Authors: Michael W. Cuneo
On May 1, 1999, looking to get an early jump on the Senate race, Ashcroft held a public hearing in St. Louis on a proposed measure to strengthen the rights of victims of violent crime. He brought in Buck and Anita Lawrence as star witnesses.
Imagine their shock, they said, when they turned on the television several months back and found out that the very same man who had brutally murdered their crippled son, Willie, along with Frankie and Lloyd—imagine their shock finding out on TV that Darrell Mease had been given a commutation. Never mind the sheer injustice of it, this cold-blooded killer waltzing off death row for no better reason than the pope’s asking. Even worse was their having to hear about it on the nightly news, the governor’s office not bothering to give them so much as a courtesy call. Finding out cold like that, with nothing to cushion the blow—who exactly was being punished here? Mease was receiving the break of a lifetime, and it was they who were being made to pay.
“When the news came on, this was the very first thing that came on and there was Mease’s smiling face,” Anita Lawrence said at the hearing. “It was kind of like learning they were dead again … I think if the governor would have just took the time to look at the pictures and hear our side, I think it would have come out different.”
Joe Bednar attended the hearing on the governor’s behalf. He apologized to the Lawrences, saying they had good reason to feel aggrieved. Of course they should have been properly notified, he said. The governor’s office had assumed, mistakenly, that there were no surviving relatives.
With Bednar this was more than simply damage control. He truly regretted the oversight. Nevertheless, the damage was done. The governor’s detractors were already accusing him of being soft on crime, soft on the death penalty. Now, thanks to Buck and Anita’s testimony, he was also made to seem uncaring. He’d spared Darrell while leaving the Lawrences out in the cold.
Ashcroft had clearly gained the early advantage.
——
T
HE LESS SAID
about Darrell Mease, the better. This seemed to be the thinking of Carnahan and his team during the opening months of the Senate race. The early polls showed Ashcroft holding a decisive lead, with Darrell’s deal the key factor. Almost 34 percent of respondents to a
Post-Dispatch
survey said they were more likely to vote against Carnahan because of the commutation; less than 8 percent said they were more likely to vote for him. Clearly the commutation had become a major liability—keep quiet about it, the thinking seemed to run, and maybe it would go away.
But of course it wouldn’t go away, not with an election looming. The only thing left was to meet it head-on. On an overcast morning in late March 2000, Carnahan finally did just that. Halfway through a question-and-answer session at a Catholic high school in Kirkwood, Missouri, a student asked him about the commutation. Carnahan knew it was coming; the questions had been vetted in advance.
He ran through the events of January 27, 1999, beginning with his visiting Archbishop Rigali’s on such frightfully short notice, fully expecting a painful conversation on capital punishment or something similarly unpleasant. “I didn’t much want to go because I did not agree with [the pope] and with the Church’s position on the death penalty,” he said. “I support the death penalty. I didn’t want to get in a big discussion or theological debate about the subject. But I didn’t think I ought to say no.”
Then he described his surprise when the conversation, while still painful, turned out not to be about capital punishment in general but rather just about Darrell. “They didn’t want me to open the whole of death row and didn’t expect me to change [the death-penalty laws],” he said. And, finally, he recounted his decision to commute Darrell’s death sentence after the pope’s personal appeal at the Cathedral Basilica. “It was done on the basis of a one-time act of mercy for this prisoner at the request of the holy father. It had to be an act of mercy because this fellow lay in wait with a shotgun and blew away three people in a failed drug deal. There
were no circumstances on the basis of justice to help him. But as an act of mercy, we could.”
Carnahan didn’t back down from his decision. He insisted that he’d made the right call, though it had not been easy. Death-penalty decisions, even under less pressured circumstances, were seldom easy. As governor, however, they came with the territory. “It’s an awful thing for any one individual to have the power to cause an execution to go ahead or to stay it,” he said.
Six months later, on October 13, Carnahan and Ashcroft appeared on Charles Jaco’s afternoon radio program out of St. Louis for their first public debate of the campaign. Jaco had been angling for weeks to get the two men in the studio. Now that they were finally there, it was his job to hold them to the fire. After some preliminaries, he asked Carnahan the question that most needed asking.
