests, "for distinct crimes like serial murder or political assassination." A keep-it-simple death penalty presumably would apply to only the most horrendous murderers, and speed up the process by reducing the number of capital cases clogging the courts.
 

Not that it would accomplish anything worthwhile. Capital punishment is but a symbol, a death star atop the criminal-justice tree. Police know more about the realities of crime and violence than anyone, and they consider the death penalty useless. A recent survey of 386 police chiefs by Peter D. Hart Research Associates found that fifty-eight percent say the death penalty is not an effective law-enforcement tool. They rank it last as a way of reducing violent crimes, behind five other options.
 

While the law promises objectivity and fairness, evaluating degrees of evil is a subjective process. The dichotomy produces an absurdly random dance of death. Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, a swing vote who came down on the side of execution in 1976, wrote in a 1994 dissent: "From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death . .. I feel morally and intellectually obligated to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed."
 

The ruthless judicial-procedure games that characterize Drehle's Floridian execution system of today are a world apart from the one I knew in 1966. At that time, federal courts had cast aside their historic "hands off," sitting-on-the-fence-post practice in order to end the rampant racial discrimination characteristic of Southern justice. A public also weary of the racism that permeated execution practices became disenchanted with the death penalty, causing it to fall into disuse. Consequently, it was not as hopeless as Drehle's modern system. During ensuing years, public fears and political demagoguery have spurred changes, turning the execution process into a slingshot designed to fling the condemned into eternity with a minimum of constitutional fuss. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, federal courts are in full retreat to their pre-1960s fence post, leaving states to do as they wish. If past behavior is any indication of the future, the dark night of Southern lynch-style justice is upon us. Execution is a regional staple of the Deep South, like grits and gravy. And that is the real culture of death row.
 

For an unbiased, enthralling analysis of the modern death penalty, read Among the Lowest of the Dead. Drehle has absolutely twenty-twenty journalistic vision. If I were to write about the experience, this is the book I would have written.
 
 

Being 'here,' as opposed to 'there.' This reality, not that. A cell block lock-down, the hole; a life sentence, a death sentence. A two hundred and fifty year sentence that a three man team living in relay couldn't defeat. Indomitable time and cold space. Time and place - waking every morning feeling 'there' becomes a little less important, a little less immediate than 'here.' The 'here' of where you are and the immediacy of breathing now, of living today of adjusting your hopes to match your means. Your ability to survive 'here,' as opposed to fictionalizing being 'there.'

Do you know what the greatest change 'here' is? Becoming acclimatized. You get 'here,' in behind all that steel and concrete and wire, that alien wall, and for the first couple of years it's all hustle-bustle. You are shocked and eager and motivated. You're still shaking the 'free world' dust off. But after awhile you get into a routine. You are cut down a couple of times - courts denying your view of the truth, another man answering the phone at home, old friends with more life to live than time to write. You start to forget what the 'other side' was really like. What it felt like, what it tastes and what it smells like. You pay lip service to memories as the days go past, conquering you, and you slowly settle into the idea of living 'here' for awhile. That idea of 'awhile' being as elastic as you need it to be.

You also discover that you can; that it's not that bad. The human animal adapts. And then you fall off. It's not really depression. It's more like living in some small town after moving from the city. You are left to reminisce over all the old things you used to do as the days go by with people who come and go. You know that you'll probably have to go one day too.

It's all slow motion. All the same, day in and day out and you are just 'here.' You settle into whatever makes you most comfortable--reading writing, music or looking out the window. You let weeks and months disappear into nothing, with you waiting for an appeal, a court ruling, a pardon board hearing or maybe just a visit, a single letter. And there's always someone who has been 'here' one more day than you or who has lost one more appeal on the way to the Death House. There's meaning in that, it gives relief. The necessary perspective "Well, I'm here, but I haven't been here that long"; or, "OK, I'm on death row but I've got five, ten more appeals. I won't be the next one to go. I can sleep well tonight. There's always hope tomorrow. That separation between now and then. I devolve into the blessing of time and I am soothed by it.

It's more a hopeless melancholy, a sort of fatalism. It's seductive and while it may only be that I am naturally predisposed to feel as such, I think it is institutional as well. The meaning of becoming, of being institutionalized.

What happens to spirits crammed into bottles stopped up, plugged and compressed? Small fish in small ponds with little food for growth, for thought, for the soul. Boundaries marked by barbed wire and gun towers carve grooves into souls made myopic. What can one do but cut out a niche to stand in, to live in, if only for 'awhile?'

And I'm no better, even when recognizing the symptoms, even if apologizing for myself. I can lose weeks between the pages of throw-away pulp fiction and not scratch a single day off the calendar I keep as religion. I end up lining Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, holidays, months off en masse. Neat little columns of numbers which get struck down for no apparent reason. Days marked not to count up to anything or down from something but because... because....

If you knew me when I first arrived 'here,' would you recognize me now? Do you remember when I arrived? I believe it was a Saturday, August 28, 1993. I was everything I was supposed to be: nervous, wary, tired, agitated, frustrated and confused. Like an animal snatched up from its habitat and dropped on unfamiliar ground, guts automatically turned towards home. With a sense of direction still finely muscled from use. If I'd been set free that day I could have walked all the way back with my eyes closed. But there are only two ways out of 'here' for most of us and neither of them is through the front gate. It's the courthouse or the graveyard.

A week before I discovered 'here,' so had Glen. He was two cells down from me. We chatted up all the usual stuff, after church talks, cook-out talk: Married? Yes, no; kids? Maybe, yes. And all the usual stuff, cell-block talk, exercise yard bitching. Innocent? Of course. Dirty DA? Cops? Dirty defense attorney? Dirty system? Racist system? Yes, of course, yes. Going home? Of course, in awhile maybe, but home nonetheless. Did we smile too much?

We waited and waited a little more. We received copies of transcripts and poured over them. Hi-liters running dry, pens marking in the margins, pages copied, photo-copied, hand copied to prove this point, that point, every single point alone bigger to us than the whole case against ourselves. We became attorneys with stacks of court rulings in boxes, under beds, even under our mattresses. We read the Southern 2^nd like third year law students, like it was the Bible, the Holy Grail, promising eternal life. Our old lives out 'there,' not 'here.'

We called our attorneys, bought typewriters learned the two prong test for Brady, for Strickland v. Washington. What 'harmless error' is, what voire dire means and over a thousand tuna fish sandwiches, I nodded my head while Glen tole me he'd be home in 6 months. Ok, a year. No really, after this appeal.

We waited against the wire, the stone, the bullets pointed in at us and we waited with ferocity. We waded through thousands of pages of evidence, testimony, accusations and denials and wrote everything down, typed everything up, pointed everything out to the attorneys who represented us and the next guy and the guy behind him. We waited for that first appeal with a purity of purpose, with the knowledge that there could only be one outcome. That we could only be 'here' for just what? A little while longer.

Would you recognize us now? I wake up and read a book, something fast and loose and definitely not 'here.' Glen watches TV. I go on the exercise yard and stare through the chain link fence. Glen sleeps until lunch. I haven't touched my typewriter in a month. I haven't looked in the mirror for a month. I haven't talked to Glen in a month. I watch the sun set and go to bed without having said a word. Glen reads the Bible for awhile now. I lost a religion I never had anyway. Glen's appeal was denied. So was mine. Glen has been denied again since. I'm still waiting. Well, at least he's ahead of me now, right?

What can I do today that will affect my world tomorrow? How can I see results? I'm a case study in futility. How long can you continue to work for the future after you discover you do no really have one? Before you begin to live for today? You put your head down and trudge on and on for some prize ahead, until your legs grow weak, and when you finally look up, the scenery is all the same. You might as well sit down and enjoy it because believe it or not, no matter where you are or however bad it gets you can always get a laugh. It's seductive.

