E-Mail This Article to a Friend Still walking (continued)

Q: How do you get politics out of the death penalty?

A: Well, the people. The only way to change things is if enough people begin to write to politicians. And politicians will see that this is not a politically advantageous issue anymore. Actually, of great interest was the last presidential election. Here we had a major candidate, John Kerry, not for the death penalty for all domestic crimes, and Bush never pushed him on it. He never raised it. Now maybe he didn’t push it because then it holds up [the Texas] record of 162 slam-dunk executions, and the process that couldn’t be more surface, of meeting on the morning of an execution with a checklist and spending something like 15 minutes and claiming he’s looking deeply into each of the cases. But what that says is, it’s not politically advantageous; it’s just not one of the movable issues politically. So [the death penalty is] beginning, already, to make its way out of politics, but we have to help it.

Also what I hope to show in this book is, no matter what guidelines the Supreme Court gives, no matter what the Constitution says, it’s all about climate. It’s like the rudder of a ship is not what’s really directing the ship; it’s all these winds and waves and currents, the way the keel is shaped. We see that in actual practice, most of the country is, in fact, shutting the death penalty down. The regional disparity is so dramatic. This year, Texas will have done half of all executions. How can you have EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW emblazoned across the front of the Supreme Court, and see that half of all US executions happen in this Southern state?

For a long time, the working title of my book was Impossible Burden. Nobody can handle it, nobody can figure it out, and we’re making mistakes all along the way. With 117 wrongful convictions on death row, [Illinois] Governor Ryan was the first to stand up in conscience and just say, "I cannot tolerate the idea that an innocent person will be executed along with the guilty." We know we have something wrong, and finally what I crunch it down to is, why can juries be giving out so many wrong death sentences where they don’t apply? And it’s because you don’t have good defense, and if you don’t have a balanced, adversarial way of coming to the truth at trial, it’s as Joseph O’Dell said: [it’s] the LA Rams — the prosecution — against the high-school varsity team.

Q: You mention juries handing out "wrongful death sentences," but really, you don’t believe that any death sentences are right.

A: That’s the other argument. That’s the argument of Dead Man Walking. We have a way to keep our citizens safe without killing people. So why kill? Whereas before, people who were against the death penalty had to give reasons for being against it, now I want to challenge the people who still want the death penalty — with all the mistakes, where we have the alternative of life in prison, well, tell me now why you still want to kill people? You’ve got a broken machinery, you have politics filtered through the whole thing, you have [pro-death-penalty] climates in some parts of the country, clearly it’s an uneven distribution of justice. Now tell me again why you still want to have death?

Q: Does it feel different accompanying someone you believe to be innocent to his execution?

A: You know what? When you get down to the essence of a human being who’s alive, and the dignity that that person has being killed ... there’s an extra, if you want to call it, opprobrium, that they are innocent. Of course there is that there. But in essence, the act of accompanying a human being, even when they’re guilty — somehow that just dissolves away because the essence of it is, here’s an alive human being, who has dignity, who has been tortured. The torture issue is a new issue of this book as well, because of Abu Ghraib and the definition and the United States signing on to the UN Convention Against Torture. See, it’s all about dignity. And there is no way that a person [about to be executed] has any dignity. It’s just the atrocious thing of watching your government use its energies to kill like this, as though that’s an answer to our social problems. I can’t tell you what it does to me.

Q: I can’t even imagine.

A: Well, and what do you do? What do you do with your grief and your anger? You become a witness, and you start talking about it in every way you can. I’m glad about the book, because I know it will make new waves, cause new waves of discourse. It’s all about discourse. It’s all about people reflecting and thinking. Tim Robbins has now written a play of Dead Man Walking, and I’ll be meeting with him to plan the national project, to colleges and universities and community colleges. It’s all about getting people information and getting them to reflect.

Q: Do you have more death-row inmates asking you to be their spiritual adviser now?

A: Yeah. I’m accompanying a man in Louisiana right now. His name is Manuel Ortiz. He just had a hearing last month. He’s been on death row for 11 years, during the prime years of his life. He’s from El Salvador. He was 35, and he’s accused of hiring someone to kill his ex-wife for insurance money. And he is totally and absolutely innocent, and I’ve been accompanying him the last five years, and just participated in this hearing for him, which will be continued in January, where for the first time, the evidence is coming out that he is in fact an innocent man. So that makes, like, three out of six people that I’ve [accompanied whom I believe have been innocent]. And this is very random, the way people come into my life.

Q: Do you learn something new from each person you meet on death row?

A: Absolutely. Well, I learn something from each person I meet, period. With James Allridge, it was just such an incredible dignity and grace in the way he died. The calmness in his being as he said goodbye. He’d pause, and then he’d think of the next thing he had to say. I don’t know what I would do. I don’t know what words I could get out, knowing these were the last words I’d ever utter alive. And seeing the dignity and grace, that he could end his last words on earth with, "I came into the world in love, and I’ll leave this world in love." Then turning his eyes up towards the executioner to begin the execution. That was so incredible to me. And Dobie overcoming his fear and walking bravely in, and Joseph O’Dell, so astounded and surprised that the courts, even as he’s about to die, that they didn’t do justice. That’s the tragedy. It’s the tragedy of murder, too. It’s the tragedy of all the violence, that unique human beings who can never be replaced are ripped out of life.