“You extended Darrell Mease mercy at the request of the pope,” he said. “How can you not extend that same mercy to everyone on death row?”
Carnahan answered in a tone of weary patience, like a teacher forced to go over the same lesson once too often for an inattentive class.
Look, he said, this was a personal request from one of the world’s great leaders and, yes, he felt obliged to honor it. He was put on the spot and he’d tried doing the right thing. It was as simple as that. Did this mean, as his opponents were claiming, that he was soft on crime? A weakling when it came to the death penalty? Of course not. It was utter foolishness to suggest as much. And don’t forget—it wasn’t as if Darrell Mease would ever again be walking the streets a free man.
Ashcroft responded, but with surprising restraint. A governor’s pardon, he said, “should be reserved to correct a mistake in the system.” And he left it at that. This was his big chance for a knockout blow, and all he did was fire off a timid jab.
Perhaps, some observers speculated, Ashcroft was simply holding back until the final rounds.
Three days later, on a drizzly Monday evening, the twin-engine
plane carrying Carnahan, Chris Sifford, and Carnahan’s forty-four-year-old son, Roger, crashed in a craggy, wooded area near the town of Hillsboro, midway between St. Louis and Potosi. They’d been heading to a campaign rally in New Madrid, way down in the southeastern spur of the state. Roger Carnahan, who’d been piloting the plane, had reported an instrument problem moments before the crash. Rescue crews spent hours sifting through the wreckage, and early Tuesday morning officials confirmed that the three men were dead.
Carnahan was remembered in the newspapers for his old-fashioned virtues of diligence, humility, and honesty. His speeches may have been dull and rambling, his media appearances clunky, but he’d never shirked his duties, he’d never snubbed a subordinate, and he’d never tried snookering the taxpayers. He was remembered as a man who’d risen to the top while staying closely in touch with his small-town roots. The kind of man who’d spend weekends at his home outside Rolla, where he’d lived since 1959, shopping for his own groceries, getting his hair cut at the local barbershop, and washing the dishes after a family dinner. Perhaps most of all, he was remembered as the governor who’d risked political suicide commuting the death sentence of a born-again hillbilly from Stone County.
By the time of the plane crash Carnahan had significantly closed the gap with Ashcroft in the Senate race. Polls had the two men running virtually neck and neck. A week after the crash, the new governor of Missouri, Roger Wilson, announced that should Jean Carnahan’s deceased husband actually get more votes than Ashcroft in the upcoming election, he’d appoint Jean to a two-year term in the Senate.
And so, of course, it happened. In November of 2000, Carnahan became the first deceased candidate in the history of the United States to win an election. This miracle he pulled off without so much as a cameo from the pope. In the end, the commutation seems not to have been held against him—not enough, at any rate, to prevent his reaching out and snatching victory from the grave. His
widow, as prearranged, went to Washington in his stead. And John Ashcroft, proving himself an uncanny survivor also, picked up the pieces and was appointed Attorney General in the cabinet of newly elected President George W. Bush. The only man ever to
lose
an election to a dead candidate was rewarded for his efforts with a promotion.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
F
OR DARRELL, NOWADAYS
, it’s the loneliness that’s the toughest part of imprisonment. He still gets very few visitors, just Lexie, Larry, and the occasional stray from back home. It’s been years since he saw any of his five kids, though they’ll sometimes write with news of their own lives, the jobs, the romances, the small triumphs over adversity.
It’s not that all the others he’s left behind have forgotten him, or otherwise ruled him out. He’s remembered fondly by a good number of people in Stone County, and truly missed by some. Quite a few of his old friends talk sincerely about going up to see him, saying they’ve been meaning to get around to it, but then they put it off and the months pass and they put it off some more. And it’s not simply the long drive that stands in their way. Even more, it’s the
worry of what to say and how to behave once they get there; the horrible awkwardness of the situation. Sitting at Potosi with Darrell, a guy whose very nature screams out against confinement—the prospect is too much for many of his old friends to bear. Execution, they sometimes think, would’ve been kinder than life without parole. That way he’d be delivered of it once and for all.