Some of us show up 'here' with a little drive, a lot of good intentions. Some show up with nothing more than a 10 foot stare for the TV on the wall and an overpowering desire to develop an advanced case of bed sores. One in a hundred manages to keep going, keep pushing, year after year, past refusal and denial. The rest of us burn out along the way, some going crazy in a last ditch attempt to go anywhere. We fit in where we come to rest, where friction finally overcomes our momentum. Where we find it comfortable. Burned out husks depleted of high hopes: book addicts, TV addicts, weight lifting addicts or chaos addicts - turning on those around them.

I know a guy on death row who has been 'here' for over 10 years and has yet to file his first appeal. In an argument with another inmate he said, "I live here. You are just passing through." So much acceptance.

I knew another guy who happily traded in his death sentence for a flat life behind there walls. The last time I saw him, he explained it all to me. He said, "Strick, it's a whole 'nother world out there in Main Prison. You can forget everything. All I need is a good job and a punk. It is a whole 'nother world man." Just another dead man walking, population this little false world with its meaningless prizes and second place clubs: Alcoholic's Anonymous, Toastmasters, the Lifer's Club, Vets Incarcerated on Main Street, Main Prison, Everywhere, USA.

We take the pleasures we can find where they can be found and we don't take them lightly. The key being the seeking of the greatest amount of pleasure with the least requirement for exertion, when so little energy remains which, for the most part, is why we are 'here' to begin with. There is enough primitive human nature on display to justify an anthropological study. All in a system designed to create it. To pull down, numb and deaden with the least requirement for financial exertion.

It is another world in 'here.' One that spirals down to that infinitesimal point where out 'there' disappears over the horizon of attainability pulling in all it can. The unfortunate, the indifferent, the incapable. Convicts and Correction Officers - the guilty and the innocent. All settling to the bottom like so much silt in a slow current of time that holds you down, cuts off your air and teaches you how to live without breathing.
 
 

There is just one thing in all this question. It is a question of how you feel, that is all. It is all inside of you. If you love the thought of somebody being killed, why, you are for it. If you hate the thought of somebody being killed, you are against it.

- Clarence Darrow
 

Some men hunt animals; others fish. Sam Jones hasn't done either in a while. He's acquired a more intriguing hobby. Sam kills people. Nineteen, so far. And he gets paid for it: $400 per death. All were strangers to Sam. He's never spoken to those he's killed, and they've all died not knowing the face of their killer. "No, I don't think any of them ever seen me," Sam acknowledges. It was all impersonal and done with chilling efficiency. Afterward, he returned to his normal routine, to await the next phone call informing him that his deadly services were needed; and he returned to his usual killing place, where another wretched soul was waiting, dreading his arrival and the commencement of the cold, methodical procedure that would extinguish the life from his body.

Sam is a nondescript man of average height and build, the guy next to you almost anywhere. When we met him, he was dressed casually in T shirt, camouflage pants, and snakeskin cowboy boots. Piercing blue eyes gazed from a weathered face. His hair was a dull red; his beard, streaked with gray. He sucked deeply on a cigarette; when he exhaled, a plume of smoke drifted toward the ceiling

.Sam was born and reared in Louisiana's capital city of Baton Rouge, where he attended school and later served a three-year stint as a police officer: "I worked in a little bit of everything--juvenile, auto theft, wherever I was needed," he recalled. At age forty-nine, he is an electrician but, like many men, he's to some extent a jack-of-all-trades. "I do a little painting, do my own carpenter work," he explained. "I had a lock shop one time, used to be a locksmith, and I got out of that." He likes country-and-western music, and his favorite radio station is Baton Rouge's WYNK. He is divorced, but admits to not playing the night-life scene much. "I do a lot of reading, watching TV ," he says. "I don't go out. I don't socialize much." He describes himself as a loner.

Sam defies all of the popular perceptions about those who kill--and he defies them in a disturbing way. "I'm just a normal person that mixes in with a crowd," he once explained to a newspaper reporter,"a normal John Doe that walks the streets every day. I work and I live a normal social life. No, I don't have any horns and I don't see anyone floating around my room at night. No nightmares, and I don't see any ghosts.... I go there to do a job, and I do it and leave."

Sam provokes awe and wonder. Nothing in his outward appearance, behavior, or lifestyle distinguishes him from the average citizen or, for that matter, from the people he kills. Yet beneath that surface normality lies a peculiar ability to kill with deliberateness and without compunction. And unlike most people who kill, for whom countless studies have shown the act of murder to be a once-in-a-lifetime incident, Sam kills regularly. But Sam is defined as neither criminal nor murderer. On the contrary, he's licensed to kill. He's Louisiana's official executioner; his instrument of death, the electric chair; his name, an alias.

In an appearance last year on an Australian TV news magazine with defense attorney Clive Stafford Smith, Sam provided viewers a chilling peek at the breadth of his peculiar capacity. After he stated that electrocution is too quick and easy for those he executes, the following exchange occurred:
 

SMITH: "Let me ask you this then. Say someone stabs somebody 71 times, would you be prepared to go in there and stab the person 71 times?"
 

SAM: "If it were required, I could do it, yes.
 

"SMITH: "You could? For four hundred bucks?
 

"SAM: "Well, the money don't have nothin' to do with it.
 

"SMITH: "What is the most gruesome thing you would be prepared to do for the four hundred dollars?
 

"SAM: "Whatever.
 

"SMITH: "You'd take a candle and sort of drop hot wax on them, pull their nails out and then kill them, or something like that?
 

"SAM: "If that's what they wanted. If that's what the state tells me to do."
 

Sam is even a bit of an artist, in a macabre way. As soon as he gets home following an execution, he pulls out a blank canvas and begins painting. When he finishes, he goes to bed and sleeps "like a baby." He's killed nineteen people; he has nineteen paintings. When his collection was described to the Australian audience as "dark, morbid paintings of death," Sam objected: "You calling it pictures of death. I just call it paint on canvas.... Some people jog; I draw pictures and execute people."

"It's never bothered me," Sam said of his executions of those deemed unfit to live in society. "There's nothin' to it. It's no different to me executing somebody and goin' to the refrigerator and getting a beer out of it." Even the family bond does not exempt his own son or grandson. "If he did something, they sit him in the chair, he was convicted of it, I'd execute him," he assured us.

And he'd paint another picture.
 

The professional executioner has his roots in the advent of civilization. Indeed, the executioner was an outgrowth of mankind's efforts to maintain social order and "justice." As family units expanded into clans and tribes, the corresponding need to establish a governing authority responsible for internal order and the general welfare gave rise to leaders and councils, the first forms of government. As these communities evolved into larger sociopolitical entities, so did the centralization of power and formal authority. In the interest of internal order and the consolidation of societal power, those who held formal authority assumed responsibility for dispensing justice. A private individual's taking of revenge carried the potential of precipitating a blood feud that could threaten the peace and stability of the community. Thus, the power to exact justice was taken from the individual and entrusted to official authorities, who in turn designated certain individuals to act as executioners. The executioner epitomized, with a graphic and awful finality, the enforcement of the will of authority. The creation of an official executioner represented mankind's progress from the law of the jungle to that of civilized order.

Historically, executioners have been popularly perceived as mysterious and sinister figures, slinking about execution chambers, carrying out the despicable task of ending lives in the name of "authority"and "justice." They have served as society's bogeymen, either feared, hated, or held in awe. History shows that many executioners were vile , loathsome personalities who, as often as not, were criminals opting to perform their duties in order to save their own skins. Others however, were affable, law-abiding persons who, for varying reasons, chose the role of executioner because that was what they wanted to do.

The appeal of the job varied with times and circumstances, and at times officials found it extremely difficult to find people to serve as executioners. For instance, being an executioner would have made you the most hated man in Quebec in 1751, so no volunteers could be found. Officials were forced to impose the job upon slaves or men condemmed to death.

According to the Amherst papyri, which make an accounting of state criminals in Egypt circa 1500 B.C., the guilty chose their own method of death and carried it out themselves. In China, Egypt, and Assyria, too, malefactors were ordered to act as their own executioners, being forced to take poison.

