The Executioner's Song (122 page)

GILMORE            Shit. Up until the last hours I only had one guard, and if I didn't talk to him, he didn't have nobody to talk to. So it was quiet.

MOODY               Yeah . . .

GILMORE            Now they've put two of them fools out there. All they do is talk to each other and play cards.

MOODY               Well, they tell us that's part of an execution.

GILMORE            Man, ah . . .

MOODY               When you get an execution, you get a deathwatch. That's what you're undergoing right now.

GILMORE            Well, I don't like to listen to the cocksuckers right in front of me.

MOODY               You may not, but it's part of your sentence.

GILMORE            Well, okay then.

MOODY               If you're gonna get shot, you're gonna have a deathwatch too. That's part of it.

GILMORE            Yeah (pause) Okay, man.

MOODY               Do you want me to send these questions in?

GILMORE            I'm not really all that choked up about answering any more.

MOODY               Okay.

GILMORE            It, man, is so noisy. If I could have some quiet during these last fucking hours.

MOODY               You doing your exercises or anything like that to pass the time?

GILMORE            Yeah . . . I do all that.

MOODY               You reading any?

GILMORE            No, uh . . . I don't read anymore. I've real all I'm gonna read.

MOODY               Draw anymore?

GILMORE            No.

MOODY               You going to draw that self-portrait?

GILMORE            Don't have a mirror.

MOODY               Well, I guess you don't have much of anything, do you?

GILMORE            I've got myself. (long pause) I don't want to ah, fuck around with writing the answers to these questions. I guess he deserves answers, but God damn it I don't like the way Schiller does some things.

MOODY               Well, there are lots of times we don't like the way he does things, but his is a style, and he's in a tough racket and you develop a style like his.

GILMORE            Is everybody just supposed to accept that?

MOODY               No, I don't think so. But he's got a damn difficult job. He's trying to do it. That's all. He's working his ass off.

GILMORE            I asked him not to read those letters and he did.

MOODY               Okay. (long pause) Don't you feel that you owe Larry something?

GILMORE            Go ahead and read the questions. I'll answer 'em. I want Larry to understand that he don't have the right to say who the fuck I can or can't speak to. My brother asked me to talk to a friend of his, and I told him yeah. I know who Moyers is. I wouldn't have answered anything that you wouldn't have wanted me to say.

MOODY               You're really splitting hairs over nothing. 'Cause there's no way in hell Moyers is going to get in to talk.

GILMORE            I know that. I was pissed off because Mike was unhappy:

MOODY               Okay.

GILMORE            All right.

MOODY               The next question has been asked a number of times. Have you ever killed anyone before Bushnell and Jensen? . . . How about this guy that you beat with the pipe?

GILMORE            He lived. (sigh) Kind of altered his life, though.

MOODY               Don't you find shooting pretty damn grotesque?

GILMORE            What's grotesque is the fact that you have to be strapped in the chair with the hood, and all that horseshit.

MOODY               Doesn't the blood and guts of a shooting appeal to you?

GILMORE            (laughs) Fuck you, Larry . . . the blood and guts . . . Yeah, man, that really appeals to me. I'm gonna take a spoon.

The questions went on. No breakthrough.

From the two executions Father Meersman had previously attended, he had learned things could go badly wrong. The person to be executed might become so upset he would lose his own particular kind of calmness. Father Meersman always tried to keep a man in such a state ahead of the execution, tried to let him know what was going to be done. He figured if the man more or less knew you went to this place, point A, and from point A you were moved to point B, and then, at a certain time, you would go to point C, and so forth, he wouldn't have to say, "Where are we going now?" and maybe get upset over it. Some little thing like that could bother a man much too much.

                Whereas, if they knew ahead, so they could go through it sort of smoothly, and if everybody leading them was calm, then that could prove a contributing factor to their own calmness, just knowing more or less how the mechanics were going to be. You didn't want anything of a surprise to happen. Everybody was very tense when an execution was taking place, and you didn't want anything to get out of step or make the man balk.

                Meersman always felt he was the one who succeeded in explaining to Gary why they put the hood on. It wasn't personal, he told him, just that you wanted to be very still, so the target didn't move the slightest bit. Any slight movement could throw the bullets off. If Gary wanted to die with dignity, then he had to respect that very, very simple thing about the hood. It was there for practicality to allow the thing to run very dignified, and no movement. Gary listened in silence.

On Saturday afternoon, Gil Athay came out of Judge Lewis's chambers in the Federal Building and faced the press in the corridor.

                The reporters were frantic. Judge Lewis's regular courtroom was in the Tenth Circuit Court, Denver, and his chambers here, while commodious, had simply not been large enough. Many had not been able to jam in for the proceedings.

                So now there was chaos, and cameras flashing, and the call letters of microphones from foreign and domestic radio stations in his eyes. Athay felt as if he were marching into one of the rings of the circus.

                If was hard not to resent such an atmosphere. For days he had been fighting his way down corridors made narrow by the bodies of reporters. It had gotten out of hand. He was a dapper man with eyeglasses and a brush mustache, and he was not tall enough to avoid getting swarmed over in crowds. So at this point he said, "I'll be happy to make a statement, but it has to be downstairs." There remained a complete pandemonium. In his ears, he could still hear Judge Lewis saying, "You make it very difficult for me, Mr. Athay, to place it all on my shoulders, you know. If you'd given us time, there could have been three Judges to hear this." But Athay by then had been sufficiently keyed up to answer, "Well, I think, Your Honor, that's true, but we have to make the decision, and can't hide behind the committee." Had he really said that? The case of Dale Pierre must have tightened his temper.