His old friends needn’t be so concerned. If they were actually to make the trip to Potosi and brave the checkpoints, the metal detectors, and the clanging doors, they’d almost certainly be guaranteed a lively conversation. In the main visiting center, small tables set up with two chairs or four, prisoners in standard-issue off-whites chatting with wives or girlfriends, absently dealing cards, getting a soft drink and candy bar from the vending machine, a sandwich from the microwave—in the visiting center Darrell rarely disappoints. He’ll start off with religion, the New Testament’s case against capital punishment, usually, and then switch to colorful, sometimes hilarious tales of his long-ago outlaw pals. For Darrell there’s no necessary contradiction between these two halves of his existence. While intensely—
ferociously
—religious, he still feels deep kinship for many of the people he knew during his years of reckless freedom. The drugs he’s renounced, the hatred and the violence he’s renounced, but not in its entirety the outlaw life itself. It’s where he comes from, and though he’s moved on, there’s much about the life and the people that belong to it that he still holds valuable.
So it’s Matthew and Luke and John to start with; and then deliciously detailed stories of living outside the lines back home in Stone County, scuffling, scheming, gallivanting—the crazy, foolish, dangerous joy of it all. Saving souls, or shooting pistols: Darrell’s perfectly at ease with either topic, though quite a bit more engaging with the latter. And there’s not a hint of moroseness in his conversation, not a drop of despair. Why should there be? He knows with defiant, unflagging conviction that Potosi is merely one stop on the road, a lengthier one than he’d anticipated, to be sure, but a stop nonetheless, a place from which he’ll soon be moving on.
But in the meantime there’s the small matter of day-to-day survival, of coping with maximum-security confinement while waiting on the next miracle. The commutation has made some difference in this regard; not quite as much, however, as might have been expected.
In the months immediately after the commutation, Darrell enjoyed a fragile celebrity at Potosi. For years he’d been telling anybody who’d listen—fellow prisoners, caseworkers, even guards—that the skies could rain execution warrants and still the state of Missouri wouldn’t get the satisfaction of killing him. With God as his lawyer, execution simply wasn’t in the cards. If the blank stares were any indication, most people had trouble taking this seriously.
But then the pope came to town, and Darrell’s boast came true. Not only had he escaped the death chamber, but he’d done so under circumstances that beggared the imagination. Prisoners who previously had him pegged as a religious flake or worse now found themselves revising their estimates. What was it about this guy? Why should the pope have singled him out for attention? He wasn’t a household name, a controversial political prisoner, say, somebody the pope might naturally have been drawn to. Who’d ever heard of Darrell? He was strictly small-time, a local boy from a town you’d be lucky finding on a road map. And yet there it was: Darrell had insisted that he wouldn’t be executed, and it was tough arguing with the results. So what was going on here? The talking heads on TV were saying it was a fluke, as if that really explained anything. Since when did flukes come this big? There was, however, another possibility: maybe, just maybe, it truly was a miracle. And if so, Darrell was definitely a guy who bore close watching.
No longer merely a number among numbers, Darrell became an object of wary, whispering curiosity. His fellow prisoners, while still not completely sold on him, were intrigued to see what might happen next. He’d already been the beneficiary of one surprise; perhaps there was something else in store. As the months passed,
however, and nothing new materialized, Darrell’s in-house celebrity gradually faded. The whispering died out, the curious glances abated, and before long everything was back to normal.
And Darrell, of course, was back in isolation. At first it was his long-running protest against doubling up, still no budging there; and then it was something else besides. A year or so after the commutation he was assigned work duty in the prison kitchen. He refused the assignment, saying that he’d developed a hernia and that hoisting heavy pots and pans on a (not infrequently) damp and slippery floor would put him at serious risk. Corrections officials said they’d arrange medical treatment for him, surgery if necessary. Darrell declined, not thrilled with the idea of going under the knife at the behest of officials who’d so recently been thwarted in their plans to execute him. So another standoff arose, and an additional reason for keeping him confined to the hole.