It was a far cry from Yale and a stone’s throw from the death chamber. Jonathan and I found ourselves inside the prison, trapped together in a steel cage through which all visitors to the Florida State Penitentiary must pass. It was nip and tuck whether we would ever get in to examine the inmates, much less out again. Behind us an electronically controlled set of sliding steel bars had already slammed shut, separating us from the entrance area through which we had come. A few feet in front of us a second row of steel bars came between us and the corridor leading to the inmates. Crowding us on our right loomed a temperamental metal detector. On our left stood a table upon which, at the moment, rested an assortment of Jonathan’s worldly goods: his watch, two sets of keys, and a Cross pen. Underneath the table sat his medical bag.
For some inexplicable reason, in spite of my metal earrings and watch, I had sailed soundlessly through the metal detector. But Jonathan had beeped twice. He seemed unable to make peace with the suspicious machine. An hour had elapsed since we first set foot on state property. It was 10 A.M. and we had not yet examined a single prisoner. In fact, we had not even seen an inmate save a lone trusty who moved methodically up and down the corridor beyond our cage, slowly pushing a floor polisher back and forth over the already glistening white linoleum. We marveled at the cleanliness of this passage; its hygiene would have been the envy of Yale–New Haven Hospital, not to mention Bellevue.
“Why do you think they keep the floor so clean?” I whispered to Jonathan.
“Wouldn’t want anyone to catch a cold on the way to the chair,” he muttered back. Jonathan dug his hands in his trouser pockets and came up with a small luggage key and an errant paper clip, overlooked during his first two bouts with the machine. He had already removed his jacket and shoes, and he appeared a bit forlorn standing in his stocking feet. Shoes, the guard explained, have metal in the instep. Blazers have buttons. Jonathan tried again. Still he beeped.
“Trah yore belt,” coached the guard. Jonathan fumbled with its small metal buckle and slid it out through the loops of the waistband.
“This could get embarrassing,” I hissed. Jonathan was not amused. Later that evening one of the public defenders informed us that the guard controlling this aspect of our clearance into the prison could set the machine at whatever sensitivity suited his fancy.
“If they don’t like you,” he explained, “they can make the fillings in your teeth beep.” Clearly, this guard did not like us. We have never been very popular at Starke. We are interlopers, interrupters of rhythms and routines. Worse, we are there to “get off” dangerous criminals who deserve to die. That is how most of the guards see us. They are not about to make things easy for us. Only if we are willing to humble ourselves and remove whatever article of clothing they designate are we allowed to enter.
On his fourth try, Jonathan and the metal detector made peace with each other, and he was allowed to pass. Even the guard, whose function it was to escort us to the examining rooms, looked relieved. Jonathan slipped into his shoes, slid his belt through the loops of his trousers, buckled it, and put on his jacket. I picked up my yellow lined pads and roller ball pens from the table top, and Jonathan reached under the table and retrieved his medical bag. “We’re off!” exclaimed Jonathan, his usual good humor having returned.
“Not so fast, Doctor. What’s this?” demanded the guard, scowling at the medical bag in Jonathan’s hand. He acted as though he had never seen an object like it before in his life.
“This? It’s just my medical bag. I carry my instruments in it.” Psychiatrists have it easy when it comes to entering prisons. A few pads and something to write with are all we usually need to do our job. But neurologists are different. They need all sorts of instruments to do theirs: reflex hammers, tuning forks, ophthalmoscopes, stethoscopes, blood pressure cuffs, flashlights, ergometers for measuring muscle strength, and a variety of objects such as cotton swabs and safety pins for testing sensory modalities.
“Can I take a look-see, Doctor.” This was not a question.
During the next half hour we stood back silently as the guard scrutinized, palpated, squeezed, shook, and whenever possible, pulled apart each of the instruments in Jonathan’s bag. Things seemed to be going well.
Suddenly the atmosphere changed. “Hello. What have we heah, Doctor?” The guard stared at Jonathan as though he had just discovered a semiautomatic masquerading as an ophthalmoscope. Jonathan peered at the offending item.
“It’s a safety pin.”
The guard studied the object, turning it over and over between his thumb and index finger, opening and closing it. He looked stumped.
“It’s for testing one of the senses; you know, pain—pin prick. It’s part of the neurologic examination,” Jonathan explained.
The guard thought long and hard. His speech slowed, and his Southern accent became increasingly pronounced, one syllable words stretching into two. “Well now, Doctor,” he drawled, “we cay-ent have something lahk thay-et come into the prison, now, cay-en we?” He spoke to Jonathan as though he were addressing a slightly dim-witted seven-year-old. He obviously relished locking horns with the big-city professor from up north. “Someone maht get hurt.”
