Almost Midnight (34 page)

Darrell had long since given up smoking, and he didn’t much care for some of the other goodies that were being chauffeured up and down the walk. But this didn’t stop him from making a Caddy of his own and becoming a pretty decent hand at the wheel. It was one of the very few diversions available to him. He had no radio or TV, and precious little in the way of reading material. He was limited to just one phone call per month, and to basics such as soap and paper and pens from the canteen. He was permitted out of his cell occasionally, cuffed and under escort—barely long enough to shake off some rust and then right back in again.

He was allowed visitors, but on a strictly no-contact basis—over the phone and behind glass in one of the little caged-in cubicles off the main visiting area. His most frequent visitors were his mom, and Larry and Sophia, who usually came up together from Stone County. His dad had enjoyed making the trek with them the first few years, before dying of a ruptured stomach in 1993. A few other people from back home dropped by from time to time: his sister Rita; his daughter, Melissa; an occasional buddy. But never the person Darrell would have been most thrilled to see.

With all the time in the world on his hands, those dead and empty hours begging to be filled, Darrell took to reading his Bible with greater purpose than ever before. And the more he read, the more astonished and outraged he became. How was it possible that so many Bible-believing Christians in the United States supported the death penalty? How could they fail to see that capital punishment was a scandal to the basic tenets of their faith? Were they reading the same Bible he was reading?

Check it out—it was plain to see. During his earthly ministry, Jesus preached a message of unconditional love and mercy. He rejected the old rule of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” and called on his followers instead to forgive and pray for anyone who may have caused them harm. Mere mortals, Jesus taught, had no business casting stones, tightening nooses, pulling the switch; final
condemnation was the prerogative of God alone. And it was never too late, this side of eternity, for the most hardened of sinners to repent and be born anew as sweet children of grace. God could work miracles in the hearts of monsters. No one was beyond hope of redemption and transformation. Even the Apostle Paul was converted on the road to Damascus, the very same guy, according to the Bible, who was “breathing threats and murder” against the earliest Christians. Would execution-happy churchgoers in contemporary America have denied Paul his encounter with the light? Given the chance, would they have preferred stringing him up on a tree?

And life without parole was hardly much better. If a monster was spiritually transformed, truly and fully so, and hence no longer a monster, what was the point of keeping him in chains until his dying breath? Pious churchgoers never tired of bragging about the new life of joy and hope that was available to anyone who turned their heart over to God. But what of life-without-parole prisoners who had turned over their hearts? Where was the joy in growing old and feeble behind bars? The hope in endless days of moldering confinement? Locking a guy up and telling him he didn’t stand a sliver of a chance of ever walking free: this was as contrary to the spirit of the Gospels as whatever crime the guy may have committed in the first place. And smug Christians who thought otherwise were in for a rude awakening. The God of the Bible was a God of redemption and liberation, a God of surprise. It was only a matter of time before God started busting born-again prisoners out of death row and out of life-without-parole sentences, busting them into freedom.

Darrell had no doubt about his own situation. He’d always known that he’d be delivered from death row, and eventually delivered from prison altogether. He’d always known that he’d be given a second chance. But now he also knew what he was meant to do with it. For the first time in his life he felt the conviction of a genuine calling. He’d been especially chosen by God to spread the word—on the fundamental evil of capital punishment, primarily, but also of life without parole. And why not? Who better to spread the word
than a hillbilly—a onetime death-sentenced hillbilly—from Stone County?

So there it was. All those long years since Vietnam, all those false turns and tough breaks and horrible decisions—all those woebegone years and Darrell seemed finally to have come full circle. When he was growing up, his brother and his mom and even some of his classmates had assumed he’d become a preacher. Now, an eternity and three gruesome murders later, a preacher was what he felt called to be. He had a message to spread, and as soon as he got off death row he’d be taking it to the streets. He’d be a crazy man for God, shouting out from the rooftops—shouting no more death penalty, no more mandatory life without parole, shouting forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

N
O MORE DEATH PENALTY
. Not exactly the sort of message the state of Missouri was hankering to hear. Not these days anyway—not since George “Tiny” Mercer. Ever since Tiny, Missouri had been on something of a death-penalty kick.

