Rethinking the System

There was a time when David Von Drehle, author of a troubling new book on the death penalty, believed that execution was the proper answer to violent crime.

As editor of the campus newspaper at the University of Denver, “I wrote a column calling for the death penalty against a guy who robbed a convenience store and murdered the clerks for a total of 20 bucks,” Von Drehle said. But after six years spent writing “Among the Lowest of the Dead” (Times Books), his view of society’s ultimate punishment has changed. Like the slapdash paint jobs carried out periodically on the peeling walls of Death Row cells at Florida State Prison, Von Drehle writes, the penalty, as currently applied, only masks society’s underlying violence.

“This is the story of the modern death penalty: Now and then, we buckle up a criminal and watch the smoke rise from his head and his leg. And when the rot shows through again, we add another layer of paint.”

As evident from the choice of topic for his first book, Von Drehle, 34, has a seriousness beyond his years.

“I think when he was 7, he talked like an adult,” said longtime friend Joel Achenbach, a reporter for the Washington Post, where Von Drehle is now arts editor. “At 8, he probably debated the pros and cons of the Nixon Administration.”

In an interview, Von Drehle ruefully agreed: “I was the sort of kid they called ‘8 going on 40.’ I was very old in high school.”

Von Drehle was born in Denver and raised in the small suburb of Aurora. His innate seriousness was intensified at 14 when an idyllic childhood abruptly came to an end. His parents, paragons of the community and members of “a big, sweet family” of six children that people compared to the Waltons, divorced.

“You learn from that how easy it is for the wheels to come off and how certain decisions and mistakes can be made that are impossible to unmake,” Von Drehle said.

This sympathy and understanding inform Von Drehle’s book, which focuses on Florida’s Death Row and manages to humanize even the most brutal--and brutalized--criminals without neglecting the feelings of their victims.

“It’s scary and deeply depressing how many ways there are for human lives to go wrong, how many faces evil wears, how many modes can be found to flout even the simplest of the Ten Commandments: ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill,’ ” he writes.

Von Drehle describes Death Row--a den of cubicles like concrete bathrooms with bunks where the bathtubs should be--as a dull hell where men crochet to pass the time (knitting needles are forbidden for obvious reasons) and where inmates’ skin, deprived of sunlight, turns the color of mozzarella.

“There are a lot of good books about the death penalty arguing pro and con, but there hasn’t been a book that tries to show the system in a narrative way,” Von Drehle said. “That’s what I set out to do.”

A modest man who speaks slowly and deliberately and does not yet parcel out his life in sound bites, Von Drehle described the events leading to his rapid journalistic rise as largely the product of good luck.

He wrote his first newspaper story when, as a member of his high school cross-country team, he complained about lack of coverage and the editor said, “Why don’t you write it yourself?”

He got a part-time job summarizing high school football and baseball games for the Denver Post when on a test he correctly identified Charles Russell as a painter of the American West. As Von Drehle recalled it, the sports editor, a Lou Grant sort of fellow, brayed: “The kid got it right! Be here at 4 o’clock Friday.”

But luck had nothing to do with his getting into Oxford, where Von Drehle won a two-year fellowship after college. For his master’s thesis he chose the topic “T.S. Eliot and the Idea of Christendom.” (Von Drehle took the title for his book from Eliot’s poem, “The Wasteland.”)

At Oxford, Von Drehle decided that he was not cut out for a career in academia--to the relief, he insisted self-deprecatingly, of his advisers. By then, he had applied to the Miami Herald. Because a staffer, also on an Oxford fellowship, was otherwise occupied, Von Drehle was asked to do a quick story on a soccer riot in Belgium in which 39 people died.

“I’m the luckiest guy I ever met. I always catch a break when I need one,” Von Drehle said of the assignment.

Herald Associate Editor Gene Miller remembered it differently: “When we got the copy, we said, ‘Jesus, hire this guy.’ ”

Jim McGee, a Washington Post reporter who also came from the Herald, said his colleague “became a presence on the front page about 10 minutes after he joined the staff.” McGee went on to compare Von Drehle to Carl Hiaasen and John Katzenbach, Herald writers who have become accomplished novelists.

Von Drehle credits Miller and Pope John Paul II for the assignment that inspired his book. After a year previewing and then covering the Pope’s first visit to America, he said, “Miller decided I needed something completely different to work on.”

Miller, who had won two Pulitzer prizes for stories proving the innocence of convicts, assigned Von Drehle to the tale of two hapless characters named Earnest Lee Miller (no relation) and William Riley Jent.

Convicted on flimsy evidence for the murder of a woman who had been burned to death at a picnic grounds in north-central Florida, Jent and Miller had been on Death Row for eight years before they had their first substantive hearing on the case, Von Drehle said.

The two, who were nearly executed, turned out to be innocent. Nevertheless, they wound up pleading guilty to second-degree murder and sentenced to time served: The state of Florida didn’t want to admit a travesty of justice had occurred and the two men didn’t want to risk another trial.

In Von Drehle’s book, Jent and Miller were exceptions to the rule: Most of their neighbors on Florida’s Death Row--among them Ted Bundy, who had raped and murdered as many as 50 women--appeared to be truly guilty. But their case was depressingly routine in terms of the years it took to resolve, the enormous financial costs involved and the incredible frustration inflicted on victims’ families, suspects, lawyers, judges and everyone else caught up in the process.

According to Von Drehle, while politicians, such as former Florida Gov. (now Sen.) Bob Graham, kept signing death warrants, courts kept changing the rules for carrying them out. The unfortunate few finally strapped into “Old Sparky,” the nickname for the electric chair at Florida State Prison, seemed chosen more by lottery, he writes, than by rational rules. Because of required appeals, the cost of their executions averaged more than $3 million each, far more than life in prison. It took 9 1/2 years and $15 million to pull the switch on Bundy.

Meanwhile, violent crime keeps rising even as the nation’s Death Rows have mushroomed into “death towns” with a population exceeding 3,000, including two men who have been under a sentence of death for 20 years.

Although more and more states are adopting it, Von Drehle said he would abandon “this broad, scattershot death penalty. Either we replace it with real life sentences or we need to apply it to a very narrow class of crimes--serial killings, presidential assassinations, Adolph Eichman sorts of crimes.

“What I know is that the death penalty is not solving the problem. While politicians wave this issue like a bloody shirt, it diverts resources and energy and focus away from coming to grips with the incredibly serious problem of violence in America.”