Executioner

For weeks during the early Alabama spring of 1983, Fred Smith regarded the growing stacks of messages with disbelief. The previous January, when he was appointed Alabama corrections commissioner by Governor George Wallace, Smith had known that as head of the state prison system, he would face the most vexing test required of any appointed or elected official--supervising the execution of another man. To handle the task, he had mentally steeled himself for months, memorizing and rehearsing the state's intricate procedures for capital punishment until he was satisfied that on the night of the execution of (continued on page 108)Executioner(continued from page 96) convicted murderer John Louis Evans III, as he carried out his duties by rote, he could respond to the revulsion of ending Evans' life as coldly and as indifferently as if he were only a piece of machinery in the electrocution chamber. But Smith had no warnings to prepare him for the stacks of messages he was receiving.

The Evans case was provocative, dramatically heightened by the 11th-hour stay that had saved him from the electric chair in 1979. For four years, Evans' name had resurfaced regularly in the media as his appeals process was gradually exhausted. At his trial on murder charges, he had demanded execution in the electric chair and had warned the jury that if he were not found guilty and sentenced to death, he would somehow escape and murder each juror. He was sentenced to death. But after his 1979 reprieve, Evans publicly professed a change of heart and said he no longer wanted to die, that he had undergone a religious conversion, had been "saved" and wanted to live.

People throughout Alabama remembered how Evans had taunted the jurors. They recalled the well-publicized moments in his case--the reprieve and Evans' conversion. And now, as Fred Smith sought to plan and coordinate an orderly execution, people from all over Alabama were calling his office and leaving messages demanding blood.

Spotting Smith in restaurants, customers shouted to him, "If y'all don't want to kill Evans, I'll do it!" Strangers often approached him and said, "When you gonna kill Evans?"

Others wanted to witness the execution. Smith could dismiss the majority of those requests as sick fantasies of the emotionally unstable. But the strident requests he received from seemingly responsible civic leaders and state troopers were disturbing. A dark wave of enthusiasm was building toward the Evans execution, and Fred Smith was caught on its crest.

•

No one had been executed in Alabama's wooden electric chair since William F. Bowen, Jr., a white male convicted of murder, was electrocuted 18 years earlier at Kilby Prison, near Montgomery. In 1967, executions were suspended nationwide by the United States Supreme Court. But before the Court halted the killings, 150 men and three women went to their deaths at Kilby, where on some nights as many as five were executed in rapid succession.

In the 18-year interval between the 1965 killing of Bowen and the scheduled execution of Evans in the spring of 1983, and in the long hiatus between executions in the nation's 37 other death-penalty jurisdictions, a new generation of law-enforcement and corrections-department professionals like Fred Smith had come of age.

These men had no experience in the elaborate, arcane procedures that had historically surrounded and shrouded the killing of condemned men and women. For guidance, they could seek out retired executioners, history books, newspaper and magazine articles or dusty technical manuals. Like any rising generation, however, they would deliberately approach and handle their tasks differently from their predecessors. But the emotions experienced by the new regime of state-sanctioned executioners would reflect what universally happens to otherwise ordinary men and women when they are called upon to end lives.

Alabama's corrections officials, like their contemporary and historical counterparts, tried to impose a safe distance between themselves and the political and emotional storms touched off by the issue of capital punishment. Their job was to kill, not to question. More importantly, they tried to maintain objectivity in dealing with often personable death-row inmates whom they would one day have to take to death chambers and execute. Alone they faced the dogging personal questions of how you end another person's life and how you live with yourself afterward. Fred Smith saw his duty from the outset as clearly and simply defined. "We had to get rid of the person," he says, "and that's all we did--get rid of the person."

To Smith, the position in which he found himself in the spring of 1983 must have seemed nothing less than extraordinary. He was a prominent member of a crop of young Southerners who represented the best instincts of the New South. He was born in 1947, received college and advanced degrees from Auburn University and had just turned 35 when he was appointed to his state cabinet-level post by Wallace. He and his contemporaries were educated, articulate and dedicated to reforming the corrupt and brutal prison systems they had inherited. Within Alabama, where for eight years he had held high-echelon administrative posts in the corrections department, Smith was known as a liberal who advocated reduced prison sentences and improved corrections facilities. Now, ironically, in his first months as commissioner, he was saddled with responsibility for conducting a killing.