Jonathan is not accustomed to being thwarted. He needed that pin to perform a thorough neurologic examination. He would reason with the guard. Jonathan does not give up; unfortunately, neither did the guard, who stood silently, arms now crossed in front of his chest.
“Forget it, Jonathan,” I whispered, “or we’ll never get into the prison to test anything.”
We began to catch on that our tedious progression into the prison did not reflect a laid-back Southern way of life, nor were we experiencing justifiable caution on the part of prison personnel. We were being harassed. Jonathan relinquished the safety pin. “We ca-yen return it to you later, Doctor, if you’d lahk,” the guard reassured him.
Having tasted victory, the guard now threw himself into the rest of his task with gusto. The leisurely pace of his initial search had ended; fingers moved deftly through the pockets and compartments of the medical bag, exploring every hollow and crevice.
Once more, a look of discovery. “Hello. What have we here, Doctor?”
Jonathan and I looked at each other. I raised my eyebrows. Jonathan shrugged. What could possibly have caused such concern? The guard’s expression remained serious as he continued to forage. Finally, a smile as he carefully maneuvered the incriminating evidence up the side of the bag and into his palm. One by one, he placed the offending objects on the table: a penny, a nickel, a dime, and a quarter. We stared, first at the coins, then at the guard, then at each other. We were baffled.
“Money, Doctor. Money. You know the rules for visitors. You cannot bring money into the prison. It’s a rule.”
Now Jonathan smiled, an endearing, self-deprecating smile. He was no longer angry. This was obviously just a small misunderstanding. He could explain.
I watched in disbelief as Jonathan attempted to teach the guard about the phenomenon of stereognosis. He explained: These innocent discs of differing shapes and sizes—coins with raised pictures of historical figures and patriotic mottos—were not brought into the prison to function as legal tender. They simply enabled the neurologist to assess a person’s ability to distinguish one item from another through touch. How sensitive were the person’s fingertips? For example, patients with peripheral nerve damage from, say, alcoholism, cannot feel subtle differences in shape and size. Similarly, patients with diseases like syphilis, which damage the posterior columns of the spinal cord, have difficulty with this task. The guard waited. Jonathan continued: Assuming these sensory pathways were intact, and the tactile message reaches the brain, can the patient then process the information? Can he then communicate verbally what he has perceived? Patients with dementia and certain kinds of strokes cannot do this. By the time Jonathan concluded the lesson, it was clear, at least to me, that the entire examination of the central and peripheral nervous systems hinged on the use of these four coins.
“Sorry, Doc. No money.”
Poker-faced, the guard handed the coins to Jonathan. “Whah don’t you take these here coins and that there safety pin back to your car and lahk them in the trunk,” he suggested. The implicit message was, “Then just try to get back in here before closing time.”
The guard had won. Without a word, Jonathan placed the forty-one cents next to the safety pin on the table. At last the bars of our cage slid open, admitting us to the glistening white corridor. It was almost eleven o’clock.
The clinical evaluation of a violent person is complex. It is time-consuming and requires the expertise of disciplines other than just psychiatry and neurology. (It also requires more than small change.) Certain neuropsychological tests and educational assessments can identify qualities of impairment that psychiatric and neurologic evaluations do not tap. Jonathan and I needed additional talent to do a thorough job. I turned for help to an old friend, Barbara Bard. Barbara, an expert in special education and a colleague from Long Lane days, readily agreed to join us and do the learning disabilities assessments. She threw in some hearing tests as well. We had no funds for a licensed psychologist, however a psychology graduate student, Marilyn Feldman, took time off from her studies to come to Starke and do basic psychological testing. Neither Barbara nor Marilyn required much coaxing. Death row had a certain cachet. Of note, neither of them had any difficulty getting through the metal detector. They, their pencils, booklets, and forms appeared harmless to guards and metal detectors.
We found Barbara and Marilyn awaiting us in the large dining room that, we discovered, was to be our communal examining room for the week. It did not matter that Barbara’s and Marilyn’s evaluations required silence, that mine required confidentiality, or that Jonathan’s required privacy. These were the accommodations that the warden had furnished. We considered discussing our needs with the guards, but realized we would only waste more time. The dining room, its tables and seats riveted to the floor, was the only area that the prison was willing to provide us at this time. (A year or two later, when we returned to study condemned juveniles, the warden was more accommodating and turned over the entire infirmary to our team of clinicians.) But, for the duration of this trip, the dining room was it. Take it or leave it. We took it. Now that we were all together, a guard who had been awaiting our arrival slowly lifted the receiver of a phone on the wall and called the cell blocks to summon the prisoners. It would be another twenty minutes before the first inmate arrived. Each of us used this time to set up shop as far away from each other as possible, to carve out for ourselves a small area of relative privacy and quiet.
