Newjack (34 page)
Authors: Ted Conover
Davis’s eventual successor was his former assistant, an electrician
named John Hulbert. Though Hulbert was as close-mouthed as Davis and similarly averse to being photographed, more is known about him thanks to a memoir entitled
Sing Sing Doctor
, by Amos Squire, M.D., who presided over the executions of 138 men between 1914 and 1925, working closely with Hulbert, who actually pulled the switch.
Though Hulbert lived in Auburn and the two were not friends (Squire refers to him as Hilbert throughout), Squire observed him closely. He describes Hulbert as “short and stocky, apparently a man with perfect nerves and excellent constitution,” which would seem to be another way of saying that he could perform his job without letting his feelings get in the way. When he read newspapers, Squire noted, Hulbert “studiously avoided all crime news, lest he stumble upon something relating to a person he might afterwards have to execute.”
Over time, though, Squire saw Hulbert grow depressed, and says he urged him to stop doing executions. Hulbert replied that he needed the money, the $150 he got for each electrocution. “I never questioned that,” wrote Squire, “but I felt that perhaps the very horror of the occupation of executioner had a dreadful fascination from which he could not escape. Otherwise he would have found a way to readjust his life—before it was too late.”
The beginning of the end for Hulbert came on a night when, three hours before a scheduled 5
A.M.
execution, two inmates escaped from another part of the prison. The escape “upset the entire staff and disrupted routine,” a routine upon which Hulbert evidently depended, because, Squire wrote,
Shortly before the time for the execution I received a call to rush to the death chamber. Hilbert was critically ill. I found him stretched out on one of the spectators’ benches, colorless, and his pulse scarcely perceptible. For a while I thought I would have to throw the switch myself. But after working over him and giving him stimulants, I brought him around, so he could go on with the executions—which were delayed half an hour by his sinking spell. He said he was suffering from ptomaine poisoning—but his symptoms indicated a nervous collapse. His condition was so serious I took him into the hospital after he had completed his work that morning and kept him there for a week.
Hilbert eventually resigned his post as executioner—but he had waited too long. Not so long after his resignation, he committed suicide in the cellar of his home.
According to the 1929 obituary in the
Ossining Citizen Sentinel
, John Hulbert used his prison revolver to shoot himself in the chest and temple. His family said he had been despondent over the heart attacks he had suffered recently and the death of his wife the year before. The obituary writer commented, “Mr. Hulbert never could be induced to relate incidents pertaining to the electrocution of criminals. He was averse to notoriety and his comings and goings from the Sing Sing death house were always cloaked in secrecy.
“Whether his work preyed upon his mind no person ever was able to observe from his actions.”
Except, perhaps, Squire and others inside the close-lipped world of the Death House. Squire’s
Sing Sing Doctor
concerns one of the more interesting periods in the prison’s history, the years between 1910 and 1930, which saw the abolition of the lockstep, striped clothing, and the rule against talking at work, as well as the practice of keeping inmates locked in their cells from noon Saturday until Monday morning. This era saw baseball teams organized among inmates, as well as the groundbreaking establishment of an organization of inmate self-government, the Mutual Welfare League.
Squire recognized that readers would want to know about the thing that made Sing Sing increasingly famous as an object of fascination and horror: the Death House. His impossibly conflicted role as prison doctor and co-executioner is an extreme example of the ambiguity inherent in many prison jobs, including guard, but it put Squire in a perfect position to tell the Death House story. His work began with making sure that Death Row inmates stayed healthy—not just for their own good but, perversely, so they couldn’t succeed in suicide and thereby “cheat the chair.” It continued, on execution day, with his certifying that the inmate scheduled to die was sane. (He excepted only one.) Next, he sat with the condemned man as he was strapped into the chair and gave a hand signal to the executioner, hidden from observers behind a partition, to throw the switch. After a period of time, usually less than thirty seconds, Squire would order the power turned off while he
checked for a pulse. As most men still had one, he would then signal for power to be turned back on one or more times, until he judged the man to be dead.