Because of the difficulty in getting individuals to serve as executioners, the job was often offered to criminals. In the thirteenth century, the English royal burgh of Wigtown passed a law that the executioner had to be a criminal sentenced to death, whose sentence was deferred as long as he carried out the public hangman's duties. When he became too old and could no longer do the job, he himself was hanged. It would be centuries before a better deal was offered criminals who became executioners. Records show that in early seventeenth-century England, a man named Derrick was sentenced to death, but pardoned by the Earl of Exxes and employed to hang twenty-three others. Derrick decided to stay on after his quota was up, remaining the official executioner for nearly half a century.

There were similar policies in the Scandinavian countries. In the small Swedish town of Arboga in 1470, a thief standing on the gallows awaiting the noose was offered the job of hangman. The attending public, having pity on the man, agreed to the offer, and the thief was pardoned. A red-hot iron was then used to brand his body with the marks of both thief and executioner. Two centuries later, in 1608, the Swedish thief Mickel Matsson, from Gronso, was asked by the court if he would become executioner in the community of Uppsala in exchange for not being hanged. Matsson agreed and was led to the gallows, where both his ears were cut off, a method used at the time to identify executioners. Many communities chose to identify their executioners by disfigurement; others merely demanded that they wear distinctively marked clothing.

The desire to save one's own skin by becoming executioner sometimes meant that a criminal had to execute members of his own family. Crosland, a well known executioner during the days of Charles II, hanged both his father and brother. Convicted of horsestealing, all three were sentenced to hang, but the judges offered to pardon the one who would be willing to hang the other two. The father and elder son refused, but the youngest, John Crosland, agreed. History records that he did the job admirably and was appointed official hangman for Derby and several surrounding communities, a position he held until old age. Some hanged their kin without having been condemned themselves. Roger Gray, a seventeenth century English executioner, hanged his own brother, then wrote to his nephew: "I am much afflicted to be the conveyancer of such news unto you as cannot be very welcome. Your father died eight days since, but the most generously I ever saw a man. I will say this of him, everywhere; for I myself trussed him up."

One of Ireland's more colorful deathmen, Tom Galvin, made extra money during his retirement by showing curiosity-seekers the ropes he had used to hang many of his nearest relatives. Selling pieces of the rope or some relic of the condemned to spectators following popular executions was a common way for executioners to make money. In some places, the executioner was permitted to take any and all of the personal property of the condemned.

Animals, and even the witnessing public, in England and ,when both jurisdictions used the "Halifax Gibbet" and the "Scottish Maiden." These devices allowed a long rope holding a blade above the condemned's head. When the rope was pulled, releasing the pin, the blade would swiftly behead the criminal. In instances of theft of an animal, the rope was sometimes affixed to the animal, which at some point walked away and pulled the pin. In other cases that had aroused community sentiment, the rope was thrown into the crowd of spectators. Sometimes, feeling sympathy for the condemned, they refused to approach the rope, thus forcing the executioner to do the job himself. The Gibbet was last used in 1650; the Maiden was discontinued in 1750.

In Germany, when soldiers were convicted of certain crimes, they were executed by their colleagues. The condemned would be turned loose in the forest, where his fellow soldiers hunted him, running him to ground and spearing him to death. It was a special honor for the man who speared him first. In other instances the condemned soldier was compelled to run a gauntlet while his fellow militiamen beat him to death with clubs and sticks.

Early executioners had to be a macho lot. Not only did many methods of capital punishment demand physical strength, but executioners often had to protect themselves from the angry spectators.

For centuries condemned men, women, and children were decapitated by ax or sword. Herr Randell, Germany's executioner as late as 1901, was an expert with the sword who beheaded criminals usually with a single sweep. Germany also provided history with the world's oldest executioner, one Reichardt who in 1931, at the age of eighty, executed Kurt Tetzner at Regenburg. During his term the elderly Reichardt killed sixty people.

Burning at the stake was the penalty generally reserved for women convicted of treason, murder or witchcraft. While demanding little physical prowess, the execution of women occasionally brought bursts of ire and threats against the executioner from spectators. After the condemned was tied to the stake and faggots of firewood were heaped at her feet, a rope with a slipknot was placed around the neck, the other end being held by the executioner a distance away. Before the fire was lighted the executioner, as a general rule, strangled the woman by pulling on the rope, unless prompted not to do so by an excited crowd. That is what happened to Catherine Hayes after she was convicted of murdering her husband. The executioner released the rope before strangulation occurred, and Hayes was burned alive for the crowd's enjoyment. Thus, on occasion, the executioner was also a showman, conducting the execution so as to provide his audience a form of morbid entertainment. Some executioners became quite adept at gauging the mood of large crowds; sometimes the executioner's own life depended on it.

In "Boddel og Galgefugl" a Swedish writer described what any angry crowd could do following a botched execution:

A woman by the name of Johanne had been sentenced to die because she had been the mistress of her brother-in-law, and she was to be executed with the sword.... Master Anders Aalborg should perform the beheading. When the poor Johanne should die... he bungled the first blow and merely cut a small ring into the neck so that the woman fell over and gave a pitiful scream; and thereafter he gave her five or six blows and still could not decapitate her. Then fear took hold of the executioner and he threw the sword of justice away, shouted in mortal fear 'Mercy!' 'Mercy' and fled away. But the furious mob of people... set out after him and he was beaten brutally and killed.

In England and France, executioners were servants picked by lords of the manor. They were called hereditary hangmen, whose families were rewarded with a plot of land and a home. Their duties were passed from generation to generation.

In France in 1688, Charles Henri Sanson would become the first in a long line of Sansons to be appointed royal executioner. For 159 years the Sansons handed the "seal of executioner" from father to son. Prior to the French Revolution in 1789, the methods of execution varied: decapitation by sword for the nobility, and hanging, burning at the stake, or drawing and quartering for common criminals. Following Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin's invention of the "guillotine," Sanson executed 2,794 people between 1792 and 1795, including King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1793. During the Reign of Terror following the revolution, Sanson beheaded as many as fifty people a day. The Sanson reign would end in 1847, when Henri-Clement Sanson was officially dismissed from his position for having pawned France's guillotine in order to pay personal debts. France maintained death-penalty laws until they were abolished under the administration of President Francois Mitterrand in 1981.

For centuries, official records of European executions and executioners were kept rarely or not at all. Not so in England, however, where documents and records were painstakingly kept, including that of William Calcraft, who not only became the "London Executioner,'"but also served a longer term as executioner than anyone else, English history. Formerly a shoemaker, watchman, butler, hawker, Calcraft served from 1829 to 1874, carrying out England's last public execution, that of author Michael Barrett, in 1868.

In 1879, Englishman William Marwood was appointed official hangman; building upon Calcraft's technical expertise, he invented what was called the long drop, a method that quickened death by breaking the neck. Though he was hangman for only four years, Marwood's reforms made death by hanging more humane.
 

In 1935, John Laurence wrote in The History of Capital Punishment:
 

The story of a nation's crime is national history. The scaffold has made and altered history. If capital punishment had been as rigorously taboo in the twenty centuries of the Christian era as had been the encouragement of education, it is not a matter of doubt that the history of the world would not be what it is. The rope has done more than break men's necks. It has numbed the brains of the living, and men's thoughts have remained inarticulate from fear of the freely falling knife and the headsman's axe.
 

Though England and her colonies, as well as France, at one time employed numerous executioners, England too, eventually opted for hereditary deathmen. The foremost of these were the Pierrepoint family, father, uncle, and son. For fifty-six years the Pierrepoints, beginning with Henry Albert Pierrepoint in 1900, served as England's official executioners. In the ten years he held that position, Henry executed 105 people in thirty-eight prisons in five different British colonies. Sensitive people sometimes see such men as a blood-thirsty villains and believe they are haunted by the ghosts of their victims. But the elder Pierrepoint told one interviewer: "Well, I have executed over a hundred persons. But I've never seen a ghost yet." Henry's brother, Thomas, became assistant executioner and took over after Henry's retirement in 1910. Thomas retired at age seventy-five having served the Crown for forty-two years.