As each inmate arrived, a guard removed the shackles chaining his ankles to one another and unlocked the handcuffs that linked his wrists behind his back. The inmate then docilely placed his wrists together in front of him, whereupon they were recuffed to each other. Some of the inmates used the moments between shacklings to rub their reddened wrists where handcuffs had been fastened too tightly. Over time we learned that the degree of tightness of handcuffs varied according to the guard and his relationship with the inmate. You learn a lot of things in prison.
The guards at Starke were a pretty rigid crew, nothing like the laid-back Texas guards with whom we would share lunch in Huntsville a year or two later. The Huntsville guards were unfailingly gracious. When one considers the fact that these facilities—death rows, that is—are created to serve the same purpose (i.e., housing and dispatching the condemned), they are remarkably different, one from another. At Huntsville, you get the feeling from the top down that they are not too keen about what they are doing—the execution aspects of their jobs. One of the deputy wardens even said so. He was a former New Yorker, a black man who had worked in prisons back east before New York State reinstated capital punishment. In fact, he seemed almost apologetic about his job in Texas. In Texas, he explained, they used lethal injection. This, he asserted, was far more humane than electrocution, the method of dispatching prisoners in Florida. Jonathan liked him so much that, on our second trip to Texas, he brought him a dozen New York bagels.
At Starke, on the other hand, the deputy warden and the guards seemed to have no qualms about their work, at least none that showed. On my very first visit, the guard escorting the prisoner I was about to see growled in the inmate’s ear, “I’ll see you fry.” Granted, this remark was in response to a rather obscene comment by the inmate regarding the tightness of his handcuffs.
On one of my expeditions to Starke, I joined a small group of visitors on a conducted tour of death row. Until then, all of my contacts with inmates had taken place in the dining room, the infirmary, or the administrative area, and I was curious to see the conditions of death row itself. I also had an ulterior motive. One of the men that Jonathan and I had examined on our first visit was refusing to come out of his cell and speak with his lawyers. He had some extremely good issues for appeal, but he had fallen into a deep depression and had lost all hope. He also refused to come out to talk with me. I hoped that my tour would pass his cell and enable me to coax him to come out and resume his appeals. It did (pass his cell); I did (coax him); and he did (come out and resume his appeals).
But three quarters of the way into the tour, to my dismay I realized that it would include a visit to the death chamber. There was no turning back. Gates had already locked behind me, and the only way to return to the infirmary where we were all stationed on that visit was to follow the tour through to its completion. That is how I came to find myself face to face with Old Sparky.
I was shaken. The leader of our tour was the deputy warden of the prison. It would have been hard to imagine a person more different from his Huntsville counterpart. This prison official, a white man, obviously enjoyed his work; indeed, he seemed to throw himself into it. For example, it was not enough to show his already tremulous audience The Chair. He made an extra effort to ensure that we would not forget our tour. Opening a door to the side of a large glass window from which witnesses view electrocutions, he bade us enter the death chamber itself. There, in front of us, within arm’s reach, stood Old Sparky. Ushering us into a small, semienclosed area to the left of the chair, he pointed out a panel of dials and switches. Patiently he described how the executioner first sets the desired voltage and timing. Then, he explained, the executioner signals an officer standing directly behind the chair. This officer, in turn, reaches for a large, metal, leverlike switch attached to the wall and throws it. As he spoke, the officer alongside pulled the lever. The clang, to my ears, was thunderous. It was also cruel, because, as we learned, it was not that loud switch that turned on the electricity. It sounded like it, but it wasn’t. Only after the switch was thrown did the executioner silently push the lethal button. Thus, whoever had the misfortune of being seated in the chair heard the clang and believed that the machine had malfunctioned: he was saved. Only a couple of seconds later did the surprise come.
The deputy warden continued; he explained that the “juice” was administered twice for several seconds each time. But I was not fully listening. I was the one sitting in that chair. I was the one teased into thinking I was saved. And I was the one who suddenly realized I was about to die. It was the stake and the guillotine all over again, only this time there was no Paul Tillich or Madame Defarge watching.
The ordeal was not yet over. I came back to my senses to see the deputy warden seat himself in the chair. “Glenn, show our guests how you fasten the inmates’ wrists to the arms of the chair. Show them how you fasten the ankles with the leather straps.” Glenn did as he was told.
As we left the death chamber and made our way back to the administrative area, the deputy warden took the opportunity to describe the way in which an executioner is selected. The selection process highlights the peculiarities of the role—the honor and the ignominy. According to the deputy warden, Floridians vie for the job. The warden keeps a list of volunteers, and there is fierce competition to get one’s name on it. When an execution is about to take place, the lucky person chosen is alerted. At this time, the state takes elaborate measures to ensure anonymity. According to the deputy warden, only the warden knows the identity of the executioner.
Throughout history, the position of executioner has been a dubious distinction. It would be interesting to study executioners.