Smith had, of course, studied the sordid history of Alabama's prison system, and especially of its electric chair during the years it was housed at Kilby Prison, between 1927 and 1970. Prisoners under death sentence used to be hanged in county jails, but a 1923 Alabama law designated Kilby as the sole place of execution within the state and conferred upon the Kilby warden--the state's official executioner--immunity from a charge of murder for carrying out his job. Multiple electrocutions at Kilby had nevertheless given rise to rumors of drunken death-squad members, of demonic prison officials who drugged the prisoners so the terrified men would not have to be dragged screaming to their deaths, and of the bludgeonings even of sedated prisoners before they were killed.

In 1970, while the Supreme Court's ban on capital punishment was still in effect, the state dismantled Kilby and the electric chair and re-established the death chamber in Holman Prison, a facility that had recently opened near Atmore. Death-penalty opponents and attorneys for death-row inmates argued that the move invalidated capital punishment in Alabama. But a state that had executed 150 men and three women in its electric chair between 1927 and 1965, and had rebuilt its death chamber in the face of the Supreme Court's ban on executions, was not going to roll over on a technicality.

In 1972, the state's supreme court ruled that the move of the chair had not, by some "magical power," repealed the state's death penalty. Alabama was prepared to resume business as usual in dispatching condemned men and women. The new death chamber was set up, its electrical generators ready to be turned on as soon as the Supreme Court backed away from its 1967 ruling. In 1976, the Supreme Court did just that.

Alabama wanted to be the first state in the nation to execute after the ban was lifted, and there had been a chance it might get its wish. Evans was scheduled to die on April 6, 1979. But on January 17, 1977, Utah became the first state to renew the killing when Gary Gilmore went to his death before a firing squad.

Denied the chance to be first nationally, Alabama was determined to be first in the South. But when Evans was granted an 11th-hour reprieve, the state again lost its first-strike opportunity--Florida electrocuted John Spenkelink on May 25, 1979. After Spenkelink's death, it was as if a race were on among the states of the old Confederacy to see which would kill next and kill most.

By the end of 1985, of the 50 men and women executed since 1976, 46 had been put to death in the South. Ironically, Alabama had killed only one man.

Alabama's momentum had been slowed because the killing of Evans initially looked like an example of the most feared excess of capital punishment conceivable in a civilized society--a botched electrocution. After Evans' execution, his killers were faced not only with the vivid memories of taking another person's life but with the distinct impressions that they had actually fried a human being to death.

•

The night of the scheduled execution, Fred Smith went to dinner at the restaurant of the Best Western Motel near Atmore. It was the night of the junior-senior prom, and he was surrounded by teenagers decked out in fancy clothes. He found it odd that reporters were curious about what he ordered for dinner that night. He could not explain to those around him, nor to reporters who wondered how he could eat and kill on the same night, that he was actually holding on by reciting to himself the steps and signals for electrocution he had memorized from the procedures manual. As he sat in silence, word came that Evans' final appeal had been turned down. The execution was to take place as soon as possible.

A heavy rain was falling when Smith abandoned his meal and rushed to the prison a few miles away. "It couldn't have been more classic," he says. "A lightning storm. We were afraid the juice would be knocked out of the chamber. People in the witness room were worried over their feet being wet. It was like something out of a horror movie."

In the car on the way to the prison, Smith ran through the electrocution procedures again. "How do you prepare for an execution?" he later asks, and chuckles. "It's like the old joke about how you get to Carnegie Hall--practice, practice, practice. You rehearse in your mind until you think you're a machine. The staff was anxious. No one had ever participated in an execution before. Security was a major concern, because people were here from all over the world. One man crawled through the woods to get to the institution just to look at it. The anxiety made us plan and rehearse. The execution team rehearsed. We had a man playing the inmate and had him mock-faint so we could rehearse that, too, and make sure it went off on time."

The procedures even involved the inmate. "You don't want to walk in on him and say, 'Come on, John, we're going to execute you now,' do you? No. You go in and you say, 'John, here's what we're gonna do.' And we rehearsed that, too."

