The Chamber (28 page)

Sam puffed on this for a minute and nodded slowly. “Keep going,” he said.

“We attack the gas chamber as a method of execution.”

“Do you limit it to Mississippi?”

“Probably. I know there were problems with Teddy Doyle Meeks and Maynard Tole.”

Sam snorted and blew smoke across the table. “Problems? You could say that.”

“How much do you know?”

“Come on. They died within fifty yards of me. We sit in our cells all day long and think about death. Everyone on the Row knows what happened to those boys.”

“Tell me about them.”

Sam leaned forward on his elbows and stared absently at the newspaper in front of him. “Meeks was the first execution in Mississippi in ten years, and they didn’t know what they were doing. It was 1982. I’d been here for almost two years, and until then we were living in a dream world. We never thought about the gas chamber and cyanide pellets and last meals. We were sentenced to die, but, hell, they weren’t killing anyone, so why worry? But Meeks woke us up. They killed him, so they could certainly kill the rest of us.”

“What happened to him?” Adam had read a dozen stories about the botched execution of Teddy Doyle Meeks, but he wanted to hear it from Sam.

“Everything went wrong. Have you seen the chamber?”

“Not yet.”

“There’s a little room off to the side where the executioner mixes his solution. The sulfuric acid is in a canister which he takes from his little laboratory to a tube running into the bottom of the chamber. With Meeks, the executioner was drunk.”

“Come on, Sam.”

“I didn’t see him, okay. But everyone knows he was drunk. State law designates an official state executioner, and the warden and his gang didn’t think about it until just a few hours before the execution. Keep in mind, no one thought Meeks would die. We were all waiting on a last minute stay, because he’d been through it twice already. But there was no stay, and they scrambled around at the last minute trying to locate the official state executioner. They found him, drunk. He was a plumber, I think. Anyway, his first batch of brew didn’t work. He placed the canister into the tube, pulled a lever, and everyone waited for Meeks to take a deep breath and die. Meeks held his breath as long as he could, then inhaled. Nothing happened. They waited. Meeks waited. The witnesses waited. Everybody slowly turned to the executioner, who was also waiting and cussing. He went back to his little room, and fixed up another mix of sulfuric acid. Then he had to retrieve the old canister from the chute, and that took ten minutes. The warden and Lucas Mann and the rest of the goons were standing around waiting and fidgeting and cussing this drunk plumber, who finally plugged in the new canister and pulled the lever. This time the sulfuric acid landed where it was supposed
to—in a bowl under the chair where Meeks was strapped. The executioner pulled the second lever dropping the cyanide pellets, which were also under the chair, hovering above the sulfuric acid. The pellets dropped, and sure enough, the gas drifted upward to where old Meeks was holding his breath again. You can see the vapors, you know. When he finally sucked in a nose full of it, he started shaking and jerking, and this went on quite a while. For some reason, there’s a metal pole that runs from the top of the chamber to the bottom, and it’s directly behind the chair. Just about the time Meeks got still and everybody thought he was dead, his head started banging back and forth, striking this pole, just beating it like hell. His eyes were rolled back, his lips were wide open, he was foaming at the mouth, and there he was beating the back of his head in on this pole. It was sick.”

“How long did it take to kill him?”

“Who knows. According to the prison doctor, death was instant and painless. According to some of the eyewitnesses, Meeks convulsed and heaved and pounded his head for five minutes.”

The Meeks execution had provided death penalty abolitionists with much ammunition. There was little doubt he had suffered greatly, and many accounts were written of his death. Sam’s version was remarkably consistent with those of the eyewitnesses.

“Who told you about it?” Adam asked.

“A couple of the guards talked about it. Not to me, of course, but word spread quickly. There was a public outcry, which would’ve been even worse if Meeks hadn’t been such a despicable person. Everyone hated him. And his little victim had suffered greatly, so it was hard to feel sympathetic.”

“Where were you when he was executed?”