His nephew, Albert's son, also named Albert Pierrepoint, inherited the position at twenty-seven, having served since 1927 as an assistant at forty executions under the tutelage of his uncle. Until his retirement in 1956, Albert Pierrepoint trained German and Austrian executioners in the craft of hanging. After World War II, he helped execute over two hundred war criminals, performing as many as twenty-seven hangings in one twenty-four-hour period.

In his autobiography, Executioner Pierrepoint, Albert surprised the world by announcing that he was a staunch opponent of the death penalty:
 

I operated, on behalf of the State, what I am convinced was the most humane and the most dignified method of meting out death to a delinquent-however justified or unjustified the allotment of death may be--and on behalf of humanity I trained other nations to adopt the British system of execution.... It is a fact which is no source of pride to me at all-it is simple history-that I have carried out the execution of more judicial sentences of death (outside the field of politics) than any executioner in any British record or archive. That fact is the measure of my experience. The fruit of my experience has this bitter aftertaste: that I do not now believe that anyone of the hundreds of executions I carried out has in any way acted as a deterrent against future murder. Capital Punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge.
 

I now sincerely hope that no man is ever called upon to carry out another execution in my country. I have come to the conclusion that executions solve nothing, and are only an antiquated relic of a primitive desire for revenge which takes the easy way and hands over the responsibility for revenge to other people.... I conceived an early ambition, implanted by my father. My belief is still, as I look back on the obstacles I met, and the dangers I have surmounted, that I was sent on this earth to do this work and that the same power told me I should leave it. I had an ambition, I have it no longer. All the desire is quite gone.
 

England's last execution was carried out on August 23, 1964, and Parliament abolished capital punishment in 1965. Though the United States used hanging as its primary method of execution for nearly two centuries, early America also utilized drowning, burning at the stake, and decapitation. Executions, for a very longtime, were primarily local affairs, carried out by local authorities who either assigned the task of executing the condemned to the chief local law officer or retained the services of a professional executioner. There is little available evidence to indicate how American executioners acquired their expertise other than through trial and error, at the cost of many botched executions.

The call for more humane executions led the state of New York to adopt electrocution in 1888. Its use would spread throughout the nation, but it would always be a uniquely American method of execution. According to Amnesty International, the United States is the only nation that has ever used the electric chair to execute people. Lewis E. Lawes, Sing Sing prison's warden from 1905 to 1930, supervised over 150 electrocutions. In Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing, Lawes wrote: "When the official executioner [John Hubert] suddenly resigned without notice, and the position of executioner was advertised, hundreds of applications were received from men and women." Lawes said some applicants were actually against capital punishment, but were jobless and had families to support. Ex-servicemen described their killing experiences at the war front. "I'll take the job if there's no publicity attached to it," wrote one applicant. "These fellows knew what they were doing when they set out to kill. Why then should I have any compunction about doing the same to them? I'll take the job, and do it with vigor and efficiency," said another.

Hubert was eventually replaced by Robert Elliott, who later became widely known as "America's Chief Executioner." Elliott wound up carrying out that duty for the states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, executing hundreds of people in the electric chair.

During the first quarter of the twentieth century, there was a growing trend to shift the responsibility of execution from sheriffs and contracted private executioners to prison and state correctional officials. In 1923, Alabama passed a law discontinuing the practice of executing people in the county where they had been tried; from then on, all executions were to be carried out at the state prison. The law designated the warden the official executioner and granted him immunity from any possible charge of murder for executing the condemned. This was the way of the future. On April 22, 1983, John Evans III was strapped into the Alabama electric chair, which had been built by inmates in 1927. When the signal came, Holman Prison warden J. D. White pulled the switch. It took three pulls to kill Evans, leaving him charred and smoking, and stirring a nationwide controversy. Evans's execution had been handled by a "death watch" team of prison security officers headed by the warden. By 1990, most of the nation's executions were handled by such teams. So it came to pass that the most despicable of tasks, historically given to criminals and professional executioners to perform because citizens refused to do it, had finally been given to regular citizens--prison personnel.

Retired Alabama prison employee Murray Daniels told Playboy magazine in 1986: "It ain't no joy to kill nobody." Daniels, then seventy-two, had conducted several executions. "We didn't want to do it. That was our living. Had to do what the bossman said. I'm not proud of it. It was bread to me. If I couldn't 'a done what the bossman wanted, he'd get somebody else. It ain't no show to kill a man. You kill a man and make a big show of it, all you done is kill a hog."

Other executioners who have spoken or written about their life's work have similarly expressed the importance of showing the condemned some dignity. In his autobiography, Albert Pierrepoint wrote:

I will not deny that on occasions I have been emotionally involved in the fate of a condemned person because of what I have previously read or heard about the crime, or the circumstances of the trial, or popular agitation for or against the prisoners which has erupted afterwards.... As the executioner, it has fallen to me to make the last confrontation with all the condemned. It is I who have looked them in the eyes. ...And it is at that moment, with their eyes on mine, and all the official witnesses huddled in a corner behind them, that I have known that any previous emotional involvement I may have had is to be regretted. There is only a final relationship which matters: in Christianity this is my brother or sister to whom something dreadful must be done, and I have tried always to be gentle with them, and to give them what dignity I could in their death.
 

From 1941, when Louisiana switched to electrocution, until 1961, Grady Jarratt was the official executioner. Prior to 1957, when executions were transferred to the State Penitentiary at Angola, the Texas native traveled from parish to parish to carry out his deadly duties. Legal responsibility for executions was then vested in the sheriff of each parish, but the truck-mounted generator and portable chair were under the authority of Angola prison officials. At the designated time, the chair and the executioner would meet at the parish where the execution was scheduled.

"The truck had an inmate electrician, a prison chief electrician, either a security officer or captain that would go along," said corrections veteran Hilton Butler, who began his prison career at Angola in 1952 and recalls accompanying the electric chair with Captain E. Foster on several occasions in the 1950s. (Much later, Butler became warden of Angola and carried out eleven executions during his administration.)

On May 20, 1949, just eight years after Louisiana began using the electric chair, Grady Jarratt traveled to Opelousas to execute Matthew "Mack" Cook and Joe Cook, brothers who had killed a prominent local and raped his young female companion. As Jarratt pulled the switch on Matthew, he said: "Good-bye, Mack!" "Wham!" Butler recalled, "that's the way he did them all. The last thing he said to them was, `Good-bye, whatever their name was.' Then he pulled the lever."

Thomas Hill, a former Angola employee, described Grady Jarratt as a pleasant and professional person who often greeted execution witnesses, shook their hands, and chatted. He didn't mind people seeing him or knowing who he was. In fact, when Jarratt pulled the switch, he was in plain view of everyone present. "We did executions on Thursday night, which would be early Friday morning. Usually Jarratt would come in two days ahead of time and go through the chair with a fine-toothed comb. I mean everything had to be right up to snuff. Even the leather. He would take it in his hands and ply it. If it had a crack in it, then we'd have to make a new one. He was very, very particular," said Hill.

The 1961 execution of Jesse James Ferguson was the last Jarratt performed for Louisiana. A moratorium on capital punishment ensued.

