My Generation (31 page)

“The little man, despite the pratings of Democracy,” Judge Curtis Bok has written of the death penalty, “is still the scapegoat.” And he added this observation: “Someday we will look back upon our criminal and penal processes with the same horrified wonder as we now look back upon the Spanish Inquisition.” Should the U.S. Supreme Court turn down his appeal, I am told that there is an outside chance at least that Ben Reid—due to those considerations of environment and mentality which his lawyer initially argued for in vain—may have his sentence commuted by the State Board of Pardons. This is highly unlikely: the Board of Pardons has never yet commuted a death sentence of a man convicted under the same Connecticut law. But there is a chance. If this comes to pass and Reid is allowed to live,
he will gain, aside from the fragments of his life, an ironic kind of victory: nothing could demonstrate more cruelly the travesty of justice which is capital punishment than this shabby and belated mercy, predicated upon the identical arguments which were advanced in his favor in a court of law nearly five years before. On the other hand, should the fact if not the spirit of justice be served, and Ben Reid goes to the electric chair one night this spring, it may be said that the soul which is taken will already have been so diminished by our own inhumanity that what shall be lost is hardly a soul at all, and that the death penalty—having divested a man not alone of his life but of that dignity with which even the humblest of men must be allowed to face death itself—has achieved its ultimate corruption.
Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee!
It is perhaps a late date in history to summon up the Gospel in behalf of a derelict Negro boy; having abandoned him, it does not become a Christian society to waste a shred of its jealously guarded piety upon him whom it has cast out into darkness. Only the condemned can truly know the heaviness of guilt, it settles upon their spirits like the weight of all the universe, and the quality of their bereavement is solitary and unique among humankind. To attempt to soothe this bereavement through Christian homilies would seem to be, like that final promenade with the chaplain whispering from Holy Writ, an act of outrageous hypocrisy. Yet somehow, try as we might to evade the verdict, we find ourselves being measured:
Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me
. Until, searching our hearts, we can reconcile these words with the murder we inflict, in the name of justice, upon Ben Reid, and his fellows likewise outcast and condemned, we stand ourselves utterly condemned.

[
Esquire
, February 1962.]

T
he administration of criminal justice in Connecticut is unique in really spectacular ways. Although in many practical respects, of course, the state is among the most advanced in the union, there are aspects of its criminal code which echo that of Sicily in the fifteenth century. Connecticut is one of the few states in the United States which vest pardoning power in a board. Its Board of Pardons, established in 1883, consists of five responsible citizens appointed by the governor with the advice and consent of the state Senate. Fundamentally, the concept of a separate board was well-intentioned, in that it removed the awful responsibility of the pardoning power from a single man (and also from the political arena), while at the same time it placed that power in the hands of a body of people better equipped in terms of both time and experience to judge each individual plea. Yet insofar as a condemned man is concerned, the existence of a board of pardons constitutes an unprecedented and, it might be said, almost intolerably cruel paradox. For where in other states the governor could be expected to exercise his power of commutation by granting clemency without ceremony on any day far in advance of the date of execution, the Connecticut Board of Pardons sits as a sort of second, final tribunal, and it convenes on the morning of the day that the condemned man is scheduled to die. Thus, as the minutes tick away toward the fatal evening the condemned man, who is likely to be present at the proceedings, is forced to endure what
amounts to the simulacrum of another trial, sweating out this ultimate, ghastly ritual whose climax is the proclamation, quite irreversible, either of mercy totally belated (else why not mercy in the beginning?) or of immediate death. Society has perhaps conceived of nothing quite so subtly undermining to the soul since the Inquisition.