Finally came the autopsy. At the time the electric-execution law was passed, questions persisted about whether electric shock would always prove fatal. Two cases were on record of men having been accidentally electrocuted and then revived by physicians, after several hours’ work. To make sure the chair had done its job, legislators required that the brain of execution victims be autopsied.
Grotesquely, the autopsy room was situated in the Death House, next to the cells of Death Row. Inmates there, having seen their acquaintance marched to his execution through an infamous little green door at the end of the hall and then hearing the sounds of the generator, next had to hear the sound of his skull being sawed open. Squire portrays himself as aghast—though he can hardly have been surprised—when one famous condemned murderer, Shillitoni, interrupted an autopsy by going mad in his cell, breaking his furniture, and tearing his bedding to shreds.
Though Squire didn’t touch on the larger principle of the Hippocratic Oath (First, do no harm …) and the matter of whether doctors should have anything to do with executions, he expressed discomfort about almost every aspect of his work. He regretted that he was “the only member of the prison staff who was compelled to watch the man in the chair every second,” and revealed that many times while listening for a heartbeat in the body strapped into the chair, “I have been so overwrought I was alarmed by the thought that what I heard was my own pulse rather than that of the dying man.” He conceded that
Even though I had the respect and cooperation of the prison population in general, there were times when I knew the inmates had a deep, inexpressible feeling of revulsion toward me—owing to the fact that I was about to take part, or had just taken part, in an electrocution. Never with words or overt act would they reproach me, but they did with their eyes—which was worse—and by an unaccustomed silence. … It was as if they were accusing me of having betrayed them, after leading them on to believe that I was their friend.
Squire devoted two chapters to arguing against capital punishment (“Each time a person is executed, the effect upon the public is infinitely more degrading than deterrent”), and he told of one sardonic man who on the eve of his execution said, “‘Boys, this is going to be a powerful lesson to me.’” So the reader gets a sense of a man who spent his professional life participating in something that he loathed and that—at least at the end—he did not believe in.
Squire’s Hulbertian decline began in a similar way—with disruption of the routine. One of the murderers scheduled for execution had had to be kept constantly in a straitjacket, and Squire, for apparently the first time ever, had sent the governor a letter expressing his doubts that the man was sane. When the day of the execution arrived, the governor still had not responded.
Panicked, Squire boarded a train to Albany to try to speak to him personally, only to learn that the governor was out of town and for the time being unreachable. Two hours later, though, Squire finally got him on the phone, and the governor ordered a two-week reprieve, during which experts reexamined the man and sent him not to the chair but to an asylum.
When I got back home after that experience, I went to bed and stayed there for a month. During that month I lost thirty pounds. As soon as I was able to get out of bed, I went to the Adirondacks to recover my strength.
But a change had come over me. I was oppressed by a feeling of anxiety and menace. I did not realize the trend of my subconscious thoughts until duty took me to the death chamber again and I stood on the edge of the rubber mat, within reach of the chair. On that occasion, just after I had given the signal for the current to be turned on—while the man in the chair was straining against the straps as the load of 2,200 volts shot through his body—I felt for the first time a wild desire to extend my hand and touch him.
Afterwards I subjected myself to severe self-analysis. I decided that my wild and irrational desire was merely a vagrant impulse, and that it would not occur again. But I was wrong. At each subsequent execution the impulse became stronger. It finally got so compelling that I was forced to
grip my fingernails into my palms in order to control it. Each time I had to stand farther and farther from the chair. But even then I would feel a sudden, terrifying urge to rush forward and take hold of the man in the chair, while the current was on.
Did he want to touch the man to comfort him, I wonder, or to kill himself?
Having confided in a friend and then his daughter, Squire finally quit. “If I hadn’t,” he wrote, thinking of Hulbert, “I might not be alive today.”
