Authors: Michael W. Cuneo
A brief pause. Silence except for the ticking of the clock on the mantel.
“Again, it is not a question of capital punishment in general. Our appeal is very specific. We are not asking you to do anything beyond your prerogative as governor. Please exercise your mercy and your authority to permit this one man to live.”
It was Carnahan’s move now and Bednar wasn’t at all certain how the governor would respond.
“Well, the Darrell Mease case is before us now,” he said. “Joe and Angie review these cases very carefully—”
“Yes, of course,” said Cardinal Sodano.
“—and we’ll give Darrell Mease every consideration. I’m sure you know where I stand on capital punishment—”
“Yes.”
“—but I will take your request seriously. Give me some time to reflect on it, and I’ll get back to you with my answer as soon as possible.”
“Fine,” Cardinal Sodano said, standing and shaking Carnahan’s hand. He then excused himself, returning a moment later with commemorative medallions and rosaries for the three visitors.
Bednar was concerned about the media getting wind of the request. He didn’t want the governor facing any added pressure.
“What are your plans on publicity?” he asked Navarro-Valls.
“We won’t publicize this until we return to the Vatican,” Navarro-Valls said.
Just before leaving, Carnahan turned to Sodano and said, “I have a request of my own, Cardinal. I’d appreciate it if the pope could somehow communicate this plea to me directly.”
“I’m quite certain this can be arranged,” Sodano said, knowing how much the Mease case meant to the pope. “This afternoon, possibly, after the prayer service at the Cathedral Basilica.”
Outside, going down the front walk, Carnahan said, “That was interesting.”
“Yeah,” Bednar said.
Then, on their way back to the restaurant in Clayton: “What do you think, Joe?”
“I have to tell you, Governor, I’m conflicted here. I’m your legal counsel and I’m also Roman Catholic. So however I advise you, I’m afraid you’ll be left wide open to criticism.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Remember the JFK campaign in 1960? The fear that the pope would be running the country? I was just a kid and I can remember. So even though you’re Southern Baptist, not Catholic, I’m concerned that you’d be setting yourself up for some real grief.”
The governor shifted sideways in the front seat of the Chevy Suburban. Resting his left arm on the seat back, and looking directly at Bednar behind him, he said, “Joe, we fought that fight back in 1960, and I think we won.”
Half a mile farther along, Carnahan called his press secretary, Chris Sifford, on his cell phone and ran through the meeting with him.
“So this is what they’re asking, Chris,” he said. “Think about it and we’ll talk later on.”
At the restaurant parking lot now: “I’ll think about this the rest of the day, Joe,” Carnahan said, “but I don’t want to know everything about the case—”
“Okay.”
“—because, Joe, are the facts ever good in a death-penalty case?”
“No, Governor, they’re always bad.”
Still intent on seeing to his business in D.C., Bednar shot out to Lambert–St. Louis International Airport. With a bit of time to kill before his flight, he ate a hamburger and scanned a newspaper. There it was, on the front page: Patricia Rice’s piece on her in-flight conversation the day before with Joaquín Navarro-Valls. Interesting, Bednar thought—the Vatican’s top media dog, as savvy as they come, scoring some advance press points on the Darrell Mease deal. It looked like there was even more to this than met the eye.
Bednar hit the nearest pay phone and put through a call to Chris Sifford.
“Look, Chris,” he said, “I’m out here at the airport in St. Louis but I’m thinking maybe I should forget about my trip and drive back to Jeff City instead.”
“Good idea,” Sifford said. “Why don’t you come on back? There’s a good chance we’ll be needing you.”
I
T WAS MIDAFTERNOON
, bright and chilly, when the slow prop plane carrying Chris Liese and five other local politicians hit the runway in St. Louis. Liese was bristling with anticipation. The short flight from Jefferson City had lasted all of a heartbeat. Now it was simply a matter of hanging in for a few hours and he’d finally have a chance to meet the pope when he came out to the airport later that day for the official departure ceremony.