“In my first cell, Tier D, on the far side away from
the chamber. They locked everybody down that night, every inmate at Parchman. It happened just after midnight, which is sort of amusing because the state has a full day to carry out the execution. The death warrant does not specify a certain time, just a certain day. So these gung-ho bastards are just itching to do it as soon as possible. They plan every execution for one minute after midnight. That way, if there’s a stay, then they have the entire day for their lawyers to get it lifted. Buster Moac went down that way. They strapped him in at midnight, then the phone rang and they took him back to the holding room where he waited and sweated for six hours while the lawyers ran from one court to the next. Finally, as the sun was rising, they strapped him in for the last time. I guess you know what his last words were.”

Adam shook his head. “I have no idea.”

“Buster was a friend of mine, a class guy. Naifeh asked him if he had any last words, and he said yes, as a matter of fact, he did have something to say. He said the steak they’d cooked for his last meal was a bit too rare. Naifeh mumbled something to the effect that he’d speak to the cook about it. Then Buster asked if the governor had granted a last minute pardon. Naifeh said no. Buster then said, ‘Well, tell that son of a bitch he’s lost my vote.’ They slammed the door and gassed him.”

Sam was obviously amused by this, and Adam was obliged to offer an awkward laugh. He looked at his legal pad while Sam lit another cigarette.

Four years after the execution of Teddy Doyle Meeks, the appeals of Maynard Tole reached a dead end and it was time for the chamber to be used again. Tole was a Kravitz & Bane pro bono project. A young lawyer named Peter Wiesenberg represented Tole, under the supervision of E. Garner Goodman. Both
Wiesenberg and Goodman witnessed the execution, which in many ways was dreadfully similar to Meeks’. Adam had not discussed the Tole execution with Goodman, but he’d studied the file and read the eyewitness accounts written by Wiesenberg and Goodman.

“What about Maynard Tole?” Adam asked.

“He was an African, a militant who killed a bunch of people in a robbery and, of course, blamed everything on the system. Always referred to himself as an African warrior. He threatened me several times, but for the most part he was just selling wolf.”

“Selling wolf?”

“Yeah, that means a guy is talking bad, talking trash. It’s common with the Africans. They’re all innocent, you know. Every damned one of them. They’re here because they’re black and the system is white, and even though they’ve raped and murdered it’s someone else’s fault. Always, always someone else’s fault.”

“So you were happy when he went?”

“I didn’t say that. Killing is wrong. It’s wrong for the Africans to kill. It’s wrong for the Anglos to kill. And it’s wrong for the people of the State of Mississippi to kill death row inmates. What I did was wrong, so how do you make it right by killing me?”

“Did Tole suffer?”

“Same as Meeks. They found them a new executioner and he got it right the first time. The gas hit Tole and he went into convulsions, started banging his head on the pole just like Meeks, except Tole evidently had a harder head because he kept beating the pole with it. It went on and on, and finally Naifeh and the goon squad got real anxious because the boy wouldn’t die and things were getting sloppy, so they actually made the witnesses leave the witness room. It was pretty nasty.”

“I read somewhere that it took ten minutes for him to die.”

“He fought it hard, that’s all I know. Of course, the warden and his doctor said death was instant and painless. Typical. They did, however, make one slight change in their procedure after Tole. By the time they got to my buddy Moac, they had designed this cute little head brace made of leather straps and buckles and attached to that damned pole. With Moac, and later with Jumbo Parris, they belted their heads down so tight there was no way they could flop around and whip the pole. A nice touch, don’t you think? That makes it easier on Naifeh and the witnesses because now they don’t have to watch as much suffering.”

“You see my point, Sam? It’s a horrible way to die. We attack the method. We find witnesses who’ll testify about these executions and we try to convince a judge to rule the gas chamber unconstitutional.”

“So what? Do we then ask for lethal injection? What’s the point? Seems kind of silly for me to say I prefer not to die in the chamber, but, what the hell, lethal injection will do just fine. Put me on the gurney and fill me up with drugs. I’ll be dead, right? I don’t get it.”

“True. But we buy ourselves some time. We’ll attack the gas chamber, get a temporary stay, then pursue it through the higher courts. We could jam this thing for years.”

“It’s already been done.”

“What do you mean it’s already been done?”

“Texas, 1983. Case called Larson. The same arguments were made with no result. The court said gas chambers have been around for fifty years, and they’ve proven themselves quite efficient at killing humanely.”

“Yeah, but there’s one big difference.”

