Authors: Michael W. Cuneo
The news media tended to draw a rather different lesson.
Whereas Darrell and his supporters regarded the commutation as divinely inspired, most journalists regarded it instead as a monumental fluke of historical timing. Darrell just happened to be next in line for execution when the pope just happened to be visiting Missouri. It was as simple as that. There was nothing providential about it. The commutation was arbitrary and capricious—and utterly undeserved. Given the ghastly circumstances of his crimes, Darrell was full value for his death sentence. There may indeed have been people on Missouri’s death row worthy of special consideration, but Darrell, alas, wasn’t one of them.
This didn’t mean, however, that the news media were universally opposed to the commutation. Far from it: quite a few journalists commended the governor for making such a bold and uncalculated move. Support for capital punishment ran high in Missouri, to the tune of 70 percent among Catholics and non-Catholics alike. The governor must have known that he stood to lose far more than he would gain by letting Darrell off the hook. He must have known that the commutation could come back to haunt him at the polls. And yet he signed off on it, a rare instance of a politician throwing expediency to the wind.
The problem, then, wasn’t so much that the governor had extended mercy to Darrell. The problem rather was that his mercy seemed perversely misplaced. If someone as monstrously guilty as Darrell could be given a free pass simply because the stars happened to be aligned in his favor, what about all the other prisoners on Missouri’s death row? Should they be lethally injected when their dates came up? And if so, why? Because they weren’t as fabulously lucky as Darrell? Because their executions weren’t scheduled for the very same day the pope happened to be passing through town?
And herein lay the lesson: in the view of journalists generally, the commutation underscored the arbitrariness of the entire system of capital punishment in the United States. If the final decision to pull the switch could turn on something so fickle as a botched execution date, an accident of timing, the best move would be to eliminate
capital punishment altogether. By all means, let Darrell live—but then let the others live, too.
The lead editorial in the January 29 edition of the
Post-Dispatch
summed up the thinking of most journalists on the matter. “While merciful, [the commutation] is also arbitrary and capricious,” it read. “Is it fair, is it just, that Mease’s life be spared just because the pope asked? Just because Mease drew a serendipitous execution date? Mercy must be informed by justice. If Mease deserves to live, so do the others on death row for whom the pope did not personally intercede. Surely some opportunistic lawyer should file suit for these inmates, making that precise point.”
T
HE POPE, THE
governor, and Darrell: for a solid week following the commutation, the three men were inseparable in the news. Where one was mentioned, the others were certain to be mentioned also. Their fateful collision in Missouri was written about in the
New York Times, People
magazine, and hundreds of publications in between and was featured on newscasts from Los Angeles to Bombay.
The Potosi publicity photo taken of Darrell in preparation for his execution received an extended workout, appearing in newspapers worldwide, sometimes alongside photos of the pope and the governor. There he was, wearing glasses and a neatly trimmed beard, balding a bit at the front, looking every inch his fifty-plus years but still recognizably the same Darrell of the high-school yearbook an eternity ago, the boy managing to peek through the accretions of advancing age and long imprisonment.
It was the kind of story that lent itself to the stunned reaction, the verbal double take, and there was no shortage of people willing to fill in with quotations.
“I’m disappointed with [the] decision, but I respect it,” Jim Justus told a reporter from a prominent wire service. “I’m a religious person and I just have to believe that there is a reason this all happened … God works in mysterious ways.”
Darrell’s mom spoke with several enterprising reporters who succeeded in tracking her down in Mease’s Hollow. “Oh, there are just no words to describe how thankful and happy we are,” she said. “I’ve been listening and looking for it and today it came. We knew God was on Darrell’s side and God is the best lawyer you can get. He’s never lost a case.”
“It was God at work,” Laura Tyler told the
Post-Dispatch
. “The whole turn of events that culminated in the pope’s request for mercy didn’t just happen because of luck or because [Darrell] happened to be at the right place at the right time. I think those events were very intentional, and they were acts of a more superior being.”