There was some confusion outside the Midcoast terminal building, as people jockeyed for rides over to Lambert’s main terminal where Vice President Al Gore and his wife were scheduled to arrive on
Air Force 2
at any moment. Liese jumped into a black Chevy Suburban that pulled up to the curb, and as the vehicle looped east and then north along a service road toward the main terminal he suddenly realized that he was sitting directly between the governor and the governor’s wife, Jean, who had just come in on a separate plane.
Liese said hello. He and the governor knew one another professionally. As fellow Democrats, they’d worked together over the years on various pieces of legislation.
The governor turned to him and said, “Chris, you’re Catholic, what can I tell the pope about executing Darrell Mease?”
Liese was stymied. He knew nothing about the Mease deal. Recognizing as much, Carnahan filled him in on some of the details. He told him about the meeting with Cardinal Sodano earlier that day at Archbishop Rigali’s residence. He said that he was on his way right now to an ecumenical prayer service at the Cathedral
Basilica, and that Sodano had contacted his office an hour or so ago confirming that the pope would be approaching him after the service and requesting that he spare Darrell Mease.
Then, as best as Liese months later was able to recall, Carnahan said: “The pope is going to ask me this even though it’s undisputed that Darrell Mease committed these crimes. And, Chris, these were heinous crimes. Mease is guilty under the law, and he deserves to die.”
Liese took a deep breath, wanting to measure his words carefully. Never before had the governor asked his advice. And never before had he seen the governor so tense. So what to say? From the little the governor had told him, Liese felt torn. As a good Catholic, he wanted to advise the governor to heed the pope’s request. As a politician, however, he knew that doing so could prove costly. He knew that Missourians could play rough at election time with any candidate deemed soft on the death penalty. In his own career, representing a suburban St. Louis district in the state legislature, Liese had studiously avoided any appearance of softness on the matter. He also knew that Carnahan was wrapping up his second term as governor and was planning on making a bid for a seat in the U.S. Senate. Letting a guy like Darrell Mease off the hook could be just the thing to scotch his chances. But still … this was the pope. How could the governor possibly say no to John Paul II, a superstar among religious leaders if ever there was one?
Finally Liese made up his mind. He knew what he’d tell the governor, though he seriously doubted it was what the governor wanted to hear.
“This is no ordinary pope,” he said. “If I were you, Governor, I would do what he asks you.”
The governor said nothing in response. He merely sat there, turned toward the side window now, grimly nodding his head.
The Chevy Suburban came to a stop outside the main terminal and the Secret Service took the governor and his wife inside to meet Al and Tipper Gore. Liese was escorted to a secured VIP tent, already
filled to near capacity, where he’d spend the next three hours over cookies, coffee, and lemonade waiting to say goodbye to the pope.
I
T GOT UNDER
way at four-thirty in the afternoon—the perfect capstone to the papal visit: an interfaith prayer service at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, a grandly ornate building with a glittering green dome on Lindell Boulevard in the city’s central west end. Wearing a cope and stole, the pope went to the main altar and chanted the doxology praising the Trinity. He then sat facing the congregation on a simple wooden throne, Archbishop Rigali and Cardinal Sodano flanking him, his entourage seated in choir stalls off to the side. Governor Carnahan, wearing a dark suit and glasses, was in the front pew to the left of the center aisle, his wife and Al and Tipper Gore alongside him.
The pope read his homily with a shaking hand and a quavering voice, closing with a ringing entreaty to all Americans: “If you want peace,
work for justice
. If you want justice,
defend life
. If you want life,
embrace the truth
—the truth revealed by God.”
There was no explicit reference in the homily to capital punishment.
It was a stirring event—the comparative intimacy of the cathedral, with its byzantine mosaic-clad interior, the sumptuous music that both preceded and followed the homily, the passage from Isaiah expertly rendered by a prominent local rabbi. Everything was in perfect pitch, graceful and harmonious, with not a single note offkey. Then, a little before six, after the last canticle had been chanted and the last prayer recited, the pope struggled to his feet, gingerly negotiated the steps in front of the altar, and slowly made his way over to the front left pew where he chatted briefly with the Gores before moving on to Governor Carnahan.
The two men exchanged greetings, and then the pope, his face a scant six inches from Carnahan’s, said: “Governor, will you please have mercy on Mr. Mease?”
And that was it.
