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TRANSFORMED AFTER VIEWING A KILLING
March 17, 2002, 10:40PM
Witnessing death turns minister into execution critic
By ALLAN TURNER Houston Chronicle
HUNTSVILLE -- Once the poisons began to flow, Texas death house chaplain
Carroll Pickett told the condemned man, unconsciousness would follow
swiftly.
Breathing out would speed the process. Together they practiced counting the
seconds -- one ... two ... three.
Offering such lessons in how to die increasingly tormented Pickett, a
Presbyterian minister, and in this case the inmate was lost in childlike
befuddlement.
Would the needles hurt?
Could Pickett hold his hand?
Those were the things the killer, 27-year-old Carlos DeLuna, wanted to know.
Later, after DeLuna had mumbled his last words, again begged the chaplain to
hold his hand -- an act officially forbidden -- and quietly died, a shaken
Pickett stood alone in the death chamber with the killer's corpse.
The December 1989 execution was a key moment in his transformation from a
backer of capital punishment to an outspoken opponent.
"Gone were the warden and the guards, those who had administered the deadly
chemicals and the witnesses, leaving me alone in a silent, sterile world
that I badly wanted to lash out against," he recalled. "I wanted to scream
out the fact that he'd not even understood what we were doing. Instead, I
only breathed deeply and kept my vigil. Still trembling, I reached out and
took his hand."
Today, Pickett, who retired in 1995 after 15 years as chaplain at
Huntsville's Walls Unit, is a fixture on the anti-death penalty circuit.
Drawing on his experience in scores of executions, he has spoken to civic
clubs and churches, authored opinion articles for national newspapers,
testified in legislative hearings, appeared on National Public Radio's
Witness to an Execution series and, most recently, co-written a book
chronicling his prison career.
The book, Within These Walls: Memoirs of a Death House Chaplain, written
with Texas author Carlton Stowers, will be issued in May by St. Martin's
Press.
In search of justice
"This was an evolving process," Pickett, 68, noted last week at his
Huntsville office. "I was raised in South Texas under the Old West
philosophy. My father was a proponent of eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.
I was raised in a town where the sheriff was king. We were all taught that
justice is punishment.
"The more I worked for the Texas prison system, the more I began to see
there is not total justice in punishment. ... At one point, I did support
capital punishment. I was wrong."
Pickett offered familiar arguments to back his anti-death penalty views: The
punishment is irreversible, and innocent people likely have been put to
death. The penalty falls inequitably on minorities and the poor. It is
applied unfairly and doesn't deter crime.
"I fundamentally believe we shouldn't take anything that we can't restore,"
he said. He emphatically supports life without parole and believes some
death row inmates should be eligible for parole. As many as 60 percent of
death row inmates, he said, are genuinely remorseful for their crimes.
His views draw spirited rebuttal from death penalty supporters.
"People are not sent to death row to be rehabilitated," countered Dianne
Clements, executive director of Houston-based Justice for All, a pro-death
penalty victims' rights organization. "Belief in God, repentance of sin can
be meaningful spiritual achievements. But they don't undo the crime. People
are not sent to death row to find God. They are sent to death row to be
punished."
Stowers, an award-winning true-crime author whose 1998 book To the Last
Breath: Three Women Fight for the Truth Behind a Child's Tragic Murder was
based on the killing of a 2-year-old Alvin girl, said Pickett's persuasive
powers are potent because they are low-key.
The avuncular, white-haired Pickett, who now works as director of a national
amateur jump rope association, doesn't "pound on the Bible and quote
Scripture," Stowers said.
"He is very soft-spoken, very low-key, very comfortable with himself," said
Stowers, who favors the death penalty in some cases. "He never asked me,
`Hey, how do you feel about this?' At no point do you feel he's trying to
sway you to his side. The book is about what he saw, felt and believes. He
presents his case and asks you to think about it."
Facing tragedy
Pickett's first encounter with the Texas prison system came in July 1974 --
long before he became a prison chaplain -- when he was summoned to comfort
families of hostages seized during drug lord Fred Gomez Carrasco's attempted
jailbreak.
For 11 days, the hostages, including members of Pickett's First Presbyterian
Church, were held by Carrasco and his heavily armed cohorts in the prison
library. On the final day, Carrasco advised the minister by telephone that
he finally was making his break, and allowed him to talk with hostages who
volunteered to go with him.
Two of them, Presbyterian church women, accurately foretold their deaths in
the foiled escape. One urged Pickett to proceed with her daughter's planned
wedding; the other calmly detailed desires for her funeral.
Carrasco, one of his associates and the two women were killed. Another
hostage, a priest, was seriously injured.
Condemned's counselor
Devastated by the ordeal of the nation's longest prison standoff, Pickett
vowed he'd never set foot in the storied, red-brick prison again.
For six years, he concentrated on family life and church work. He
successfully ran for school board. But in early 1980 he became chaplain of
the Walls, in part to save a marriage strained by the around-the-clock
demands placed on a "free world" minister.