When Louisiana reinstituted the death penalty in 1976, it also revived the need for official executioners. But many of the men who possessed the expertise, former professional executioners, had died or had grown old and retired from the killing business without having trained another generation to replace them. While other states simply assigned the responsibility to their corrections officials, Louisiana wanted its own public executioner, not a member of any law enforcement or correctional agency. Grady Jarratt had died during the moratorium and there were no professional executioners to be found, but Louisiana's problem was quickly solved when a Baton Rouge electrician volunteered his services. "1 heard that the executioner they had here died in Texas," Sam Jones explained to The Angolite. "Somebody told me. So I took a regular civil service application and filled it out, put my phone number on it, and they contacted me." Then-warden Frank Blackburn hired him, giving him the alias "Sam Jones," after the governor who oversaw Louisiana's switch from hanging to electrocution decades before. Why be an executioner? "I believed in it," Jones explained. "I never was the kind of person to say so-and-so ought to do something. If I felt that strong about it, I'd do it myself." He emphasized that the money he's paid has little to do with his being executioner. On the contrary, he said that it actually costs him money. "I go in the hole on these executions," he said. "Sometimes it costs me $800 to fly and I only get $400 and I usually hand that to my kids and they use it in their church, or whatever. "Sam acknowledged that not only has he never been a victim of crime, but neither has his family nor anyone close to them. Yet he identifies with the victims of crime and publicly proffers the rationale that he performs executions for them because somebody has to speak for them. Asked if he really feels that he does speak for crime victims, he told The Angolite: "Yeah, I feel I do, because they don't have anyone else speaking for 'em. They just become a number [in the system]. "Sam did not know that every facet of Louisiana's system of justice--courts, Pardon Board, Parole Board, and even the governor's office--provides for input from the victim. Sam had no professional expertise as an executioner when he was hired, but it didn't matter. Louisiana was willing to allow him to learn the art of execution through on-the-job-training, trial and error. In 1984 he recalled his first execution, that of Robert Wayne Williams in 1983, for Baton Rouge's Morning Advocate reporter Melinda Shelton: "Everybody has their doubts when they do something for the first time and, sure, I had mine. The first time I was nervous because it was the first time. I didn't doubt I could do it, but I didn't know what to expect. I had no previous experience, and I'd never seen one [an execution] before."

Jones has since acquired definite opinions about execution, one being that the condemned feels no pain. "I've been shocked before," he told Playboy in 1986, " but I didn't feel any pain. Been hit with 480 and I didn't feel anything. I never experienced no pain getting shocked. Neither do they. It goes in the top of the head and out the left leg. There're two phases. It comes in through the head and out the leg, just like an element in a toaster." The Angolite showed Sam several color post-execution photos of Robert Wayne Williams, asking if he had seen the burns on Williams's body before. There was a long pause while he studied the pictures. "No, I've never seen that," he said, shaking his head. "That's the first time I've seen that. I didn't see that on him when they had him in the chair. It may have come up later. I don't know what happens to 'em, what procedure the body goes through after they're electrocuted." Asked if he had seen similar burns on any of the other eighteen men he has executed, he answered: "No. I don't remember seeing it on 'em. As soon as they take 'em out of the chair, they put 'em in a body bag and they're gone.... I don't remember seeing it on Wayne."

Though Sam has said publicly that electrocutions are humane and really too easy for the condemned, he would not want to be electrocuted. Asked if he could envision himself in circumstances in which he could commit a crime and kill someone, he acknowledged: "That could happen to anybody. Nobody know what the future brings." The Angolite then asked him which method of execution he would personally prefer if he had to be executed. "Well, I don't know that much about the others," he answered. "I know electrical and the lethal injection. I went to New Jersey up there and went through that with them. But, if I had my rathers, I'd guess I'd want the needle. Why? I just figure it would be easier on me," he said. "All it do is put you to sleep."

During his first several years as executioner, Sam insisted on working under his alias and not being photographed. More recently, he has started allowing himself to be photographed and has even appeared on television. He was asked how allowing his face to be photographed protected his anonymity. "People don't recognize you," he explained. "I've been sitting in a lounge before and be on TV and the barmaid serve me a drink and not even know who she's serving a drink to. And I've never had nobody walk up to me and say, `You're so-and-so.' "

Sam differs greatly from past executioners not only in his readiness to court fame, but also in his role as executioner. In the past, executioners were generally responsible for the entire execution scenario. For instance, Grady Jarratt would check out the execution site a couple of days early to make sure that everything was in proper working order. He greeted witnesses and officials and dealt with the condemned face-to-face, executing him in full view of everyone.

Sam, on the other hand, avoids all contact with the witnesses and others present. He discreetly arrives at the death house shortly before the execution, and waits behind the wall adjacent to the electric chair while the shackled prisoner enters the death chamber and is strapped into the chair by prison security officers. Through a small rectangular window in the wall, he observes the ritual and waits for the warden's nod - the signal for him to push the button that sends volts of electricity burning through the condemned. He departs just as secretly as he arrived. The Angolite asked Sam if he personally checks the chair and electrical apparatus to be used in the execution. "No," he said, "Angola takes care of that." Unlike most executioners throughout history, Sam is not asked to do very much. His sole duty has been reduced to pushing a button, something a child, an animal, or even a machine could do--though Louisiana's requirement that the executioner be a certified electrician implies a larger responsibility.

While many professional executioners of the past spoke of dignity and even possible redemption for the condemned, there is no room in Sam's execution philosophy for dignity, and he does not believe the condemned are redeemable. His appearance on Australian television last year provided much insight. Asked how he saw the condemned, he replied: "They trash, simple as that. That's all they are. Pure trash. If they was any good, they wouldn't be in that spot where they at. I don't care whether they male or female, black or white, or green or pink. It makes me no difference. None at all. When I strap them in the chair and the warden gives me the nod, I'll push the button. I don't care who it is." Even if it was his grandson, he said. Asked about the reaction of the condemned when they're brought into the death chamber, he stated: "You can tell they's scared. They got fear in their eyes and all that, but most of them, they keep up the macho image. They all say they goin' home. I don't know where they goin' but I'm sending 'em there.

Speaking of the American justice system, Sam Jones told The Angolite, "Takes too long. Too long a procedure." Stays of execution frustrate him. "They're getting too many stays," he explained. "It's too complicated and too involved. Why should it take forever? The man committed the crime. He should pay for it. Sitting on death row for ten years is not solving anything. It's not helping him." Asked if speeding up the process might result in mistakes, Sam said: "It's possible to make mistakes in anything, but I don't believe they do that nowadays. No."
 
 

Department Regulation

No. C-03-001 20 December 1999
 

1. AUTHORITY: Secretary of the Department of Public Safety and Corrections as contained in Chapter 9 of Title 36 and LA. R.S. 15:567 through 15:571.
 

2. REFERENCE: La. R.S. 46:1844(N) and Department Regulation No. C-01-013 "Public Information Program and Media Access."
 

3. PURPOSE: To set forth procedures to be followed for the lethal injection of those individuals sentenced to death.
 

4. APPLICABILITY: Assistant Secretary/Office of Adult Services and the Wardens of the Louisiana State Penitentiary and the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women.
 

5. INCARCERATION PRIOR TO EXECUTION:
 

Male inmates sentenced to death shall be incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, Louisiana. Female inmates sentenced to death shall be incarcerated at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women at St. Gabriel, Louisiana. Until the time for execution, the Warden shall incarcerate the inmate in a manner affording maximum protection to the general public, the employees of the Department, and the security of the institution. Female inmates shall be transported to the Louisiana State Penitentiary on the day immediately prior to the execution date.
 

6. VISITS:
 

A. During the final 72 hours before the scheduled execution, the Warden may approve special visits for the condemned inmate.
 

B. All visits will terminate by 3:00 p.m. on the day of the execution except visits with a priest, minister, religious advisor, or attorney which will terminate at the direction of the Warden or his designee.
 

7. MEDIA ACCESS:
 

A. Pursuant to the provisions of Department Regulation No. C-01-013, the media may contact the Warden's office to request interviews. If the Warden, inmate, and attorney (if represented by counsel) consent, the interview shall be scheduled for a time convenient to the institution.
 

B. Should the demand for interviews be great, the Warden may set a day and time for all interviews to be conducted and may specify whether interviews will be done individually or in "press conference" fashion.
 

8. PRE-EXECUTION ACTIVITIES:
 

A. The Warden shall select appropriate areas to serve as a press room and for any mobile press units.
 

B. The execution room shall be off-limits to unauthorized inmates and employees from 8:00 a.m. on the day preceding the execution until such time after the execution as the Warden deems appropriate. The execution room shall also be off-limits to the public and press five days before the execution until such time after the execution as the Warden deems appropriate.
 