Will you please have mercy on Mr. Mease?
The most direct request imaginable. The most specific request imaginable. It wasn’t about the death penalty in general. It wasn’t about sparing anyone else on death row. Just Darrell—nobody but Darrell.
The governor nodded, almost imperceptibly, and the pope moved on, working his way laboriously to the rear of the cathedral with his entourage in tow.
A
T JUST A
few minutes before seven, Chris Liese’s patience was finally rewarded when the pope came into the VIP tent at Lambert for the departure ceremony. It didn’t matter to Liese that he wasn’t able to get much closer than gawking distance. Simply being in the pope’s presence for a few precious moments was thrill enough.
Afterward, needing a lift back to the Midcoast terminal building, Liese was whisked into the same black Chevy Suburban that he’d hitched a ride in earlier. Once again, he took the middle seat of the second row. The governor hurried in after him and shut the door. Several minutes of tense silence passed while Carnahan waited for his wife to wrap up a conversation she was having with someone on the pavement outside. Neither Liese nor the passengers behind him—state attorney general Jay Nixon and state treasurer Bob Holden—breathed a word. Finally, his agitation apparently getting the better of him, Carnahan uncharacteristically barked: “Jean, get in the car.”
Jean Carnahan took the empty seat next to Liese and sat with her arms folded. The ten-minute drive to the Midcoast terminal was about as cheerful as a funeral cortege. Liese was dying to ask the governor about his meeting with the pope, but he didn’t dare break the silence. Nevertheless, he had a strong hunch that the deal had already been struck. The governor had decided to grant the pope’s request and was now contemplating the political implications.
Flying back to Jefferson City, Liese kept turning it over in his mind. If his hunch was right, there was a good chance that Darrell Mease was just the beginning of a major shift in Missouri’s death-penalty policy. Let Mease live, and the walls could soon start tumbling.
A
T SEVEN O’CLOCK
, Terry Ganey had all his assignments tidied away and was preparing to shut down for the evening when a tip came through. Somebody had contacted
Post-Dispatch
gossip columnist Jerry Berger saying that members of the pope’s entourage had met with the governor a few hours earlier urging him to put a halt to capital punishment in Missouri. Berger had passed the tip on to the city desk where an alert editor immediately thought of phoning it in to Ganey. Ganey was an old hand at covering government in Jefferson City for the newspaper, so if anybody could get to the bottom of this, he was the guy.
The first thing Ganey did was put a call through to the governor’s press secretary. Kiddingly, he told Sifford that it was a tradition for the governor’s office to give the
Post-Dispatch
a couple of exclusives toward the end of a second term.
Interesting tradition, Sifford said. He asked Ganey if he had anything particular in mind.
Now that you mention it, Ganey said, and he ran through the tip that had come in to Jerry Berger.
Perhaps hesitant about going any further without a green light from the governor, Sifford told Ganey that he’d get back to him within the hour.
Thirty minutes later, Sifford called back with the full scoop. It was true, he said. The governor had in fact met with Cardinal Sodano at Archbishop Rigali’s residence earlier that afternoon. The meeting had been perfectly cordial and had lasted approximately twenty minutes. But it hadn’t been about a state moratorium on capital punishment. In fact, nothing of the sort had come up in the conversation. It had been about Darrell Mease’s pending execution
—and nothing more. On the pope’s behalf, Cardinal Sodano had asked the governor to grant Mease a commutation. What’s more, the pope had personally requested the same thing of the governor at the interfaith prayer service that had ended less than two hours ago.
And what, Ganey asked, was the governor’s response?
He was considering it, Sifford said.
He was considering it
. Perhaps it was something in the way Sifford had said this, or that he had said it at all, but Ganey had the distinct impression that the headline writers at his newspaper would soon have their hands full. It wasn’t every day that a death-row prisoner in Missouri received a reprieve through the direct intervention of the pope.
L
ATE WEDNESDAY, AT
about ten-thirty, Governor Carnahan met with his team around a big oval-shaped table in his private office at the capitol building in Jefferson City. The governor sat at the head of the table, with his chief of staff, Brad Ketcher, and Angie Heffner along one side, and Chris Sifford and Joe Bednar along the other.