But this is not all Ben Reid would have to endure at the hearing. He would have to endure the knowledge that in over ten years the Board of Pardons had not once commuted the sentence of a man convicted under the 1951 law. This was not due necessarily to a failure of mercy; it was due rather, once again, to failure of the Connecticut law, which in criminal matters is so freakish and capricious as to stun the reason, and at best is permeated by the kind of stubborn, ominous reverse logic that haunts
Alice in Wonderland
. It doubtless begins with the fact that Connecticut, unique in so many ways, is the only state in the United States (and indeed probably the only jurisdiction in the civilized world) that does not consider its first-degree life prisoners to be eligible for parole. This in turn results from a state of mind which assumes all murderers (who are in reality overwhelmingly better parole risks than forgers and thieves) to be a species of uncontrollable brute likely to run amok in the streets. (Even second-degree murderers get a tougher break in Connecticut than anywhere else in the United States. The average time served for second-degree murderers before parole in Connecticut over a recent eleven-year period was the highest in the nation: eighteen years, vs. ten years in California and eight years in New Jersey.) Further, in 1951, in a well-meaning effort to rid the state of an archaic law calling for mandatory execution in all convictions for first-degree murder, the legislature passed an act (mentioned above), now in effect, which states: “Any person who commits murder in the first degree…
shall
suffer death
unless the jury…
recommends imprisonment in the State Prison for life, in which case the sentence of the court
shall
be imprisonment for life without benefit of release….” (Italics mine.) In actuality, this statute was an enormous step backward, and its consequences need to be explained. One of the results of the act—without precedent in any state in the union—is loony and nightmarish in the extreme: what it means is that a first-degree murderer
must
be sentenced to a sort of living death without any possibility whatever of release, or that he
must
be sentenced to actual death, like Reid, whereby he stands at least a chance to live through intercession of the Board of Pardons, and in such a case is likely to be eventually paroled. Here the dilemma
and anguish of our contemporary attitudes toward punishment reach their mad climax. Under such circumstances, what convicted felon would not opt for the sentence of death? Even so, his chances to live are only theoretical, since the Board of Pardons—which under the mandatory-death-penalty statute felt free to commute death sentences to life imprisonment when they thought that the nature of the case demanded it—has been understandably reluctant to overrule a jury which, representing the will of the people, had had two sentences from which to choose. Therefore, no person condemned after the 1951 act in Connecticut has ever had his sentence commuted by the board. It was mainly because of this complex and wholly irrational situation that thoughtful observers were not giving Ben Reid much of a chance.

The hearing took place last June 25. It was public, and it began promptly at ten o'clock in an airy, spacious, newly painted conference room on the second floor of the administration building of the state prison at Wethersfield. It was a beautiful, sunny day, hot but tolerably so because of a pleasant breeze, and through the windows one could see the great elms and neat lawns of the town of Wethersfield, and watch children bicycling along the streets, so that the effect—save for the presence of two or three guards—was hardly that of a prison at all, but of a meeting room in some New England school or college. The irony was almost too explicit: it did not seem either the day or the place to ponder death. At the far end of the room, at a table perhaps twenty feet long, sat the five members of the board—two lawyers, a judge of the state Supreme Court, a professor emeritus of political science at Wesleyan University, and a physician. All men in their fifties and sixties, they were gray-haired, solemn, and distinguished-looking; indeed, several of them so combined steely-gray handsomeness and juridical gravity that they seemed ready to be cast as judges in a movie. They were also, as I say, extremely solemn, almost forbidding in manner, Connecticut Yankees to a man, and I had the distinct feeling that mercy might be wrung from their hearts, but only under mighty compulsion. The spectators—sixty or so in all—sat on hard chairs at the other end of the room. Between spectators and the board there was another table, and on opposite sides of this table sat members of Reid's counsel, who would argue for clemency, and the state's attorney and his aides, who, presumably, would present reasons why Reid should be executed.

Shortly after ten, Reid was brought in by a guard. Dressed in freshly pressed prison khaki, shirt open at the throat, he was a tall muscular young Negro, and his face seemed to me curiously impassive and expressionless as he slumped down into a wooden armchair. I realized with a start that he was the first person I had ever seen whose death seemed almost inevitable and only twelve hours away.

Now, it should be said here that no longer was Reid completely friendless and alone, as he had been during the five years he had spent in his condemned cell. Since the previous winter, after a young Trinity College student named George Will had learned of Reid's predicament and imminent execution, an extraordinary amount of activity had been organized in his behalf. Will had written an impassioned letter which was published in the college newspaper. This had resulted in a committee, composed of three Trinity faculty members, three members of the Trinity administration, and six students, which had set about energetically during the ensuing months to try to save Reid's life. The committee was headed by George Will and Albert E. Holland, the latter the vice president of Trinity College and a man who might be expected to have rather severe strictures about capital punishment. Holland had spent several years in a Japanese prison camp during World War II and had endured more than one bad moment when his custodians began promiscuously lopping off heads. Like such vocal opponents of capital punishment as Arthur Koestler and Jean-Paul Sartre—who suffered similar experiences in Spain during the Civil War and for whom the issue of the death penalty has grim personal relevance—Holland was no quixotic adventurer, and his efforts to save Reid had consumed a large part of his time for over four months. With other members of the committee, Holland had dug deep into Reid's past. It had been a past of nearly monumental poverty and neglect, and much information about his squalid upbringing, it is important to note, had not been admissible as evidence at Reid's trial. The committee had pored over dozens of the melancholy records and documents scattered back through almost all the years of his wretched career—welfare records of the Reid family; juvenile-court reports; records of the Hartford County Temporary Home, where Reid had spent eight of his youthful years, and those of the state reformatory where he had also been lodged for a time; psychiatric reports and trial transcripts and records of Reid's unsuccessful appeals to higher courts. They had also interviewed a score of people who had been associated with Reid at one time or another—
parole officers, social workers, officials of various welfare and correctional institutions where he had spent the greater part of his life. In addition, the committee had engaged itself in a great deal of legal research: even on the surface of Reid's case it had been shockingly apparent that, in terms of equality of justice, his death sentence had caused him to be a singular victim in more than one respect, and the exhaustive, meticulous investigation which the Trinity group made of capital cases in the state over a period of forty years brought forth some remarkable conclusions, best expressed in a single statement made in the bulky mimeographed dossier which the committee presented to the board that morning: “Our study shows that prior to 1957 [the year of Reid's conviction] the State of Connecticut had not even tried on a first-degree murder charge, let alone sentenced to death, a person like Benjamin Reid who at the time of his crime was an adolescent, with a mental capacity of an eleven-year-old child, with a most unfortunate family heritage and background, and with no previous record of violence.”