C. All persons selected as witnesses will sign copies of the witness agreement prior to being transported to the execution room.
 
 
 

9. TIME AND PLACE:
 

The execution shall take place at the Louisiana State Penitentiary between the hours of 6:00 p.m. and 11.59 p.m. (La. R.S. 15.570C.)
 

10. WITNESSES:
 

A. The execution shall take place in the presence of the following witnesses:
 

1) the Warden of the Louisiana State Penitentiary or designee;
 

2) the coroner of West Feliciana Parish or deputy;
 

3) a physician chosen by the Warden;
 

4) a competent person selected by the Warden to administer the lethal injection; and
 

5) a priest, minister, or religious advisor, if the inmate so requests.
 

B. Not less than five nor more than seven other witnesses are required by law to be present. (La. R.S. 15:570A.) These witnesses will be selected as follows:
 

1) Three witnesses will be members of the news media:
 

a. a representative from the Associated Press;
 

b. a representative selected from the media persons requesting to be present from the parish where the crime was committed; and
 

c. one representative selected from all other media persons requesting to be present.
 

These witnesses must agree to act as pool reporters for the remainder of the media present and meet with all media representatives immediately following the execution.
 

2) The remaining witnesses will be selected by the Secretary from persons whom he feels have a legitimate interest in being present.
 

C. Victim relationship witnesses are authorized to attend the execution (La R.S. 15.570D.)
 

1) The number of victim relationship witnesses may be limited to two. If more than two victim relationship witnesses desire to attend the execution, the Secretary is authorized to select from the interested parties the two victim relationship witnesses who will be authorized to attend.
 

2) At least ten days prior to the execution, the Secretary shall give either written or verbal notice, (followed by written notice placed in the United States mail within five days thereafter), of the date and time of execution to the victim's parents, or guardian, spouse and any adult children who have indicated to the Secretary that they desire such notice. The named parties shall be given the option of attending the execution and shall, within three days of their receipt of the notification, notify, either verbally or in writing, the Secretary's office of their intention to attend.
 

D. All witnesses must be residents of the State of Louisiana, over 18 years of age and all must agree to sign the report of the execution. (La. R.S. 15:570-571)
 

E. No cameras or recording devices, either audio or video, will be permitted in the execution room.
 

11. PROCEDURES:
 

A. The witnesses will enter the witness room where they will receive a copy of the inmate's written last statement, if a written statement is issued.
 

B. The inmate will then be taken to the lethal injection room by the escorting officers. Once in the room, the inmate will be afforded the opportunity to make a last verbal statement if he so desires. He will then be assisted onto the lethal injection table and properly secured to the table by the officers. Once the officers exit the room, the Warden will close the curtain to the witness room and signal the I.. V. technician to enter. The I. V. technician will appropriately prepare the inmate for execution and exit the room. The Warden will reopen the witness room curtain.
 

C. The person designated by the Warden and at the Warden's direction, will then administer, by intravenous injection, a substance or substances in a lethal quantity into the body of the inmate until he is deceased.
 

D. At the conclusion of the execution, the coroner or his deputy shall pronounce the inmate dead. The deceased shall then be immediately taken to an awaiting ambulance for transportation to a place designated by the next of kin or in accordance with other arrangements made prior to the execution.
 

E. The warden will make a written report reciting the manner and date of the execution which he and all of the witnesses will sign. The report shall be filed with the clerk of court in the parish where the sentence was originally imposed. (La. R.S. 15:571)
 

F. No employee, including employee witnesses to the execution, except the Secretary or the Warden or their designee, shall communicate with the press regarding any aspect of the execution except as required by law.
 

Richard L. Stalder

Secretary
 

bvm
 

Attachment: Agreement by Witness to Execution
 

This regulation supersedes Department Regulation No. C-03-001 dated 15 September 1997 and Page Three dated 02 December 1997.
 

I, , a person of full age and majority, and citizen of the State of Louisiana, hereby agree to the following conditions precedent to being a witness to the execution of a sentence of death at Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola, Louisiana.
 

1. I agree that my presence at the execution is voluntary.
 

2. I agree to sign the report of the execution as required by law.
 

3. I agree to comply with all rules and regulations of the Department of Public Safety and Corrections and the Louisiana State Penitentiary during the course of the proceedings leading up to, during, and after the completion of the execution.
 

4. I agree that I will not electronically record or photograph any activities while I am present in the lethal injection room.
 

5. I agree to submit to a search of my person before and after the execution if requested to do so by the Warden of the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
 

6. If I am a member of the press selected as a witness to the execution, I agree to act as a pool reporter for the media representatives not present at the execution, and I agree to meet with all media representatives present at the penitentiary immediately after the execution.
 

7. If I am an employee of the Department of Public Safety and Corrections, I agree that I will make no public statements about the execution without prior approval of the Warden of the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
 

I have read the above agreement, understand it, and have signed it in the presence of the listed witnesses on this date

.

(Day, Month, Year)
 

Selected Witness to Execution
 

WITNESSES TO SIGNATURE:
 

Robert Excell White arrived on Texas death row in 1974. At the time, he shared the death quarters with only four other men. Today, a quarter-century later, there are 437 on Texas death row, second only to California's 536.

Assembly-line executions in Texas have not solved the swelling death row population problem. The state leads the nation in executions since reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976 with 173-Virginia is a straying second at 63. Twenty-three years and 530 executions later

( as of April 1, 1999), the country has a death row population of 3,565, according to Death Row U.S.A., Criminal Justice Project for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Richard Dieter, executive director for the Death Penalty Information Center, told the New York Times that since 1986 about 300 death sentences are imposed every year. While prison officials grapple with problems connected to growing death-row populations, taxpayers take the brunt of the assault. The ultimate punishment, death, is expensive.

It is no secret among lawmakers that enormous costs to taxpayers attach to capital punishment-money generally diverted from education and highway budgets by state legislators to fuel the death penalty. While the rest of the Western world has abolished capital punishment or seldom uses it, the U.S. resists downshifting the machinery of death. Instead, it pushes the throttle forward by enacting more death-eligible laws every year and, consequently, states follow the lead "and build bigger death rows. It is a vicious cycle that results in warehousing condemned men and women at taxpayer expense.

In Quitman County, Mississippi, where unemployment is 14 percent, far above the national average, and 91 percent of school children qualify for free lunches, taxpayers are struggling to send two men to their death. The two young black men were arrested, convicted and sentenced to death in 1990 for a quadruple murder. The county raised taxes to cover the $250,000 for trials and automatic appeals, has since paid $30,000 a year per case while the condemned men prepare to enter their second round of appeals-which includes having their cases heard for the first time by federal court.

Quitman grocer Bessie Sbravati expressed uncertainty over prosecuting the cases, saying the cost wouldn't matter so much to folks if the money were going to "something that's important to the county... where everybody benefits from it, reported the Associated Press.

The truth of the matter is, if a prosecutor's going to make the determination that the death penalty is in order, then one needs to take into consideration is that there is a real price attached to that choice," said Mississippi attorney C. Jackson Williams.

"It is always more expensive to have and use the death penalty than it is to no have it, for the very simple reason that lawyers are more expensive than prison guards," Frank Zimring, director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute at UC-Berkeley, told the New York Times.

In 1988, the Miami Herald reported it cost an average of $3.2 million to execute a person in Florida. Four years later, in 1992, the Dallas Morning News said that each death penalty case in Texas cost an average of $2.3 million, three times more than it cost to imprison someone in a single cell at the highest security level for 40 years.

North Carolina's 1993 Duke University study is the benchmark analysis for capital punishment costs. The comprehensive examination took in all cost factors incorporated from time of arrest to moment of execution and concluded it cost $2.16 million to execute a person. "To many people, the notion that the death penalty costs money is counter-intuitive," the report read. "Common sense says that it's cheaper to supply a few jolts of electricity than to shell out the equivalent of tuition at Harvard for incarceration for the next 20 years. But when all the costs are weighed, just the opposite is true. The death penalty is more expensive because of the constitutional protection embodied in the judicial determination that death, as a punishment, is different."