Tiny was put to death in early 1989. He’d been convicted of murdering a young woman some biker buddies had abducted and handed over to him as a birthday present. His execution was the first in Missouri in more than twenty years.

It wasn’t that Missouri had somehow gone soft on capital punishment in the two decades or so prior to Tiny Mercer. The biggest reason for the long stretch between executions was the U.S. Supreme Court. In its landmark
Furman v. Georgia
decision of 1972, the court put the kibosh on capital punishment nationwide,
ruling that it had hitherto been applied unfairly and arbitrarily, with poor and black defendants generally drawing the short end of the stick. For several years after
Furman
, execution chambers across the country were put in mothballs, as individual states scrambled to bring their death-penalty laws up to constitutional snuff. In 1976 the Supreme Court gave the go-ahead for executions to resume, ruling that the revised laws of several states, by stipulating the conditions under which a death sentence could be imposed, had succeeded in eliminating much of the older bias and inequity.

Missouri’s revised Capital Murder Law became effective in 1977, and then it was another dozen years before Tiny Mercer’s number came up. For Tiny it was a double whammy: not only was he the first person slated for execution under the new law, but he also had the dubious distinction of being first in line for the state’s brand-new, state-of-the-art lethal injection machine. Executions in Missouri had previously been carried out by lethal gas, and before that by public hanging. But now, in these gentler post
-Furman
days, lethal injection was suddenly the method of choice, not just in Missouri but nationwide. Coast to coast, individual states were boarding up their gas chambers and putting their electric chairs—their Old Sparkys and Yellow Mamas and Sizzling Jacks—into deep storage. The future of capital punishment had come calling and damned if it wasn’t wearing a white coat and toting a black medical bag. The future of capital punishment looked for all the world like a scrubbed-down lab technician.

But, of course, a lab technician. This was the great appeal of lethal injection. It took the death—the X-rated-ness—out of execution. No more bulging eyeballs or sizzling flesh, no more heads bursting into flames or bodies writhing in cyanide-induced agony. With lethal injection, the entire business was smooth as silk, medicalized, sanitized, over and done with in scarcely a whisper. Strap the victim onto a gurney and put him under with a nice solicitous shot of sodium pentathol, then some pancronium bromide to shut down his respiratory system, and, finally, a carefully measured dosage
of potassium chloride to stop his heart. Nothing cruel and unusual about this punishment. Not much different from having an old dog euthanized at the neighborhood veterinary clinic.

Missouri’s lethal injection machine was designed by a dweeby New Englander named Fred Leuchter. During the 1980s Leuchter had fashioned a nifty living for himself handcrafting customized execution devices out of his basement workshop in Boston. Any state after
Furman
looking to get back into the execution business and needing an upgrade in equipment could always count on Leuchter. A new electric chair, perhaps, a lethal injection machine, even a full-assembly gas chamber: he’d build it and he’d install it; he’d even conduct on-site training sessions to ensure that prison officials got the hang of operating it. Anyone doing business with Leuchter would almost certainly walk away a satisfied customer. Nobody in the United States was a greater expert on the hows and wherebys of killing a man. If old Fred hadn’t gotten sidetracked by anti-Semitism during the early 1990s and frittered away his credibility denying the Holocaust, there’s no telling how far he could have gone.

Leuchter would build almost anything you asked for, but his real pride and joy, the thing that brought him greatest professional satisfaction, was his lethal injection machine. It was something to behold, Leuchter’s machine. With the press of a button, it swung into action—its hi-tech delivery module dispensing the lethal drugs, its control panel with color-coded phase lights monitoring the procedure from start to finish. And best of all, the machine worked its magic with a minimum of fuss and bother. In keeping with Leuchter’s business motto—“capital punishment, not capital torture”—its efficiency gave execution all the drama of watching some guy nodding off after Sunday dinner.