David Lawrence, the younger of Lloyd and Frankie’s two sons, had a rather different take. In the same
Post-Dispatch
article, he said that he was surprised by the commutation and distressed that neither the pope nor the governor had “considered the feelings of the family.” “I don’t think they looked into the background of the situation,” he went on. “A man who killed three people, and did it brutally, is now allowed to go ahead and live.”
On a more stridently partisan note, Daryl Duwe, a spokesman for the state Republican Party, told the press that Darrell was “the poster boy for the death penalty in Missouri.” “If we can’t execute Darrell Mease,” he asked, “who can we execute?”
Everyone within shouting distance, it seemed, had something to say. Everyone, that is, except Darrell. True to form, he refused all requests for interviews. Only one reporter succeeded in making any headway whatsoever with him, and this only because of a memorable encounter in an Ozarks jailhouse a decade earlier.
Michelle Beth Katzenell was Michelle Beth Mueller now, married and raising a young family in a St. Louis suburb, a lifetime removed from the death-and-destruction beat of southwest Missouri. She was still plying her trade, contributing occasional pieces, on education mostly, to the
Post-Dispatch
. Hearing of the commutation, she thought back to that unexpected interview at the Taney County
jail ten years ago when Darrell assured her that God was his lawyer and that under no circumstances would he ever be executed. It had been her most singular experience as a reporter. And now this: the most implausible of outcomes, the pope coming to St. Louis and Darrell’s prediction coming true.
She wrote him at Potosi, suggesting a follow-up interview. Darrell’s reply was dated February 1, four crowded pages in black pen, studded with biblical citations.
Of course he remembered her, Darrell said. How could he not after God had sneaked her into the jailhouse so she could put the word out about the miracle that lay ahead? And, yes, of course, he’d be happy to grant her another interview. But not right now—give it a bit more time. God was hatching another miracle on his behalf, one which would free him from prison altogether. Wait until then, he said, and he’d grant her a great interview. He’d tell her all about the death penalty: how it was fundamentally at odds with the Christian Scriptures. He’d tell her everything he’d learned during his time in prison. “When I come out of here,” he wrote, “I’ll come out a talkin’.”
He wrote a few words about the commutation, reminding Michelle that he’d known from the first that he wouldn’t be executed. The last thing he’d anticipated, however, was the pope’s involvement. (“[It] caught me flatfooted, too,” he said.) He added that he was “deeply touched” by John Paul II’s intervention and that he planned on thanking both the pope and the governor by letter.
But again, Darrell said, this was only the beginning. God wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than total victory. The best was yet to come.
“Fasten your seatbelt,” he wrote, “it’s fixin’ to get wild. What a ride, God, what a ride. You shall see me walk out of here totally free, in Jesus’s Name.”
Michelle did a piece for the
Post-Dispatch
on the letter, which must have induced a fair bit of head shaking. Everybody knew that the guy the pope had saved was a convicted murderer. But was he also crazy?
——
T
HE ABOLITIONIST OR
anti-death-penalty crowd in Missouri was of mixed mind regarding the commutation. While delighted with the pope’s intervention, abolitionists would have preferred if someone other than Darrell had been its direct beneficiary. In the worthiness rankings, Darrell was near the bottom. There were questions regarding the fairness of his arrest, sure, but none whatsoever regarding his guilt or the severity of his crimes. If the pope had singled out almost anyone else, anti-death-penalty activists would have been quite a bit happier. “Darrell Mease is the luckiest bastard in Missouri,” a leading activist said not long afterward. “And he is
not
a sympathetic person.”
Of course, most anti-death-penalty activists barely knew Darrell. He hadn’t given them much opportunity. With God on his case, he’d seen little point taking up their occasional offers of help. While other prisoners were being adopted as favorites of the abolitionist cause—“death-row darlings”—Darrell had tucked in his chin and kept mostly to himself. He hadn’t been anyone’s darling.
Misgivings about Darrell aside, abolitionists were determined to make the most of the commutation. Here was something that defied all odds. It was a gift from heaven, the breakthrough for which they’d long waited. In a sense, Darrell’s unworthiness only made it that much sweeter. If someone so far down the list could be plucked off death row, why not everyone else? If Darrell’s life could be spared for ostensibly ethical and religious reasons, why not the lives of other death-row inmates, too? The sky was the limit. The commutation, they were convinced, augured a new moment in the debate over capital punishment.
