Over the next four years Johnny Garrett paced his cell, conversed with his voices, and waited to be executed. And waited. And waited. Johnny may have inhabited the cell in Huntsville, but he did not really live there. Johnny lived apart, in a personal universe peopled by Indians, Nazis, and dead relatives.
As far as the guards and inmates were concerned, they were more than happy to leave Johnny alone. He was too unpredictable. Usually he was fine. Months on end could pass without incident. Then, out of the blue, something would set Johnny off, and anyone who witnessed the explosion that followed would forever keep his distance. One never knew what lit Johnny’s fuse. There was the time a guard said something—no one ever figured out what it was. Seconds later a radio came flying straight for the guard’s head. Only the bars on Johnny’s cell interrupted the heavy missile’s trajectory, thus coming between Johnny and a possible second murder charge. The very next day, when Johnny was dragged before a disciplinary panel, he denied everything. As usual, he was being framed. He had done nothing. And, oddly enough, Johnny seemed to believe what he was saying.
In 1986, when Jonathan and I came to Huntsville and first examined Johnny, the guard who ushered him into the examining room whispered to us, “That’un there’s a strange’un.” Prisoners must be pretty strange for guards to take notice.
Ever since the advent of Thorazine and the like, with the slow demise of the state hospital system, prisons have become repositories of disruptive, impoverished, mentally ill men. Psychotic, aggressive men who just a few years ago would have lived out their days muttering quietly to themselves or raising havoc on the back wards of state hospitals now make the rounds of prisons, shelters, and a dwindling assortment of available public psychiatric institutions. About a third of their nights are spent tossing and turning on prison pallets; another third in shelters, on the streets, or “depending on the kindness of strangers”; and another third struggling to keep warm between the thin mattresses and polyester blankets of mental hospitals. Because so many poor, sick men now make their homes in prison cells, their keepers get lots of clinical experience—more, perhaps, than many psychiatric residents. As the guards become increasingly accustomed to this clientele, even their most psychotic charges start to look relatively normal.
Not Johnny. Johnny may have looked sane to the trial judge and jury, but to the experienced eyes of the Huntsville guards, Johnny looked crazy. That says something. Johnny’s wariness far exceeded the adaptive suspiciousness necessary for survival on death row. He trusted no one, least of all his attorneys. (Then again, as will become clear, not all of his attorneys were trustworthy.) Johnny heard voices. Actually, he did not just hear them, he kept up running conversations with them. His nocturnal altercations kept the other inmates awake. “Go to bed, already, ya crazy bastard!” they shouted. Sometimes Johnny became these voices; he turned into Yoni Red Eagle or the Nazi Commandant. When this happened his tiermates knew that they were in the company of a bona fide “loony.” “Shut the fuck up, ya Nazi bastard, or I’ll do it for you.” “If you don’t cut that out, Chief, I’ll tell you where I’m gonna stick one of them arrows!” came hoots from the far ends of the cell block. Fortunately, Johnny’s excursions to Never Never Land, or wherever he went, were relatively infrequent. Usually Johnny was just a naive kid, a hayseed, who had not aged a day since the murder of Sister Catherine.
Johnny was one of the only death row inmates whose hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, and excursions to fantasy land caused the prison psychiatrist to make a diagnosis of schizophrenia. When a death row psychiatrist calls a condemned man schizophrenic, you can be sure the inmate is very, very sick. The doctor prescribed Thorazine. Thorazine proved useless. No amount of it, or for that matter of any of the other chemicals the prison doctor prescribed, put a damper on Johnny’s voices.
A death row psychiatrist’s allegiance is torn between Hippocrates and the state. If a condemned person is insane, he cannot be executed. However, if the doctor treats him properly and brings him back to his senses, that patient will be put to death. How should a prison doctor interpret the medical injunction, “Above all do no harm”? As Koko, the Mikado’s Lord High Executioner, once said, “Here’s a pretty mess.” In Johnny’s case, the psychiatrist opted to treat, but since the medication never even touched Johnny’s hallucinations, the doctor was never faced with the guilt of hastening Johnny’s demise. His conscience was clear.