“What?”

“This ain’t Texas. Meeks and Tole and Moac and Parris weren’t gassed in Texas. And, by the way, Texas
has already gone to lethal injection. They threw away their gas chamber because they found a better way to kill. Most gas chamber states have traded them in for better technology.”

Sam stood and walked to the other end of the table. “Well, when it’s my time, I damned sure want to go with the latest technology.” He paced along the table, back and forth three or four times, then stopped. “It’s eighteen feet from one end of this room to the other. I can walk eighteen feet without hitting bars. Do you realize what it’s like spending twenty-three hours a day in a cell that’s six feet by nine? This is freedom, man.” He paced some more, puffing as he came and went.

Adam watched the frail figure bounce along the edge of the table with a trail of smoke behind him. He had no socks and wore navy-colored rubber shower shoes that squeaked when he paced. He suddenly stopped, yanked a book from a shelf, threw it hard on the table, and began flipping pages with a flourish. After a few minutes of intense searching, he found exactly what he was looking for and spent five minutes reading it.

“Here it is,” he mumbled to himself. “I knew I’d read this before.”

“What is it?”

“A 1984 case from North Carolina. The man’s name was Jimmy Old, and evidently Jimmy did not want to die. They had to drag him into the chamber, kicking and crying and screaming, and it took a while to strap him in. They slammed the door and dropped the gas, and his chin crashed onto his chest. Then his head rolled back and began twitching. He turned to the witnesses who could see nothing but the whites of his eyeballs, and he began salivating. His head rocked and swung around forever while his body shook and his mouth foamed. It went on and on, and one of the witnesses, a journalist, vomited. The warden got fed up
with it and closed the black curtains so the witnesses couldn’t see anymore. They estimate it took fourteen minutes for Jimmy Old to die.”

“Sounds cruel to me.”

Sam closed the book and placed it carefully onto the shelf. He lit a cigarette and studied the ceiling. “Virtually every gas chamber was built long ago by Eaton Metal Products in Salt Lake City. I read somewhere that Missouri’s was built by inmates. But our little chamber was built by Eaton, and they’re all basically the same—made of steel, octagonal in shape with a series of windows placed here and there so folks can watch the death. There’s not much room inside the actual chamber, just a wooden seat with straps all over it. There’s a metal bowl directly under the chair, and just inches above the bowl is a little bag of cyanide tablets which the executioner controls with a lever. He also controls the sulfuric acid which is introduced into the affair by means of the canister. The canister makes its way through a tube to the bowl, and when the bowl fills with acid, he pulls the lever and drops the cyanide pellets. This causes the gas, which of course causes death, which of course is designed to be painless and quick.”

“Wasn’t it designed to replace the electric chair?”

“Yes. Back in the twenties and thirties, everyone had an electric chair, and it was just the most marvelous device ever invented. I remember as a boy they had a portable electric chair which they simply loaded into a trailer and took around to the various counties. They’d pull up at the local jail, bring ’em out in shackles, line ’em up outside the trailer, then run ’em through. It was an efficient way to alleviate overcrowded jails.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Anyway, they, of course, had no idea what they were doing, and there were some horrible stories of people suffering. This is capital
punishment, right? Not capital torture. And it wasn’t just Mississippi. Many states were using these old, half-ass rigged electric chairs with a bunch of jakelegs pulling the switches, and there were all sorts of problems. They’d strap in some poor guy, pull the switch, give him a good jolt but not good enough, guy was roasting on the inside but wouldn’t die, so they’d wait a few minutes, and hit him again. This might go on for fifteen minutes. They wouldn’t fasten the electrodes properly, and it was not uncommon for flames and sparks to shoot from the eyes and ears. I read an account of a guy who received an improper voltage. The steam built up in his head and his eyeballs popped out. Blood ran down his face. During an electrocution, the skin gets so hot that they can’t touch the guy for a while, so in the old days they had to let him cool off before they could tell if he was dead. There are lots of stories about men who would sit still after the initial jolt, then start breathing again. So they would of course hit ’em with another current. This might happen four or five times. It was awful, so this Army doctor invented the gas chamber as a more humane way to kill people. It is now, as you say, obsolete because of lethal injection.”