On Killing and Justice

The plastic chairs, the signs in equal measure harsh and silly, meal trays dolloped with bleak-looking lumps--all faithfully depicted maximum-security decor. But Saturday at artist Richard Kamler’s installation titled “The Waiting Room,” in Sam Houston Memorial Museum, it was the meeting in the room next-door that best evoked the desperation surrounding America’s death rows.

Kamler watched tensely from the margins, as members of law enforcement, academia, victims’ families and death penalty opponents debated for three hours about what the death penalty really achieves.

Though it resembled a town meeting, the “community conversation” had the impact of theater--focused, eloquent, emotional.

It also was almost as predetermined as the installation. No one, several participants said, likely changed the point of view he or she came with.

At the same time, Huntsville resident George Green said, you couldn’t help but ponder the images and stories unveiled here, in a tiny museum in the town where more death sentences are carried out than perhaps anywhere else on Earth.

Population 30,000, Huntsville houses eight prisons, including the one that carries out Texas death sentences. That distinction, Kamler said, is why he chose it for the debut of the “The Waiting Room” last month. The artwork, including the discussions that accompany it, aims to help citizens “learn how to live with ourselves and our neighbors in peaceful, forgiving ways,” as Kamler puts it. Installed since Jan. 5, “The Waiting Room” moves to two other Texas sites and to Boston, Rhode Island and Tennessee in coming months.

Modeled on the death row visiting room at San Quentin Prison, the installation is a spare, hushed chamber bisected by four rows of inhospitable beige plastic chairs. On entering, the visitor first sees a bank of prison bars, swept by a pendulum of blue light and accompanied by loud ticktocking. On the other side of the bars hang two massive cast-lead sheets. Suggestive of the Ten Commandments tablets, they detail the bleak agenda of authentic death row inmate Clydell Coleman, executed May 5, 1995.

“5:30 AM / Asleep on bunk,” it reads. “6:45 PM/watching TV . . . 7:00 PM escorted to seg office to make a phone call to his mother.”

Across the room, a horizontal sheet of the same material is stamped three times: “Dead Women Waiting.” Covering the sheets are tiny mug shots of female inmates, descriptions of their crimes, and scheduled dates of executions. Executing women, Kamler seems to be suggesting, somehow merits more attention, perhaps horror, than executing men.

Still other lead sheets line the room from end to end, braying out the rules for families visiting condemned relatives.

“Sit up straight do not put your head or hands on another person’s lap,” one barks. “No inappropriate touching,” says another. Behind them, while a randomly occurring heartbeat thumps over a loudspeaker before abruptly stopping, four TV monitors show videos of death row inmates, their victims and their families.

The opposite wall contains a shelf of cast-lead food trays that represent the last meals of several actual death row inmates. Some are empty, indicating inmates who abstained from eating; other trays bear dreary helpings of apples, eggs, hamburgers or bread.

The death row waiting room, Kamler has said, “encapsulates many of the most pressing issues of our time: How do we punish wrongdoing? How do we handle the tragedy of losing a loved one? And how do we learn to acknowledge that our pain is not exclusive, that everyone suffers from the senseless infliction of death upon our culture?”

Perusing the exhibit quietly, Huntsville residents said it made them mull over their own feelings about the death penalty, but it didn’t noticeably change them.

“It seemed that anyone who would come out would have very mixed feelings about it,” said Huntsville Mayor Bill Green, who visited the exhibit before joining the panel next-door. Green, an economist who is ambivalent about the death penalty, said the experience reminded him of visiting the Holocaust Museum in Houston.

“It was very stark--terrible, from a variety of perspectives,” he said. Passing through the exhibit, Green said he thought not only of the pain of inmates’ families, but also the pain the inmates wrought on victims’ families.

George Green (no relation to the mayor) held a cowboy hat respectfully beside him as he examined the food trays.

“I think there are some crimes that we as a society need to make a statement about,” said Green, who supports the death penalty.

The exhibit, he added, mainly reinforced his belief in helping at-risk youths. “I think we’ve really forsaken our kids,” Green said.

University of Texas anthropologist Asale Ajani, a death penalty opponent, found the exhibit both moving and disconcerting. Struggling to sort out her reactions, Ajani explained that she had a special frame of reference.

Not only had five people close to her been murder victims, but both her parents had been incarcerated.

“I’m still processing--it’s hard for me,” Ajani said of Kamler’s project. Though she enjoyed the discussion, she said, she resented the TV and press photographers invited to document the project, who approached her in the installation.

“I felt that at that particular moment we were being asked to take sides” for crime victims or for death row inmates, Ajani said. “There are moments when I identify with each.”

Linda White, a murder victim’s mother and also against the death penalty, had an even stronger reaction to the media. Reporters’ questions about her reactions, White said, “reminded me of being a crime victim. ‘How do you feel? What do you think about this?’ ”

For better and sometimes worse, the same mix of personal experience and public discourse threaded the whole project. It created a certain tension between Kamler’s dual goals of protesting the death penalty and offering a fair, free forum in which to discuss it.

Moderator Stephen Hartnett, a professor at the University of Illinois, handed out his “Important Death Penalty Information Sheet,” for example, which purported to answer “often-asked questions” but in fact simply argued against capital punishment.

But the public policy conversation also had special vitality, debated by citizens intimately acquainted with the issues.

Brisk, confident-sounding David Weeks, district attorney for Huntsville and one of the panelists, talked about his religious upbringing. “I spent most of my early formative years as a pacifist,” he said evenly. “And I am not a pacifist now.” Working as a prosecutor transformed his views, Weeks said.

Then came a statement by panelist Ronald Carlson, whose sister was murdered by Karla Faye Tucker, executed in 1998. Carlson, who is among those videotaped for the installation, now opposes capital punishment. “Just a couple of years ago I witnessed an execution,” the gentle-voiced man explained. “I hoped and I prayed that I would receive the term that they call ‘closure.’ But I didn’t. That’s the God’s honest truth.”

By late afternoon, when the forum ended, Kamler was ecstatic, he said. True, few people had returned for a second viewing of “The Waiting Room.” Fewer still probably had changed their minds.

But the “social sculpture” Kamler created had come to life. In folding chairs, in doorways, under the rustic quilts in the Sam Houston Museum halls, victims’ mothers, killers’ lawyers, street corner activists and marchers lingered on. Some were arguing. But as Kamler planned, they were continuing the conversation.