Jonathan and I had not come to Huntsville just to see Johnny Garrett. Johnny was but one of more than thirty young murderers in the United States who had been condemned to death before their eighteenth birthdays. We would be studying fourteen of them in prisons from coast to coast.
Over the preceding years we had evaluated fifteen adult condemned murderers. Those we examined were nothing like the cold, calculating thugs we had seen on the silver screen—the ones who ground toothbrushes into shivs and slid them between the ribs of wholesome, clean-cut, all-American prison guards. (Nor, for that matter, did the guards fit their Hollywood images, but that’s another story.) We met no Jimmy Cagneys or Robert Mitchums among the inmates in the prisons we visited. We found ourselves, rather, in the company of a pathetic crew of intellectually limited, dysfunctional, half-mad, occasionally explosive losers. Long before these men wound up on death row, their similarly limited, primitive, impulsive parents had raised them in the only fashion they knew. They battered them. They used them sexually. They sold their child bodies to buddies in exchange for drugs or food or money. They neglected them. Sometimes they even tried to kill them. These brutish parents had set the stage on which our condemned subjects now found themselves playing out the final act. It was a drama generations in the making. The mothers and fathers of our subjects had held their children out of the open windows of moving cars; they had set them on fire; they had shot at them; they had slashed them with knives and machetes. But in spite of their efforts to destroy them, the children had lived to adulthood. They had lived to perpetrate on others the violence that had been visited upon them. That’s how traditions get started. Now the state, in loco parentis, was about to finish the job the mothers and fathers had bungled.
During our study of condemned adults, Jonathan and I learned to our surprise that, in certain states, children—minors—could be sentenced to death. In some states, a child as young as age thirteen could be put to death. In others there was no lower age limit. What sorts of children, we wondered, could be deemed so vicious and depraved as to warrant a death sentence? We decided to try to find out. Since, in the mid-1980s, Texas housed the largest number of condemned juveniles in the United States, it was the obvious place for us to start. Johnny was just one of fourteen research subjects.
Most people don’t realize that the United States has a death penalty for juveniles. We are one of the few countries in the world in which such a sentence is possible. In all Western European countries the death penalty for adults as well as children has been abolished. Most countries in which the death penalty is still an option exempt minors under the age of eighteen years. In 1983, our own American Bar Association adopted a resolution opposing “in principle, the imposition of capital punishment upon any person for any offense committed while under the age of eighteen.” Nevertheless, the sentence of death for juveniles has remained on the books in many states. At the time of our study, over thirty youngsters were actually awaiting execution in fifteen states, extending from New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the East, to Florida in the South, and all the way west to Texas. The United States shares this tradition with such countries as Iran, several emerging African nations, and an island or two in the Caribbean.
The Supreme Court has articulated the principle of “evolving standards of decency.” Given that concept, one might assume that in the United States these kinds of sentences would never be carried out. After all, few juveniles, homicidal or otherwise, give the death penalty a second thought when they commit their crimes. Maybe the option is left on the books in the vain hope of deterring a few potentially violent youths from acting on their homicidal impulses; such, we discovered, is not the case. In fact, during a twelve-month period in the mid-1980s, a period that coincided by chance with the start of our study of condemned juveniles, three young adults were executed in the United States for crimes for which they had been convicted and condemned as juveniles. Two of these sentences were carried out in Texas. Prior to 1985, the last person executed in the United States for a crime committed when he was a juvenile was James Andrew Echols. James, a black youngster, was electrocuted in Texas on May 7, 1964, for the rape of a white female. Thus Texas has the distinction of having terminated one era of juvenile executions and inaugurated the next.
I doubt that Jonathan or I will ever forget our first sight of Johnny Garrett. He was the very caricature of a madman: long, light brown, uncombed, wavy, shoulder-length hair; a brown, untrimmed moustache and beard; dark, sunken hollows for eyes; and a lethal glare.