Tiny Mercer was lethally injected on January 6, 1989, in a small rock-walled gas chamber on the grounds of Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City. Nicely warmed up now, Leuchter’s machine was all set to really prove its worth. A couple of months after Tiny’s execution, it was moved to the brand-new death chamber
at Potosi, an eighteen-by-twelve-foot, cinder-block room located in the prison’s hospital wing. Four guys were strapped down, hooked up, and carted out in 1990, and twelve more over the next five years. Doyle Williams headed up a class of six lethal injectees in 1996, and the following year there were six more, including a big good-looking guy named A.J. Bannister who’d become a minor celebrity during his final years on the row. Sentenced to death for a fatal trailer-park shooting that he insisted was accidental, Bannister had been featured in two documentary films and had received public support from Sean Penn, Gregory Peck, Ed Asner, and a number of other Hollywood personalities. “The state of Missouri is committing as premeditated a murder as possible,” Bannister said in his final statement, “far more heinous than my crime.”

The traffic was somewhat slower in 1998, with only three guys ticketed for the gurney. One of these was the convicted cop-killer from southwest Missouri, Glennon Paul Sweet. In a last-ditch gambit for survival, Sweet wrote the Vatican pleading for the pope’s intervention. The pope responded with a letter to Missouri governor Mel Carnahan requesting clemency. The letter apparently didn’t do the trick. Sweet was lethally injected on April 22.

D
ARRELL RECEIVED HIS
warrant of execution on November 12, 1998. The warrant was issued by the Missouri Supreme Court and hand delivered to his cell in administrative segregation. It stipulated that he was to remain incarcerated at Potosi until January 27, 1999, at which date he was to “suffer death.”

The warrant was hardly a bolt from the blue. Since failing in his direct appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court, Darrell had suffered one legal disappointment after another. First, in September 1996, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri had denied his petition of appeal. Then, several months later, the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court in St. Louis had done likewise. Finally, in October 1998, just one month prior to the issuance of the execution warrant, the U.S. Supreme Court had declined to hear his case.
Getting brushed off by the highest court in the land was pretty much the end of the line. It meant that Darrell had exhausted his avenues of relief and that the state of Missouri was now free to set a firm date for his lethal injection.

The string of defeats had actually been rougher on Darrell’s new attorney, Laura Higgins Tyler, than on Darrell himself. A strong, bright, attractive woman in her mid-forties, Laura had been appointed in 1995 by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri to represent Darrell in federal appeals. The appointment was not without a certain irony. Laura’s dad, Andrew Jackson Higgins, had just recently, in 1991, retired from the Missouri Supreme Court after a long career as one of the most formidable jurists in the state. He’d written the opinion in the Tiny Mercer death-penalty case, and were it not for his stepping down he might very well have been tapped to write the opinion for Darrell’s case, too.

Laura had jumped at the chance to represent Darrell. Working on behalf of the underdog—it’s what she knew best as a lawyer. She’d spent seven years as a public defender after graduating law school in 1981, and even in more recent years, since hooking up with a top-notch law firm in downtown Kansas City, she’d dedicated the bulk of her practice to standing up for poor lost souls in juvenile court.

It was a long way from the firm where Laura worked, with its plush lobby and smartly polished hardwood floors, its perfectly appointed offices and perfectly creased lawyers, all the trimmings of prosperity—it was a long way from downtown Kansas City to Potosi Correctional Center. Laura was nothing if not game, however, and she was determined to do this thing right. Whereas some other attorney might have preferred conducting business through the mail or over the phone, Laura always made a point of dropping by to see Darrell in person. Sometimes the purpose of the visits was to discuss legal strategy; too often, however, it had come down to delivering bad news.

The worst was when she learned that the Supreme Court had declined to hear Darrell’s appeal. She’d realized from the start
that it was a long shot. Of the thousands of cases that came knocking at its door every year, the Supreme Court would normally take on no more than a hundred. The trick in making it into this select group was to dress up one’s case as provocatively as possible, give it the appearance of having some broader constitutional significance. This is what Laura had tried doing with Darrell’s case, and as insurance against missing an angle, she’d enlisted the help of a brilliant death-row attorney out of Kansas City named Kent Gipson.