Involving Evans in the planning for his own execution was important to Smith. Like all executioners, whether novices or veterans, he needed the assurance that all surprises had been prevented.

Now as he entered the witness room and took his position beside the doorway--with the opened telephone line to the governor's mansion--it would be up to his finely wrought procedures to get him through the ordeal unscathed.

•

The ground-level cell block at Holman Prison looks like any prison hallway, with gray-green walls and spotless floors. On one side is an ordinary prison cell. Just past that are three large doors. The hallway is strangely quiet for a penitentiary, the ordinary racket of the prison far removed from this particular cell block.

Carrying a set of heavy keys, a guard unlocks one of the three large doors. Inside, a stand of electrical equipment crowds a small, narrow room. Upside down, a long black-rubber glove rides the switch to the electric chair. The glove's heavy fingers are curled into a grip. Holding the keys, the guard stands in the doorway, partially blocking the light. In the dim, almost airless room, the silence seems oppressive and threatening, and it is hard to avoid brushing against the generator, the glove and the switch.

To the left of the electrical equipment is a small window through which the electric chair is visible. Built by prison labor in 1927 and painted yellow, the chair is known familiarly as Old Yellow. To the touch, one of its wide arms feels like just another piece of wood, not unlike the back of a church pew. On a lark, it would be easy to slip into the big yellow chair, clasp your hands behind your head and sink into its oversized proportions designed to accommodate men and women of any height, any weight. But in the stillness of a room sealed and unopened for days, weeks and maybe months during an unremitting Alabama summer, it is as if all of the heat and the stench of the season wraps around the throat like a vise, placing a palpable barrier around the chair.

On the night Evans was led down the hallway by the three members of the execution squad, the cramped witness room next to the death chamber was occupied by Smith and eight other men--a chaplain, three reporters, two doctors, Evans' lawyer and a friend of Evans'. If it hadn't been for the windowpane, the witnesses almost could have reached out and touched Old Yellow itself.

Electrocution procedures do not differ radically in the states that employ the electric chair. Some states hire anonymous individuals to serve as executioners; but in most, the warden of the prison housing the death chamber does so, and the death-squad members who perform almost all of the execution procedures other than the killing are prison guards hand-picked by the state's senior corrections officer or the prison warden.

"They were the most trusted men the warden had," Smith says of the death squad that killed Evans. "The execution team was made up of the deputy warden and seven correctional officers."

Like Smith, they were inexperienced in the business of executions. But if they were nervous or tense as they carried out the duties they had rehearsed, it did not show. They followed Smith's orders and procedures without flinching.

Three men escorted Evans to the death chamber, where the five others were waiting. Two of the men then left the death chamber and stood in the hallway outside. Each of the six men in the death chamber had been assigned tasks in strapping Evans into the chair. There were straps for each of his legs, each forearm and wrist, his waist, neck and head. The team member responsible for placing the strap around Evans' neck was also to put the skullcap containing the electrodes over his head and the mask across his face.

When the straps were secured, four of the men left the chamber and stood at assigned stations--two outside the witness room, the others outside the death chamber. The two men remaining checked the straps and the electrical connections. One of them then left and stood outside in the hallway. The other picked up a small paddle with the word Ready on it and waited beside the window between the death chamber and the electrical-equipment room. He stood on a wooden box in case the current jumped from Evans' leg.

Outside the prison, in the surrounding south Alabama piney hills, people were crawling through the woods, desperate to be nearby when the execution took place. Supporters and opponents of the death penalty clamored behind cordons of state troopers. Along an interstate highway, a woman claiming to be a reporter was found walking toward Montgomery--en route, she said, to get the permission of George Wallace to take Evans' place in the electric chair. Inside the prison's visiting area, members of the press corps and state troopers who were granted their wishes to see the execution jostled with one another to watch Evans killed on closed-circuit television. Standing in the witness room beside the doorway, near the telephone to the governor's mansion, Smith silently recited the procedures once more.

"Warden," he then said, "has there been word?"

Holman warden J. D. White told Smith there'd been no word from the governor.