Given Texas’s Draconian record, Jonathan and I expected the young condemned inmates we saw to exhibit fear, or at least a little anxiety. Johnny did not. The wild mystic who came before us expressed more concern about his spiritual being than about the prospect of losing his corporeal one. Johnny, we discovered, had created his own Jehovah-less religion in which he was a messiah. (Of note, his mother was a Jehovah’s Witness.) Johnny explained that he was what he termed an “Odious.” (Neither Jonathan nor I smiled.) An “Odious,” Johnny said, was a worshipper of the Norse god, Odin. Johnny was also an Aryan and a Hitler fan. The Holocaust, Johnny declared, was a hoax perpetrated by the Jews. (Jonathan and I had heard that one before.) Just when we thought we understood who Johnny was, or thought he was, he would volunteer another piece of information to confuse us. Johnny, it seems, was also a Cherokee.
“How’s that, Johnny?” I asked. “Run that by me again.”
“Inside me, I tell the white half to go to Hell,” Johnny explained. We had no idea what he was talking about. Time being of the essence, we would not even try to clarify that issue. Other prisoners were waiting to be evaluated. In those days, Jonathan and I had a marvelous capacity, when we didn’t understand what a patient was saying, to dismiss it as gibberish. Therefore, while Johnny was laying his cards on the table, trying to tell us who he was, we were telling him to put his cards back in the pack and set the deck aside.
Every so often during our examination Johnny would pause, fall silent, and look away, as though he were listening to something Jonathan and I could not hear. “Johnny, you seem to be hearing voices that aren’t there,” I ventured. This is one of the dumber statements psychiatrists are taught to make. Jonathan and I have since dropped it from our repertoire for reasons that will become obvious.
Johnny shook his head vigorously. No. No. No.
“You mean you don’t hear voices that aren’t real?”
“No. Of course not. The voices are real!”
(Jonathan and I now ask, “Can you ever talk to someone in your head?”)
“What do the voices say?”
“They tell me what to do.”
“Like what?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Do you know who they are?”
Johnny paused and his eyes flitted back and forth.
“Whose voices?”
“I can hear Aunt Barbara.” Johnny sounded softer, less angry.
“She told me to trust you. To confide in you.”
Lots of people who are lonely and scared find comfort in imaginary conversations. We promptly dismissed Aunt Barbara as a normal, expectable phenomenon. In spite of Johnny’s having Aunt Barbara’s blessing to talk with us, every so often, in the midst of recounting tales about his childhood, Johnny would suddenly fall silent and stare straight ahead. At these times, his features would harden and his eyes would glow with the fury we had seen at the start of our meeting. Had Aunt Barbara changed her mind? Was she now telling Johnny to keep his mouth shut?
Gingerly we approached the topic of Johnny’s crime. To our amazement, Johnny was unfazed by our questions. His explanation was straightforward. Someone else out there, on the other side of the prison walls, had killed Sister Catherine; he, Johnny Garrett, was taking the rap. What is more, he knew who it was, but he couldn’t say. If he told, something bad would happen to his family. In fact, he decided that he probably had said too much already.
The diagnostic picture was obvious. Delusions, hallucinations, feelings of being controlled from outside. Jonathan and I were convinced that Johnny was schizophrenic. For once we were in agreement with the prison psychiatrist.
Getting a history from Johnny Garrett was a challenge. A voice in his head kept interfering. He would start to answer, think better of it, and shut down. It was an art to overcome this obstacle—an art that, in those days, we had not fully mastered.
“Tell us about your childhood, Johnny.” There, that was a pretty simple question. Johnny’s voices allowed him to respond.
“When I was born, the welfare was gonna take me away. They said my mother was unfit.”
“Why was that?”
“She had some of these here nervous breakdowns.”
We learned that between her bouts of madness, Johnny’s mother had allied herself with a series of violent partners; each proved more abusive to her and to her children than the last. We also learned that when Johnny was very young, while his mother was psychiatrically hospitalized, Johnny’s grandparents took care of him. This arrangement sounded like a good thing. But when Johnny was three and a half years old, and his mother emerged from one of her hospitalizations, she wanted him back. She got him. A battle for custody ensued, and throughout his childhood and adolescence Johnny was pulled back and forth between the two households, his mother’s and his grandparents’.
