The Eyes of Christmas

In a corner of my mind where dark things dwell, there is the memory-implanted image of a pair of eyes staring at me moments before they are closed forever.

I can see them clearly, even though in reality we made contact for only a fraction of a second, before a quick clanking sound diverted our attention and a puff of poisoned vapor ended our connection.

The place was the gas chamber at San Quentin Prison. As a young reporter, I was a witness to the same-day executions of Jack Santo, Emmett Perkins and Barbara Graham.

I don’t know whether my eye contact was made with Santo or Perkins. They died together in a mist of hydrocyanic gas as I stood, separated by glass and steel, a few feet away. Graham had died earlier in the day, by her request blindfolded. “I don’t want to look at the people,” she said.

They had murdered an old lady for her money, and while I had no sympathy for what they had done, I was chilled by the clinical process of their dying. The dispassionate, ritualistic manner of their deaths has stayed with me all these years, locked in the eyes that stare from the dark side of memory.

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I mention this today as a kind of Christmas column to play against the bells that ring out compassion in this season of human warmth, however manufactured the warmth might be.

That moment at San Quentin changed me. Just back from a war and tired of cruelty, I began thinking that there had to be a better way of dealing with the murderous elements of our society. We had to evolve beyond the moral equivalent of a shootout.

I kept seeing those eyes, the last seconds of life in them, staring across eternity.

Over the years since the Santo-Perkins-Graham executions, I have covered crimes so vile and violent that they cried out for atonement of a drastic sort. And I have been asked time and again, “Suppose the victim were your wife? Your daughter? Your son?”

Would I stand among the crowds and demand the head of the killer? Would I find a way to destroy him with my own hands? I don’t know what I’d do. We are the victims of our genes, the children of our experiences. Grief and horror create strange chemistry.

But if violence were my choice, it would be a wildly emotional one, not a cold, clinical mandate for vengeance; not a calculated cultural decision to kill.

We vacillate in our attitudes toward legal murder. Last March, California voted overwhelmingly in support of expanding the death penalty. But more recently, an L.A. Times poll indicated that support for it in the state has declined overall by 20% in the last decade. A Gallup poll reveals that only 66% of Americans now favor capital punishment, a 19-year low.

But by executing almost 100 human beings in 1999, the U.S. is still up there with China, Iran and Saudi Arabia as leaders in legal executions in the world. We are the only democracy in league with totalitarian states that still kill their citizens in deadly retaliation for their crimes.

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The current penalty phase trial of Robert Bloom in Van Nuys Superior Court epitomizes the surreal nature of capital punishment. In 1982, Bloom killed his father, stepmother and 8-year-old stepsister in their Sun Valley home. He has been convicted of murder and faces a possible death sentence.

Giggling and joking, describing himself as “the nicest killer you’ll ever meet,” he has testified in detail how, at age 18, he killed the father he hated and the women who were in the way. Asked if his little sister was in pain when he stabbed her with a pair of scissors, he laughed and said simply, “I don’t remember.”

Two court-appointed attorneys had been pursuing an insanity plea. Bloom fired them and is representing himself. The hideous nature of his crime and his “performance” in court would indicate that he is anything but normal. His posturing and his disruptions are a study in megalomania.

The case poses the kind of dilemma that haunts us. What do we do with borderline maniacs? With those too retarded to even begin to understand the nature of their crimes? With lawyers who fall asleep during a trial or are inadequate to the point of uselessness?

Those wealthy enough to hire a Johnnie Cochran don’t die in America’s death chambers. Money mocks the mantra of equal justice. And now the existence of DNA testing strongly indicates how many innocent people have gone to their deaths.

The eyes that stare at me from the dark side of memory are not the eyes of an innocent man or even a compassionate one. But they are the eyes of human conscience that remind us with unblinking persistence how close we are to the jungle.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latiimes.com.