"Go ahead with the procedures," Smith said.

Warden White stood in the death chamber and read Evans the warrant for his death, telling him he was going to be electrocuted. He asked Evans if he wanted to make a final statement. Evans had asked that his statement remain private.

Inside the witness room, Holman prison chaplain Martin Weber said, "He's saying, 'I have no malice for anyone, no hatred for anyone.'"

Smith turned, shook his finger at Weber and silenced the chaplain. He then (continued on page 154)Executioner(continued from page 110) watched as a death-squad member fixed the electrode skullcap onto Evans' head and covered his face with the black mask.

White left the death chamber and went to the electrical switch. At Smith's direction, the remaining man inside the room with Evans held the Ready sign up to the window and the warden threw the switch.

Smith watched Evans stiffen his wrists and arch his body into the restraining straps when he was hit with the charge of 1900 volts. When the current ended, Evans' body quivered and fell back into the chair. Sparks and flames crackled around his head and left leg, and white smoke curled from beneath the mask.

When the two doctors from the witness room went to examine Evans, they found a heartbeat. Smith directed the warden to throw the switch a second time. Again, sparks and flames shot out from Evans' head. The doctors examined him once more, and this time couldn't agree on whether or not there was a heartbeat.

Evans' attorney in the witness room shouted, "Commissioner, I ask for clemency. You'll be charged with cruel and unusual punishment!"

Smith relayed the clemency appeal to the governor's mansion. Then a third charge of 1900 volts was administered. After that, the doctors pronounced Evans dead. Smith stood in the witness room, facing the electric chair. He was only three feet from the dead man.

Suddenly, Smith's nostrils were filled with the stench of burned flesh. All his careful planning, his determined efforts not to repeat the ugly excesses of the past, had ended with the sparks and flames that shot from John Evans' head and leg.

"It's one thing to see a dead person," Smith says later, sitting in his Montgomery office, "to walk up on a car accident or something. But to see somebody go from life to death..." he says, and pauses and glances at the tabletop in front of him. "You could hear the transformer, the electrical current. You could smell the flesh burning. See the smoke from the head area. From one of the legs. There was stench. You're always gonna have that.

"But pain? Suffering?" he says, looking up again. "You're gone immediately. There's not even a split second of recognition of anything happening to you." He speaks firmly, as if required to convince yet another skeptic that John Louis Evans III died without suffering.

With the initial surge of 1900 volts, Smith had thought Evans was dead. "There was no life going on as I could see," he says. "The doctors heard a heartbeat. I related this to the governor. The same procedure was repeated. A former warden at Kilby remembered a case when they had had to do it ten times."

Smith leans back in his chair and stares straight ahead, as if remembering the execution, the aftermath and the grilling he took when the media accused him of having fried Evans to death. "The whole state is behind you," he says quietly. "The whole state was asking, 'When you gonna kill him?' You carried out the execution by the letter of the law. Then people start saying, 'Smith burned a man to death last night.' And, 'We didn't know y'all were gonna do it that way.' The press is all over you for days, and after the execution, you walk in and it's like, 'God, get back, he really did it.' Like I still reeked of flesh burning. Nobody ever said, 'Hey, you did the right thing.' But how do you thank somebody for doing that?"

•

On the front porch of his frame house near Holman Prison, Murray Daniels, 72, rocks back in a chair, props his feet on the porch railing and talks with disgust about the execution of John Evans.

Daniels retired from the Alabama prison system in 1977, after 33 years. He is a veteran of several executions at Kilby Prison, where he electrocuted, by his own count, five or six men. He lives practically within sight of Holman, and his son works in the prison as a chaplain.

"It ain't no joy to kill nobody," Daniels says. "We didn't want to do it. But it's our job. We signed up to do it. That was our living. Had to do what the bossman said. I'm not proud of it. It was bread to me. If I couldn'ta done what the bossman wanted, he'd get somebody else. It ain't no show to kill a man. You kill a man and make a big show out of it, all you done is kill a hog."

To Daniels, the large crowds that descended on Holman for Evans' execution were an unnecessary spectacle. The fact that as an experienced executioner he was never sought out and consulted continues to rankle.