Now as we sat in the hot, still meeting room, it was Holland's task to present these facts to the board. One of the first persons he called to testify also made one of the most dramatic pleas of the day. This was Robert Satter, a prominent Hartford lawyer who had followed Reid's post-trial career with an abiding interest. It had for a long time been Satter's belief—shared by others—that of the multitude of injustices surrounding Reid's conviction one of the worst was that involving the sinister connection between Reid and the notorious mass-murderer Joseph Taborsky. It was Satter's contention that it had been the public furor and vengeful outcry attending Taborsky's trial that had infected Reid's own nearby courtroom and similarly sealed Reid's fate. A mild, scholarly-looking, sandy-haired man, Satter asked the board to consider a literary allusion. “You may recall the conclusion of
Moby-Dick
,” he said, “how, as the ship
Pequod
sinks beneath the waves, the arm of a sailor appears from the depths to hammer a pennant against the mast. Just as the nail is being driven home, a gull flies by, and its wing, interposing itself between hammer and mast, is nailed fast to the spar, so that the final glimpse of the doomed ship is this bit of fluttering life being dragged with it into the deep.” There was nothing histrionic about Satter and his manner; his words were splendidly afire. Pausing, he gestured toward Reid. If Benjamin Reid should die this night, he continued, his life, like that of Melville's gull, would have been sacrificed just as surely as if the arm of Joseph Taborsky had reached from the grave to drag him down into oblivion.
It was a marvelously delivered speech, all in very low key, and when Satter had finished there was a long, rather uneasy silence in the room.

The first hour or so of the general plea, including Satter's statement, was based on the question of equality of justice, and Holland had plenty of statistics at hand to show that the state of Connecticut had granted clemency or given lesser sentences to many criminals whose background and mental capacity were infinitely superior to Reid's, and whose crimes had often been far more cold-blooded and ruthless. But this was only the first part of the plea. Now, as the morning lengthened, Holland began to call witnesses to testify to Reid's fearful and blighted upbringing. There were a dozen or so in all, and they included a Negro policewoman who had been assigned to the slum area where Reid had been reared (she described the section as a “jungle”), various welfare workers and parole officers who had known and worked with Reid, and finally, a gentle-spoken middle-aged white woman named Mrs. Neva Jones, who had been the nurse at the Hartford County Home during the eight years Reid was there, and who had flown up from North Carolina to be present at the hearing. Partly due to the fact that he was at first barely literate, Reid had corresponded with no one during his long and lonely stay on death row, but late in 1961, as his execution approached, he and Mrs. Jones began to exchange letters. Excerpts from his letters were read at the hearing. They were remarkable, in style often resembling nothing so much as that of a man who in a general sense was quite lost but on the verge of a miraculous verbal discovery (actually, as he told Mrs. Jones, his main reading matter had been the Bible and a dictionary): “In your most recent letter you made mention of my vocabulary as being increase, well the reason is due to the fact that I do read quite a bit, and by doing this, I feel that I can express myself more clearly logically speaking, by studying neologistical expressions excerpted from the different literature I study.” But there was no doubt, as Holland pointed out to the board, that the letters were those of a man profoundly conscious of his wrongdoing (“I do not want sympathy, I just merely want a chance to show everyone that I have reformed and repented of my wrong that was done thoughtlessly senselessly”) and, even more important, were the expression of one struggling toward some kind of enlightenment. There was an unconscious irony in one questioning statement, which might sum up the thoughts of condemned, miserable, desolate, guilty men everywhere: “I know that I have
done wrong but have I done worse than the worse or am I the worse period.”