His duties were to conduct Sunday services and to minister to prisoners and
staff.
"For 2 1/2 years, I ministered to dying convicts, to dying staff and the
staff's family," Pickett said. "I assisted with those who committed suicide.
I assisted twice in cutting the ropes because the guards on duty didn't want
to do it. To me, that was the ministry that God had called me to do. For 2
1/2 years, I didn't even know the death house was there.
"The Supreme Court had stopped executions, and nobody ever talked about it."
When the high court cleared the way for resumed executions in 1982, Pickett
was told he would be counselor to the condemned.
"You're going to be with the inmate all day," the warden told him, "and it's
important that you gain his trust as quickly as possible. Talk to him,
listen to him, comfort him as much as you possibly can. But, above all else,
I want you to seduce his emotions so he won't fight."
"The first time I stepped into the death house," Pickett said, "I was
nauseated."
On Dec. 7, 1982, the state executed Charlie Brooks Jr., 40, for the
kidnapping-murder of a Fort Worth car-lot employee. His was the first of
more than 40 executions at which Pickett was chaplain. Many others during
Pickett's tenure ended in last-minute stays.
So emotionally racking was the job that the chaplain sometimes left the
execution chamber drenched in perspiration.
Texas has executed 262 killers since capital punishment was reinstated.
As chaplain, Pickett was both spiritual counselor, confidant and official
representative of the prison administration.
"I never read the offense jackets," Pickett said. "I always tried to relate
to them as a human being."
At their sides to the end Pickett greeted the inmates when they arrived at
the Walls, facilitated visits and phone calls, helped them polish final
statements, carefully explained the sequence of events that would lead to
their deaths and -- finally -- accompanied them to the death house. Often he
conducted their funerals and counseled their survivors.
Once, Pickett -- at the inmate's request -- called a radio station to
request it play the killer's favorite song. Then, as the death hour
approached with the request unfulfilled, he called again. The song began
seconds before the killer's last walk was set to begin. Pickett successfully
implored the warden to delay the execution three minutes as the inmate
raptly listened to his radio as it played the Willie Nelson tune Help Me
Make It Through The Night.
Another time, Pickett noted that a small window, the sole source of outside
light in the holding area, caused condemned inmates consternation. Through
it, they could see the growing shadows that heralded their deaths. The
chaplain arranged to have the window painted over.
"These may seem like small things," Pickett said, "but to the prisoners,
they were very, very important."
Even as his distaste for capital punishment grew, Pickett felt compelled to
appear neutral.
"If I told the inmate I favored capital punishment, I'd lose his trust," he
said. "If I said I opposed the death penalty, I would lose my job. My job
was to minister to the inmates.
"I didn't make the law. I didn't serve on the jury. I didn't inject the
drugs."
Pickett acknowledged some death penalty opponents have faulted him for not
publicly decrying capital punishment while employed by the state.
"Sometimes I get stung," he said.
`Was he innocent?'
No single execution can be credited with changing his views on capital
punishment, he said. But the execution of DeLuna for the murder of a Corpus
Christi convenience-store clerk and the near-execution of Johnny Paul Penry,
a rapist and killer with an IQ of 60 who arrived at the death house with
crayons and a coloring book, played a role.
So, too, did the execution of Leonel Torres Herrera, convicted of murdering
a state trooper during a traffic stop. Despite public questions of Herrera's
guilt -- based, in part, on his nephew's affidavit swearing his own father
had committed the crime -- the inmate was executed in May 1993.
"Was he innocent? Had something very wrong taken place as he had stated?"
Pickett says in his memoir. "I am doomed to forever wonder."
In January 1995 the state of Texas for the first time in more than 40 years
executed two inmates in a single day. They were Clifton Russell Jr. and
Willie Williams, sentenced, respectively, for Abilene and Houston
robbery-murders.
The executions were the sixth and seventh in a month, and Pickett felt
drained. He had to force himself to report for work. The back-to-back
executions, he felt, were atrocities. The situation worsened when prison
authorities left the timing of the execution of the second inmate, Williams,
to Pickett's discretion.
Williams relieved the pressure by asking the chaplain to end his waiting.
Afterward, though, Pickett experienced sharp abdominal pains that no medical
tests could diagnose.
"My problem," he wrote, "was not of the body but of the mind and spirit. I
had watched too many people die in the name of justice and vengeance. My
feelings about what was taking place with increasing regularity had grown
stronger. It was becoming increasingly difficult to hide my thoughts about
the barbaric nature of executions.
"I began to consider the possibility that it was time to step away."
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SENT BY:
Abraham J. Bonowitz
Director, CUADP
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YES FRIENDS!
There is an Alternative to the Death Penalty
Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty
(CUADP) works to end the death penalty in the United
States through aggressive campaigns of public education
and the promotion of tactical grassroots activism.
Visit or call 800-973-6548
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Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty
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