A New Day: Death Goes On in Texas

There were no television trucks, no final-hour appeals, no news conferences. Wooden platforms erected for camera crews one day earlier stood deserted; the witness rooms were half full.

A 39-year-old carpenter named Jeffrey Carlton Doughtie was killed by the state of Texas on Thursday afternoon. And Texas barely blinked.

Doughtie’s final hours stood in sharp contrast to the crowds and clamor outside the Texas death house the day before. The scheduled execution of Napoleon Beazley drew the world’s attention. The 25-year-old Beazley became famous because he was 17 when he murdered the father of a federal judge. And in the end, he didn’t die: With just hours to spare, the state appeals court granted a stay of execution.

Beazley’s non-death got more press than Doughtie’s death.

Thursday afternoon, only the whir of the air conditioner broke the silence on the sun-dappled lawn outside the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in Huntsville. A little boy pedaled his bicycle past the death house without so much as turning his head. Even the five protesters shifting their weight on a nearby street corner were taciturn.

“Tell the media,” Doughtie urged prison officials in the holding cell beside the death chamber, “I’m being held against my will.”

There wasn’t much media to tell. As it has for more than 250 Texas executions since 1982, Associated Press sent a reporter. So did the local daily newspaper, the Huntsville Item. Police reporter Mary Moreno drove up from Corpus Christi, where Doughtie killed an elderly couple eight years ago.

“I can’t believe there aren’t any Corpus stations here,” Moreno mused, glancing into the deserted parking lot.

It was Moreno’s first execution. She was the only one who registered any surprise.

“There is a definite pattern here of one day we’ve got crowds out there, and they’re proclaiming that, by God, it’s such a horrible thing,” prison spokesman Larry Fitzgerald said. “And the next time, I could shoot a cannon down the street and not hit anybody.

“Sometimes,” Fitzgerald said, “I have to call around the TV stations to try to drum up some interest.”

Around here, folks are used to executions--there have been 12 already this year. Every once in a while, as in Beazley’s case, a condemned killer becomes interesting, lures protesters and hecklers and reporters to bemoan, celebrate and record his or her death.

But far more often, Texas kills its killers with just a whisper of publicity.

“This is more routine now,” said AP correspondent Michael Graczyk, sweeping an arm at the sleepy, silent afternoon. “It’s not the exception. It’s been a gradual change.”

Graczyk has been covering Huntsville since 1983. He’s witnessed more executions than any other reporter in America. When he approached the glass wall of the death chamber, Doughtie caught his eye and said, “Hi, Mike.”

“It’s--I hesitate to say routine,” Graczyk said. “It should never be routine when a state takes somebody’s life.”

But routine it was: With the exception of a brief delay caused by the difficulty of finding a good vein in the former junkie’s arm, Doughtie’s death went off without a hitch. At 6:22 p.m., as 14 state officials, three reporters, a chaplain and five Doughtie acquaintances watched, lethal drugs began to coarse in his veins. He cringed.

“It’s burning,” he said.

Ten minutes later, a doctor entered the chamber, listened for a heartbeat and pronounced him dead.

Doughtie was a carpenter and a trucker, a drifter and drug addict who grew up in Tarboro, N.C. He beat an elderly couple to death with a metal pipe, stole their wedding rings and traded them for heroin.

“It started with a needle,” Doughtie told witnesses in his final statement Thursday, his torso, arms and legs strapped flat on the gurney, “and it is ending with a needle.”

Antiques store owner Jerry Lee Dean, 80, and his wife Sylvia, 76, were found moaning in their rocking chairs. It took Sylvia Dean a month to die. Doughtie confessed to the crime when the police picked him up for robbery.

The execution didn’t go totally undisputed: Speaking into a microphone suspended from the ceiling, the redheaded inmate pontificated on of capital punishment.

“I’ve thought about the death penalty, if it’s right or wrong,” Doughtie said. “I don’t have an answer. But I don’t think the world is a safer place without me in it.”

Outside, a few uniformed guards paced around, gazing into the treetops, whistling a little. The five protesters clustered quietly: two women from Belgium, clad in white from head to toe; a criminal justice professor from nearby Sam Houston State University; one of his students; a woman from Houston.

These quiet streets have seen their share of macabre, impassioned protests and rallies. European tourists and Klansmen; Black Panthers and movie stars have hovered outside police lines to holler about capital punishment. The Texas attorney general used to drive out from Austin. Famed killers like Carla Faye Tucker and Gary Graham have died here, inmates elevated to celebrity status.

But not Thursday. Doughtie went to death alone, watched by a few friends--and the people who have to watch because it’s their job.