He had come to believe that his client, Dale Pierre on Death Row, was innocent. That was an extraordinary belief to most. The public was convinced Dale Pierre was one of the hi-fi killers who had poured Drano down people's throats and stuck ball-point pens in their ears. The wife of a prominent gynecologist had been killed in that record store, and her son's brain had been permanently damaged. Stove-in by the killers. A horror of a case, but Athay had come slowly to the conclusion that Dale Pierre was innocent and had been convicted by the Jury because he was black, a condition to avoid in the State of Utah. In Utah a black man couldn't become a priest in the Mormon Church.

                So Athay had embarked on a crusade. In fact it had cost the full price of a crusade. When he ran for Attorney General in the last election, Bob Hansen, his opponent, had made Dale Pierre one of his most powerful talking points and won by a good margin. Would-you-want-this-man-who-defends-clients-who-stick-ball-point-pens-in-middle-aged-women's-ears-to-be-your-next-Attorney-General had been the whispered theme of the campaign. Nothing Athay could do. You couldn't tell every voter that he had been made Pierre's lawyer by Court appointment, nor that in the beginning, in fact, he had seen it as an unpleasant duty, and only later had become convinced of Pierre's innocence. You couldn't tell the voters that Dale Pierre was a complex man, a difficult man, but now, to Gil Athay, rather a beautiful black man, and besides, Athay had always hated capital punishment.

                He was ready to argue there was no rational way you could justify the death penalty, except to admit it was absolute revenge. If that, he would say, was the foundation of the criminal justice system, then we had a pretty sick system.

                So he had worked with the ACLU on this Gilmore business, and today had entered an appeal which had been audacious in the extreme.

                After standard opening remarks that the lack of mandatory appeal in the Utah statute was unconstitutional, Athay had introduced his legal novelty. Let one execution be carried out under a defective law, he argued, and it would be hard in the future to find a higher Court ready to declare that same statute unconstitutional. No Judge would want to say to a fellow Judge, "You know, you executed that man in error." Gary Gilmore's death threatened, therefore, the life of Dale Pierre. An interesting argument, but difficult. To get the Court's attention, you had to make your language virtually insulting.

In the meeting on January 10, the ACLU therefore put Athay's venture next to last on their list. But by Friday afternoon, with the sad word coming from Giauque that Mikal Gilmore was not signing any papers, Gil Athay went to Judge Anderson's Court. Anderson was a rigid Mormon, but he was also the only Judge available at that hour. While there was hardly any realistic hope, Athay got caught up, nonetheless, in his own reasoning, and came to feel he had a good shot. Judge Anderson had listened carefully. The basic problem, however, remained. Nobody wanted to face the sinister merits of the argument. Judge Anderson turned him down.

                Having failed there, Athay had gone to Judge Lewis on Saturday afternoon, but by now, the legal weakness of his case was apparent.

                He had no statistics to offer. He couldn't show that 50 percent of the state population, say, had once thought Dale Pierre should be executed, but now because of the emotionalism of the Gilmore case, the figure had gone up to 90 percent. Nothing to muster but logic.

                So Athay lost again in Judge Lewis's Court, and knew as he fought his way past the press in the corridor, that one way or another, he would try to get to the U.S. Supreme Court tomorrow.

The Utah Coalition Against the Death Penalty held its meeting in the State Office Building auditorium on Saturday afternoon and Julie Jacoby thought it was all rather decorous. The only outsider who got up to speak was Henry Schwarzschild, and he didn't go on for long. It was best if locals did the talking. Professor Wilford Smith, a bona fide Mormon from BYU, was a true catch, and there was Frances Farley, who was not only a Utah State Senator but a woman, and Professor Jefferson Fordham from the University of Utah Law School, then James Doobye, President of the Salt Lake City chapter of the NAACP. Buttons were available at the door—WHY DO WE KILL PEOPLE WHO KILL PEOPLE TO SHOW THAT KILLING PEOPLE IS WRONG?—and the program said, "Your donations are greatly appreciated."

                Hoyle counted the house at 175, a decent turnout. There were men and women present that Julie didn't know, plus all the ACLU folk she could recognize. It was what you could call the liberal community in Salt Lake.

                Once again, the committed were preaching to the converted. In Julie's mind it was futile. Everyone knew the mouse was fighting the elephant.

                Nonetheless, they wanted to do something. The idea, as Julie saw it, was not to let those unthinking bloodthirsties swallow the day without some resistance. The world was watching Utah, and so they wanted the world to know some people in Utah did not agree with the prevailing forces.

                In fact, they got some publicity. The Salt Lake Tribune gave them the front page of the second section and ran a marvelous picture of Dean Andersen of St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral in front of a beautiful banner a couple of students had made. It was navy blue with white letters and said, "NO EXECUTION."

SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

"Official Blood Bath"

Protestors Say of Utah Death Penalty

Salt Lake, Jan. 6—The execution of Gary Mark Gilmore has turned into a "super bowl of violence," an Episcopal priest charged Saturday.

                "It is complete with a Barnum and Bailey circus atmosphere and movie rights, reserved seats, T-shirts and love letters. We could all laugh about it, but in two days a team of volunteers will kill Gary Mark Gilmore without appeal," the Very Rev. Robert Andersen said.

DESERET NEWS

Salt Lake, Jan 5—About 15 or so bishops from the National Council of Churches are expected to arrive Sunday afternoon to participate in a Sunday-Monday vigil at Utah State Prison.