The moment proved tantalizingly brief. On February 24, 1999, less than a month after the commutation, James Edward Rodden was lethally injected at Potosi while eighteen people conducted a vigil outside the prison walls. Rodden had been sentenced to death for the fatal stabbing, in 1983, of twenty-one-year-old Terry Lynn Trunnel in the west-central Missouri town of Marshall. His date of
execution had been finalized on January 29, when the ink on Darrell’s commutation order was still wet and the pope had not yet fully unpacked from his visit to St. Louis.
Two days before his execution, Rodden was interviewed from prison on a talk-radio show out of St. Louis. He insisted that he hadn’t killed Trunnel and that he’d been convicted of the crime mainly through the stupendous unfairness of the criminal justice system. Nevertheless, he said, he was resigned to being executed. He knew he had no shot of receiving a commutation. After Darrell, no one had a shot. The governor would be packing guys off for lethal injection like it was going out of style, trying to mollify voters displeased with him for caving in to the pope. It wasn’t Darrell’s fault, Rodden said. Darrell was a good guy; everybody on the row was happy for him. It wasn’t even necessarily the governor’s fault. It was the politics of the situation.
Rodden appears to have been on to something. On March 10, a mere two weeks later, Roy “Hog” Roberts became the second person executed in Missouri following the papal visit. This one was especially hard on death-penalty opponents. Roberts had been one of the few guys on the row whose profession of innocence seemed entirely plausible. He’d been condemned for allegedly helping two inmates murder a guard during a riot at a medium-security prison in Moberly, Missouri. By any reasonable standard, the evidence against him at trial was paltry and contradictory. If there was anyone, on strictly legal grounds, deserving of a commutation, it was surely Roy Roberts.
And so it went—over the next six months the death chamber at Potosi was kept constantly busy. By the end of August, six more lethal injections had taken place, making a total of nine for the year. Death-penalty opponents had hoped that Darrell’s commutation would slow down the killing machine, perhaps even grind it to a halt. Instead it was the exact opposite. Never before in Missouri had there been so prolific a stretch of executions. The machine was polished and primed, and operating as smoothly and efficiently as Fred Leuchter had promised it would. It was as if
the governor, having spared Darrell, couldn’t dispatch the others fast enough.
The pope wrote the governor on Roy Roberts’s behalf. He might just as well have saved himself the postage. Safely back in Rome now, he was much easier to ignore.
And, of course, James Rodden was right. The governor wasn’t necessarily to blame. Even if he’d wanted to spare Roy Roberts, spare any of the others, political realities dictated otherwise. With his second term winding down, he was planning on making a run for the U.S. Senate seat held by the hard-baked Republican John Ashcroft. No one was predicting an easy cruise to victory. A former governor himself, sturdily right wing, sturdily Pentecostal, Ashcroft liked presenting himself as a tough law-and-order guy, a capital-punishment guy, the kind of guy who would have told the pope thanks for the suggestion but we’ve got our own way of doing business in Missouri. He strongly disapproved of Darrell’s commutation (“I wouldn’t have granted him mercy,” he’d been saying), he seemed confident that most voters disapproved of it also, and he wasn’t above playing the deal to his own political advantage. It didn’t matter that Carnahan, with Roy Roberts in the books, had presided over a whopping twenty-eight executions. Twenty-eight, and counting. The only thing that mattered was the one that got away. It made him look soft and impressionable. It made him look like a flunky, the governor who couldn’t say no to the pope.
Kent Gipson represented James Rodden in his final appeals. Kent, too, saw it right away. Once Darrell’s commutation was announced, he knew that no one else stood a chance. Given his political aspirations, how many commutations could the governor afford? He had extremely limited capital in this area, and he’d spent it all on Darrell. The Missouri electorate was
possibly
willing to forgive a single commutation. Catholic voters
might
make special allowance for a deal engineered by the pope. But that was surely it. One was the limit, and with Darrell the limit had been reached. The account was empty. Whatever small fund of mercy may have existed, it was completely exhausted.