The death penalty appeal process is a constitutional safeguard that helps protect against the execution of an innocent or wrongly convicted person. Illinois is a prime example, having carried out 12 executions, while releasing another 12 condemned people from death row since 1987 because they were innocent. (The only other state to have released more people from death row is Florida, with 18.) Most of the 12 factually innocent convicts in Illinois were aided by experienced capital punishment attorneys, journalism students and private investigators who enlisted in their cases years after conviction. Had present habeas corpus restrictions been implemented years earlier, they would have been executed.

Taking note of the one-to-one ratio of execution to innocence, Illinois lawmakers recently passed a non-binding resolution for a six-month moratorium on capital punishment to study why so many innocent people are being sentenced to death. The governor promptly vetoed it.

For over ten years a handful of Louisiana legislators have proposed a bill to abolish capital punishment. The bill never makes it out of the judicial committee, which meets in the state capital, Baton Rouge, in East Baton Rouge Parish. The parish leads the state in the number of death-penalty verdicts, something it had not done before District Attorney Doug Moreau was elected in 1991. During his eight-year reign, his office has sent 17 men to death row. Each year the number of death verdicts has increased.

"We estimate there are approximately 290 to 300 capital cases pending in Louisiana at any given time. This would include pre-indictment and post-indictment," attorney Jelpi Picou Jr. told The Angolite. "I would say that this number is fairly consistent over any given period." Picou is director of the Louisiana Indigent Defense Assistance Board--a state-funded operation that helps pay for the defense of indigent defendants.

According to Picou, death-penalty cases in East Baton Rouge Parish are bankrupting the system. He and other criminal defense attorneys appeared in court in April, attempting to postpone capital and noncapital trials until funding is found to pay attorney fees. Picou testified it cost from $32,000 to $35,000 per defense lawyer, reported the Baton Rouge Advocate, noting that two lawyers are required for a first-degree murder case. That figure does not include money needed for expert witnesses and other expenses. Picou said the Indigent Defense Assistance Board needs more state funding to keep up with the influx of capital cases, not only in East Baton Rouge Parish, but state-wide. That funding is now set at $7.5 million annually, and Picou has asked the legislature to boost it to $10.6 million. "The fact is, the Public Defender system in Louisiana needs more money," he said.

Some would say that Robert Excell White benefitted from his 25-year stay on death row before Texas finally strapped him to the dead bed on April 30, 1999, and pumped poison through his aged body. After all, having committed his crime at 35, he did live to the ripe age of 61. Others would argue White's confinement to a small cell for a quarter century, with impending execution constantly pressing on him, was cruel, torturous and unduly costly. Texas taxpayers coughed up millions to keep him there until they killed him.

He left behind only three other men who have logged more time on death row than he did (two in Georgia and one in Florida). But that is not the norm. The average time nationally between arrest and execution is 13 years, according to the U.S. Justice Department. That figure is skewed, though, by prisoners known as "volunteers," who abandon their appeals for a swift death.

In Louisiana, which has had no volunteer executions, the average time between arrest and execution has been 12 years. There are currently 80 men and one woman on the state's death row (the woman is held at the female prison just outside Baton Rouge), with over 200 capital prosecutions in the pipeline. Relying on the Duke University finding of $2.16 million per execution--no thorough cost study has been undertaken in Louisiana - executing the 81 people now on death row will cost tax-payers $175 million, more than double the $81 million it would cost to incarcerate those same prisoners for 40 years. On a national scale, to execute the 3,565 people condemned to die will cost $7.7 billion.

"The only way to make the death penalty a 'better buy' than imprisonment," said death penalty expert Hugo Adam Bedau, "is to weaken due process and appellate review, which are the defendant's (and society's) only protections against gross miscarriages of justice."
 

DEATH MORATORIUM
 

Last April, the United Nations Human Rights Commission voted 30-to-11, with 12 countries abstaining, for a worldwide moratorium on executions. The United States and China, believed to be the most frequent users of capital punishment, voted no. Joining them, according to the New York Times, were Bangladesh, Botswana, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan, Oatar, Rwanda, South Korea and Sudan.

The resolution, sponsored by the European Union, was seen as a step toward eradicating the death penalty entirely, already banned in 65 countries. It urges countries to progressively limit the crimes for which death can be imposed, and to disallow it entirely for defendants under 18 when the crime was committed, who are pregnant, or have "any form of mental disorder .

"This is not the first move by the international community against state-sponsored executions. Both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the American Convention on Human Rights state that the "sentence of death shall not be imposed for crimes committed by persons below 18 years of age. "So does the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The United States signed the first two treaties, but is one of only two nations that have yet to ratify the third. Somalia is the other nonsignatory.

Since 1990, only six countries have executed juveniles: Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and the United States. "This land of the free and home of the brave," author/journalist Christopher Hitchens wrote recently in Vanity Fair magazine, "has, you may be interested to hear, left the silver and bronze medals divided among these other fine contenders, keeping the gold for itself both by conducting the most executions and by having the largest number of juveniles awaiting extinction on death row.... It may seem odd. ..that the United States joins Yemen and Pakistan in putting down its troublesome young, and [then] reads lectures on human rights to other countries while refusing to ratify treaties which most civilized societies regard as the ABCs of law.... And [this] country with a positive glut of counselors and spiritual-awareness artists and fancy shrinks will continue to wonder what is wrong with kids these days."
 
 

In 17th and 18th century London, the execution of a condemned criminal was a public spectacle, an event that might have been orchestrated by Cecil B. DeMille. After a farewell dinner (and often a farewell party, if the condemned could afford it) the night before, the condemned (one or several, as multiple executions were common) were paraded through the streets to the site of the gallows. Before the huge throng gathered in the square, the condemned person was expected to give a speech and ask for forgiveness. He then dropped a handkerchief to signal that he was ready to be hanged. The point of this ritual, historians say, was to educate the public about the consequences of criminal behavior, and thereby to discourage similar behavior. Today we call this idea deterrence.

In America executions remained public until the post-Civil War era when, first in the Northern states and later in the South, they were moved behind jail and prison walls and made by-invitation-only events. Journalists were always among those allowed to view the executions, to report the details to the larger public no longer allowed to attend in person. Political officials and death penalty proponents continued to speak of the deterrent effect of the death penalty, even as newspaper accounts universally replaced the direct viewing (and sometimes overt participation, for and against) of the earlier era.

Did executions, public and private, deter crime--or more specifically homicide, as the crime most likely to be punished by death? Most research says no. Probably the best known of the studies that says yes is Isaac Ehrlich's 1975 article, "The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: A Question of Life and Death." Looking at executions and homicides between 1933 and 1969, an era when both were in decline, Ehrlich claimed that each execution prevents seven or eight murders. In a 1980 article, sociologist David Phillips, who studied executions and homicides in London between 1858 and 1921, reported that a well-publicized execution resulted in a temporary drop in the homicide rate, a decline which was quickly followed by an increase to an above-normal rate thereafter.

Most of the research has suggested opposite conclusions, finding that executions either had no deterrent consequences or even increased the number of homicides. Recent studies in Texas, California, Oklahoma, and Arizona have found no apparent deterrent effect of executing murderers. William Bowers and Glenn Pierce, writing in "Deterrence or Brutalization: What Is the Effect of Executions?" in 1980, used the term "brutalization effect" to suggest that viewing an execution or reading about one might encourage certain persons to kill. If we believed in deterrence, we would hope that a might-be murderer would identify with the person being executed, and would fear the legal consequences of killing and thus avoid the act itself. But Bowers and Pierce posed an interesting thought: what if the potential killer identifies with the power of the state, used against its victims, to justify his own violence against other victims. If this sounds farfetched, you might consider the case of one Timothy McVeigh, about to become the first federal prisoner executed in four decades.