Had he been asked, Daniels could have warned the death squad that in the old days at Kilby, his team often had only 30 minutes in which to shave a criminal's head, feed him and electrocute him. Once, he had to wake a prisoner for execution.

"There was this old nigger over here from Wilcox County," Daniels says. "He was the humblest nigger I ever saw. I had a feeling for the nigger. But there wasn't nothing I could do. Last electrocution I made there. He'd gone to sleep. Had to go down and wake him up. Shave his head and feed him. He didn't say much."

Daniels remembers that more than one surge of electricity was frequently required before a man's heart stopped beating.

Today, says Daniels, "You keep a man up there on death row and fatten him up for two years. He's not a puny little thing that would do it. They made a big to-do over two charges. Lots of times you had to give two charges. Second shots. I would have been glad to go down and help 'em. But they wanted to make a big show. It made me plumb sick. No time to have a show when you're killing a man."

Sitting on his porch, Daniels evokes a sort of halcyon, sordid golden era of executions before the Federal Courts got involved and suggested that even condemned men and women have basic constitutional guarantees. In the old days at Kilby; he and his cohorts worked almost as if in a vacuum. The media weren't around. The prisoners were there to be killed, not to wait out appeals.

"I picked out four or five good guards to strap him in the chair," Daniels remembers. "The chaplain stayed with him until we went to electrocute him. You pull the shoes off of' em. Don't electrocute with the shoes on. A black mask you pull over his face. Soaked that cap a couple of days in brine. Can't get a man in that seat and it ain't ready. There are general principles. The cap's gotta be damp. Sit it in brine. Put a band on the left leg. Cap's got the juice in it. Grounded out of his leg. The first shot. That addles him. He's just a vegetable then. We never had no trouble. The chaplain stayed with him. They was all 'saved.'"

Daniels' prison system and the society reflected by that system were entirely different from today's. Ironically, even though Daniels was never consulted in the Evans execution, most of the general principles he had casually carried out years before were formalized and updated in Smith's procedures manual.

But if he had been consulted, Daniels would have told Smith that "the longer it takes, the worser it is for you. Ten minutes is long enough to get shed of one. Two takes longer. Twenty minutes for two."

Daniels also would have warned Smith that there "ain't no kinda scent like human flesh."

When prisoners were killed at Kilby, fans were left on all night to draw out the scent. And most of the executions were scheduled for Fridays, to give the death squads the weekend to get over them.

•

For nights after Evans' execution, Fred Smith awoke in the middle of the night to pace the floors and recount each detail of the event and then the public aftermath, when he had been portrayed as someone who had intentionally burned Evans to death. Critics had argued hotly that Smith had been too young and inexperienced to supervise the execution.

"How do you get experience in that field, unless you're a traveling executioner?" he asks, and shakes his head as if bewildered, betrayed. "I became engrossed again in the procedures, the letter of the law," he says, explaining how he handled the sleepless nights following the execution. "That's where my strength came from when I'd get up and walk around at three o'clock in the morning. The procedures. I'd say to myself, 'Let's see now, the first step.'"

Since Evans died, 41 men and one woman have been put to death in the South's execution chambers. States across the region have executions scheduled almost monthly. No death warrants were issued in Alabama in the immediate aftermath of Evans' execution, but the state recently issued warrants for the deaths of Willie Clisby, a black male, Michael Lindsay, a white male, and Wallace Norrell Thomas, a black male.

The governor of Alabama and the state's attorney general sanctioned the Evans execution, as they do all state killings. But neither man is required to attend or witness the execution. And not long after Evans was put to death, Fred Smith got the chance to remind the attorney general of what it can mean to be involved in the actual execution process.

Smith returned home one day and found his young son sitting in a replica of Old Yellow. Someone at the state trade school near Holman had made the scale-model electric chair for the commissioner, for his children to play with. It had been dropped off while Smith was at work.

Smith crated the chair up that very afternoon and sent it to the attorney general. He does not know what happened to the chair after that.

and then capital punishment came back

"Alone they faced the dogging personal questions of how end another person's life."

"'You kill a man and make a big show out of it, all you done is kill a hog.'"