The electric chair may or may not have been a more humane method of execution than hanging—Squire, who had seen two hangings in Canada, thought it was—but it seems it could not have been any better for the people who had to operate it. Then again, the well-being of those who would operate the electric chair probably never entered the minds of its promoters. I think this problem—not being taken into account—exists in some degree, however minimal, for nearly all people who work in prisons. Even a prison chaplain, one of the “good guys,” faces the underrecognized moral dilemma inherent in working in a jail.
Irving Koslowe, Sing Sing’s rabbi for forty-nine years (until 1999), attended seventeen executions, including those of the Rosenbergs, in 1953. The day before an execution, he told the makers of a historical documentary that aired while I was a guard, the condemned man was moved from the regular Death Row cells to a cell near the Dance Hall, through which he would walk on his way to the chair. His head was shaved. He ordered his last meal. By the time the guards came for him, Koslowe said, “that man was half dead.” One night after work, I watched Koslowe describe, on television, the minute-by-minute procedure preceding execution, heard how he told inmates he’d “be there” for them—“on a rubber mat, but I’ll be there.”
Could one really “be there” and stand on the rubber mat? I admired Sister Helen Prejean
(Dead Man Walking)
for her pastoral work among Death Row inmates. But the problem with being an
official
prison chaplain, it seemed to me, was that one had to accept the values of the system and could not, as a matter of practicality, question anything. Anyone holding the job was hopelessly compromised as any sort of moral example. Like Rabbi Koslowe,
you had to agree to stand on the rubber mat. The documentary showed a sign over the door in the death chamber, which the rabbi had passed under many times. It said SILENCE.
The same dynamic, I realized, was at work for correction officers. You didn’t have to be flaying an inmate’s back with a cat-o’-nine-tails to be wounded by the job. That was simply its nature, a feature of prison work as enduring as Sing Sing’s cellblock design. “In its application the familiarity it causes with suffering destroys in the breast of the officer all sympathetic feeling”: The words of the Auburn physician seem to me to express a timeless principle.
When I was first looking into the lives of guards, somebody at Council 82 suggested I speak with the union’s chaplain. I was surprised to learn about Father James Hayes, and I liked him immediately. He said that he counseled members over the problems the job seemed to cause—alcoholism, divorce, wife and child abuse, ill health. He also mentioned counseling a guard who had put his finger on a sad truth that priests seem to understand better than doctors or social workers.
The CO was retired, said Father Hayes, but his retirement was troubled by the thought of what his life’s work had amounted to. “Father,” he said. “I spent thirty-three years of my life depriving men of their freedom.”
The priest told me he had nodded, listened, and prayed. There was nothing more to do.
Amos Squire’s tenure at Sing Sing coincided with that of two of its most famous wardens, Thomas Mott Osborne and Lewis Lawes. Osborne stayed only a few months; Lawes, more than twenty years. Osborne was at heart a politician and reformer; Lawes was a firm but sympathetic warden several cuts above the rest, a passionate believer in doing the job right. Both were from upstate prison towns. Both—though they oversaw Sing Sing’s executions—were against the death penalty.
A life-size bronze statue of Osborne stands, anomalously, in the foyer of the Albany Training Academy. Draped over one outstretched hand is a set of cuffs and chains; in the other is an open book. I say anomalously because to Osborne, guards were not people to be admired. In fact, he envisioned a prison system that
would dispense with them altogether. New York’s prison system in the early twentieth century, to his concerned eyes, was in need of complete overhaul. “Prisoners are treated now like wild animals and are kept in cages,” he said in a lecture in 1905. “The system brutalizes the men and the keepers. [The inmates] are forced to work, and this is not reformatory. It does not create in the criminal a desire to work and respect the law. … I would propose a system [wherein] the prisoner’s sentence would be indeterminate. He would work for a living or starve, and if diligent would be allowed to save up and purchase luxuries and possibly freedom. He would be self-governing and learn to respect law.”