Many historical observers of executions expressed skepticism that the event was having much of a deterrent effect. Crowds in London in the 1600s and 1700s were often drunk and nruly, making the event more like Mardi Gras than a moral philosophy lecture, and historians have long pointed out that execution crowds were a favorite working place for pickpockets, criminals who knew, even as they plied their trade, that if they were caught it would be their turn on the gallows next. There is the story, told in Robert Johnson's Death Work, of the mother in the crowd, calling out to her son about to be hanged, "Son, I hope you will die courageously, like your father."

Closer to home, in both time and place, Table 1 below was prepared to consider the deterrent effects of executions on the murder rate in Louisiana during the decade of the 1990s.

Does executing criminals deter homicide? No definite relationship can be established from our own recent experience. It is clear, in looking at the FBI's homicide statistics, that the murder rate in Louisiana fell off sharply during the latter half of the 1990s. It is also clear that juries gave out more death sentences from 1995 to 1999 (56) than they did from 1990 through 1994 (29). More death penalties, fewer murders; isn't that what prosecutors have been saying all along?

But when you look at the stats by parish, rather than statewide, a more uncertain relationship emerges. Most of Louisiana's parishes did not give anyone a death sentence during the 1990s. Of those that did, by far the most significant decline in the murder rate occurred in Orleans Parish, where defendants are least likely to get a death sentence. New Orleans, with 11% of the state's population, had 44% of the state's homicides during the 1990s. Another sharp decline in the murder rate took place in Caddo Parish, which also falls lower on the list of parishes ranked by the ratio of homicides to death sentences.

Local officials in New Orleans and Shreveport, when asked to explain why their murder rates have declined, typically mention such influences as a decline in violence associated with crack cocaine distribution, police tactics aimed at keeping guns off the streets, the decline of gang violence, expansion of alternatives for victims of domestic violence, and improved employment conditions in urban areas. The role of the death penalty, as a public policy influencing criminal violence, is so negligible that it is scarcely mentioned.

For the decade as a whole, two parishes, East Baton Rouge and Jefferson, gave out the most death sentences, a total of 30 between them. These two parishes, with 20% of the state's population and 17% of its homicides, meted out 35% of its death sentences. Criminals: are you listening to the tough-talking DA's in East Baton Rouge and Jefferson? Maybe in Jefferson, where the murder rate did decline substantially in the latter half of the decade.

But the experience of East Baton Rouge lends support to the old argument that the death penalty is much more about politics than it is either justice or crime control. East Baton Rouge, which gave more death sentences than any other parish in the 90s, was the only urban parish in which the murder rate went up in the second half of the decade. The more death sentences, the more murders. So if East Baton Rouge wanted to follow the homicide trend in Caddo and Orleans, it should give fewer death sentences, and make its streets safer.

Statewide only about one in 84 homicides results in a death sentence, mostly because of the very low rate of death sentences in Orleans Parish. This is slightly below the recent national average of one death sentence for every 60 homicides. But even if we gave ten times the number of death sentences we do now, only about one in every eight or nine murders would result in a death sentence, which would still likely not be enough to significantly increase the deterrent effect of death.

We might keep in mind the two main reasons why England and America moved away from the death penalty and other corporal punishments at the end of the 1700s, and toward the use of the penitentiary in the 1800s: (1) the physical punishments were widely viewed as inhumane and uncivilized in a modern society; and (2) because the legal system did not often impose these punishments, they were viewed as being largely ineffective in deterring crime. The penitentiary replaced death as a punishment (for all but the most unlucky or heinous murderers), precisely because it was viewed as a more certain punishment. So it remains today, especially in a state like Louisiana which imposes true life sentences to incapacitate criminals who were not deterred.
 
 

Homicides by Parish (Population in 1,000s)

Homicides Rate Death Sentences (484) (457) (396) (247) (177) (173) (167) (146) (126) (100) 

Louisiana(per 100,000) Louisiana Orlns Jeff EBR Cad Lafy Calc St.T Ouac Rapid Terre 

1990 724 17.2 1 304 63 57 68 9 15 (7)³ 6 (11)⁴ 9

1991 720 16.9 7 345 62 65 53 15 (13)² (5)³ 11 (9)⁴ 3 

1992 747 17.4 6 279 50 72 55 20 (18)² (6)³ 26 (12)⁴ 14 

1993 874 20.3 8 395 65 86 83 20 15 10 23 25 6

1994 856 19.8 7 424 54 79 69 11 19 6 15 11 7

1995 740 17.0 12 363 38 80 63 8 12 7 9 11 4

1996 762 17.5 8 351 36 86 54 10 21 12 9 11 (2)¹

1997 682 15.7 13 267 39 70 42 20 18 7 16 8 (4)¹

1998 560 12.8 12 230 33 73 37 12 9 8 12 10 6

1999 468 10.7 11158336435125614103

Total: 7,133 Total: 85 3,116 473 732 559 137 145 74 141 118 58 
 

Total homicides in urban parishes: 5,573 (78.1% of state total)

Total homicides in rural parishes: 1,560 (21.9% of state total)
 

¹Houma P.D. did not report statistics.

²Calcasieu S.O. did not report statistics.

³Slidell P.D. did not report statistics.

⁴Rapides S.O. did not report statistics.
 

1990s Death Sentences by ParishRatio of Homicides to Death Sentences

E. Baton Rouge 16 46/1

Jefferson 14 38/1

Orleans 12 260/1

Caddo 8 70/1

Rapides 4 30/1

Calcasieu 4 36/1

Ouachita 3 47/1

Terrebonne 2 29/1

St. Tammany 1 74/1

Lafayette 0 None

Others 21 74/1

*Homicide statistics from FBI Uniform Crime Reports Crime in the United States.
 
 

"Convicted murderer Ted Bundy is scheduled to die shortly after midnight tonight in Florida's electric chair for the brutal slaying of . . . . The news flash echoes through the house, tweaking the attention of the couple enjoying an evening snack in front of their TV before going to bed. They suddenly sit up and stop chewing their food to better hear the anchor's account. Both become engrossed in the details of Bundy's crimes. They anxiously await news of his death without pausing to consider why they hate this man neither of them know.
 

Americans have become accustomed to hearing news reports of pending executions, especially those of high-profile murderers, as the rate of government-sanctioned killings increase. During the few hours or days prior to an execution, many people become fixated by the coverage, and their fascination with death and violence keeps them waiting with bated breath for the next update. Just as we were during the O.J. Simpson and Louise Woodward trials, they are ensnared in the media frenzy's real-life drama. This is not a recent development: our ancestors spilled into town squares to scream for the blood of men and women burned as witches. Just as they did, we are acting impulsively on sheer passion with little--if any--forethought.
 

I am a 31-year-old man confined to Louisiana's Death Row, and before I arrived here, I acted in a similar fashion. This is surprising to me now because I knew three of the men executed in the mid-eighties: Alvin Moore, Jimmy Wingo, and Eddie Byrne.¹ Considering that Louisiana had executed fewer than 20 men at that time, one could almost predict my future; yet, while I mourned the loss of my acquaintances, I still lent virtually no thought to the machinery of death itself.
 

During more than six years on death row, I have come to know the intricacies of the death penalty. Not only the pros and cons but also the public's generalizations about the "ultimate penalty." What strikes me hardest is how naive everyone outside of the system truly is. We as a people need to begin making rational decisions about not only the death penalty but crime and the justice system in general. The best way to begin doing so is to stop allowing our emotions or the emotions of others do our thinking and consider what is truly best for all of us. Before we can do that, we must first educate ourselves by dispelling the myths we have commonly accepted.

One myth is that the death penalty discourages others from committing death-eligible crimes. Beheading, stoning, burning, feeding to ferocious carnivores, drawing and quartering, disembowelment--these are only a sampling of the torturous executions devised by our ancestors. If these methods failed to deter criminals, then how can our relatively sterile and painless procedures possibly do so today?
 

Psychiatrists have been telling us for decades that most violent criminals suffer from anti-social personality disorders. Since primary traits of this disorder include heightened impulsivity and a reduced ability to plan ahead, reason dictates that such criminals fail to consider the consequences of their actions beforehand. Forethought is