The Long, Cold Mile

In terms of its history, the last mile that condemned prisoners walk to the place of their execution has probably been a million miles long.

It has accumulated over the centuries as humanity has attempted to deal with people who kill other people or who otherwise offend the body politic.

At the end of the long mile, we have applied virtually every means of butchery to placate the public’s cry for vengeance and the law’s determination that the mob be appeased.

We have burned, beheaded, hanged, shot, strangled, boiled and otherwise satisfied the notion that the condemned person has suffered at least as much as his victim.

Today, most states apply what they consider to be a more humane method of executing evildoers, although no one knows for sure that lethal injection is more humane, since no one has returned from the dead to endorse the method. We’re waiting.

What troubles me is that through all of human history we haven’t come up with a better way of dealing with those who commit what English dramatist John Webster calls “the crime that shrieks.” We still kill murderers in one way or another. Dead is dead, we figure, so why bother with anything else?

The reason we haven’t bothered, I think, is because the people are satisfied that killing does the job. Whenever there’s a measure on the ballot to revive or expand the death penalty, it wins hands down. Our thinking hasn’t expanded much beyond the Dark Ages. Hooray for civilization.

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What brings this to mind is both last Tuesday’s vote, which overwhelmingly supported expansion of the death penalty, the Benetton advertising effort to put faces on condemned prisoners and the movie “The Green Mile.”

California’s Proposition 18, relating to special-circumstance murder, spoke the loudest. It won with about 70% of the vote, which is more of a margin than almost anything ever gets.

The fury raised over the Benetton ad campaign, which included the Sears withdrawal of all Benetton products, at least reminded us that those on death row were real people, albeit flawed ones.

Then there was that damned movie. I wasn’t going to see “The Green Mile” because I have witnessed real executions and I thought I didn’t need a movie to remind me of the horror that dwells in dark memories. Like scenes from a war, the clinical deaths of other humans imprint themselves indelibly on the mind.

But I finally did see the movie, because I felt I had to. It wasn’t the greatest film ever made, what with all of its glowing firefly miracles, but it did convey the shared anguish of state-mandated executions.

I came away shaken by the fact that we’re still doing in reality what they did to the character portrayed hauntingly by Michael Clarke Duncan on film, God help us all.

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The executions I witnessed were those of Barbara Graham and two male cohorts in the gas chamber at San Quentin. I stood just a few feet away outside the steel chamber and watched as they gasped and struggled, spraying the poisoned air with sweat and saliva, twitching in agony, and then dying.

Graham died alone and the two men, Jack Santo and Emmett Perkins, side by side. They had been sentenced for the murder of an elderly woman years before.

I remember standing outside the building between executions, waiting in the cold sunlight of Marin County for them to prepare the chamber again, and feeling that I was in some kind of dream.

It was all so surreal, the idea of walking healthy, living people into a cubicle and killing them. Make no mistake, I am not inclined to forgive those who murder. Under certain circumstances, I could call upon my own dark rage to go after them myself. But still, isn’t there a better way?

After witnessing the executions, I said to the detective who had arrested the three that it wouldn’t make any difference in the long run. “Others,” I said, “will go on killing.” He looked at me for a long time and replied, “But they won’t.”

That seems to be the prevailing attitude, that if we kill them one by one, eventually we will do in every murderer in the land and maybe one or two who didn’t kill but just got swept up in the enthusiasm of the crowd--too bad.

I have no answers to the whole business of capital punishment, only questions. I’ll try not to think about them on vacation for the next week or so, removing myself as much as possible from the realities that hover over us like dark clouds. But I know that I will still flash upon those executions a long time ago. And I will still think to myself that there’s got to be a better way.

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