Dead Man Talking

Somebody help me. I’m trapped between reality and conviction, and I can’t get out.

What got me into this uncomfortable position was a faltering liberal friend, a movie and a Texas prison official who, quoted in a recent story, said dying by lethal injection was as easy as “bam, bam, bam.”

Also contributing is the climate of killing that seems to hang over us like a funeral shroud, culminating most recently in the murder of Dixie Lee Hollier, first shot in her Burbank home, then beaten and stabbed to death as she crawled down a hallway toward eternity.

I’ve come to realize we’re a culture awash in death on every level, intrigued by its adventure, fascinated by its finality, cheering its progress as though death were a downfield runner hurtling toward a winning goal in the last two seconds of a game.

And now we’re trying to make dying a little easier for those who cause death, translating an ominous mantra of revenge--an eye for an eye--into something more tolerable.

This all comes about because of William Kirkpatrick Jr. He was supposed to be California’s first execution by lethal injection Friday, kicking off a Super Bowl weekend of thrills and excitement.

Convicted of killing a man and a boy in Burbank 12 years ago, Kirkpatrick said he wanted to die, and we were all waiting to see just how swell the new form of execution would be. But then, wouldn’t you know it, he chickened out and filed an appeal.

Now the execution has been delayed and we’ll have to settle for the Super Bowl alone as weekend entertainment. That’s what comes of putting your faith in a guy on death row.

*

My liberal friend, whose name is Ernie, called late Saturday night. He had just seen the movie “Dead Man Walking” and had stopped for a few belts on the way home, shaken by the impact of Sean Penn’s bravura performance.

Ernie wanted to talk about things and wouldn’t let me go, even when I pointed out it was 1:30 in the morning and he was three sheets to the wind, as old sailors used to say.

“You’ve got to listen,” he said, his voice slightly slurred. “I’ve had an epiphany.”

Ernie had always been opposed to capital punishment, but now he wasn’t so sure. He’d been feeling more and more depressed by the kinds of killings going on, like the bombing in Oklahoma, the murders of Michael and Alex Smith by their mama, the travesty of the O.J. Simpson trial and now the murder of Dixie Lee Hollier, whose teenage daughter is accused of helping her boyfriend do the killing.

Even so, Ernie had clung to his belief that revenge was still morally wrong, whether it was undertaken on an individual basis or as institutional sport, but then he saw “Dead Man Walking.”

It was afterward, sitting alone in a Van Nuys bar called Pineapple Hill, thinking about the movie, that Ernie said he realized that executing someone by lethal injection was, as he phrased it, “the way to go.”

“They put you to sleep,” Ernie said, describing Penn’s portrayal of a doomed man, “and you just kind of drift off.”

That’s the way it was in the movie, all right. Penn mouths the words “I love you” to Susan Sarandon, who plays a nun, she mouths them back and the clean medical ritual of atonement puts him, bam-bam, into heaven.

*

Ernie’s call left me wide awake, so I went downstairs, poured some cognac and sat staring out the window, slipping into that desolate place between reality and conviction.

I’ve been against capital punishment most of my adult life after seeing three people die in the gas chamber at San Quentin. The horror will never stop haunting a corner of my memory.

I’ve also seen the pain and suffering of those who die at the hands of killers--more in the past 10 years than at any other time in my life--and that haunts me too.

Those who are supposed to know say that dying by lethal injection isn’t nearly as bad as being gassed, shot or hanged, and if we wanna be humane, that’s the way to go.

In contrast, murder victims hardly ever die as peacefully as those who sail off on a sea of potassium chloride. They struggle and scream and beg for a mercy rarely granted, a killer’s face their last terrified view of life.

They’re human beings just like us, some younger, some older, who stumble in fate’s way and end up crawling and dying, the way Dixie Lee did, or being torn apart, like the people in the Oklahoma City bombing.

I sat in the darkness for a long time, thinking about how vicious killing is becoming and how tolerable we’re making death for the killers, and now I’m not sure what I believe.

There’s a kind of deadness growing inside of us toward the violence shaping our world. We’re becoming desensitized to pain and immune to killing. It’s a hard, hard time to hold a conviction.