Johnny had lots of fathers. In order to keep track of them, Johnny numbered them chronologically, one through four. Johnny was uncertain which one was his real father, his biological father. Some folks said it was father number one; others said father number two was his daddy. Father number one, a fierce man, was not around long, and Johnny felt lucky to have escaped the brunt of his rages. “He beat my mom and my brother.… He beat my brother with a baseball bat.… He liked beating women. I seen him.” When it came to father number one, Johnny thought he had gotten off easy compared to his brother. The next three fathers were a different story.
“My second father, he beat me real bad when I was small,” Johnny explained. “I have marks on my behind. They say that he sat me on a hot stove because I wouldn’t stop crying.”
“Can we look?” Johnny nodded assent. Johnny bent over and lowered his pants. A deep scar, about three inches long and a half inch wide, extended diagonally outward, starting from Johnny’s anus and terminating in the middle of his left buttock—a shiny canyon where seared muscle and flesh must have slowly knitted together.
Scars on Johnny’s back and arms, clearly the results of beatings, attested further to the quality of Johnny’s relationships with his fathers. But it was the relentless assaults of father number three, not just upon his body but also on his very soul, that fractured forever whatever had made Johnny a whole person. Now, in a monotone reminiscent of Marie Moore, Johnny described what had happened to him when father number three moved into his mother’s trailer.
“Him and a friend came home. Mom was at work. My baby sisters and brother were asleep. My big brother was with my uncle. I just came home from the lake. I had a cat with kittens. I heard my baby cats. I found one of the kittens in the garden. I picked it up. I went over to the basket. I bent over to put the kitten in the basket. Then he came over.”
“Who?”
“My stepfather. My third dad. He was with his friend. He gave me a choice. Suck him and his friend or be beaten up.” Johnny paused and cleared his throat. “He made me swallow it.”
The crazy, illogical utterances had stopped. As he related this event, Johnny was coherent, clear as a bell.
“Did it ever happen again, or was that the only time?”
“He did it every chance he got. He’d come check me out of school. He’d take me home. He’d make me strip.” Now, the feelings caught up with the words. Johnny was unable to continue. He paused, took a deep breath.
“He made me bend over on the floor.… He made me spread my legs and entered me that way … he fucked me in my ass.”
The words were familiar. Billy had said pretty much the same thing.
In fact, in the decade since our first meeting with Johnny, we have seen more than a dozen violent men whose rage could be traced back to early, repeated experiences of being sodomized.
I did not know what to say.
Finally Johnny broke the silence. “After they got the divorce, they kept coming back.”
“They?”
“Different dudes. He, my third father, brought friends over. They took pichurs. They made fewums.”
“Fewums? What’s that?” I asked.
“You know. Fewums with a camera.”
“What kind of films?”
“One was called Big Brother Gets Banged. There was one called Mother’s Lover.”
I had nothing to say. Fortunately, I did not have to because Johnny continued. “They used animals. In one fewum a donkey had sex with a woman.”
“That’s impossible,” I challenged, as though I knew what I was talking about.
“No, it’s not impossible!” Johnny was definite. It was obvious to him that I knew nothing about making porn films. “They had to lift its front part up on a pulley. She was laying back on the bed. They lowered it down on her.” Then he added, as if to supplement my education, “They used lots of different animals.”
I tried to sound casual as I asked questions Yale had never taught me to ask about practices I had heard of but only half believed ever really happened.
“Johnny, were you ever in those films?” I asked.
“Not with the donkey. There was this big collie. This male collie. They had it fuck me. They took pichurs.”
Silence again. I decided to skip the details.
“Who else was in these films?” I asked. I wanted proof.
“I remember a dark-haired prostitute. They called her Sunshine.… I saw children as young as seven years old having sex with adults.” Johnny did not know the names of most of the adults. “They never showed their faces. Just the kids.”
So the identity of the adults was protected. Only the kids were exposed. What Johnny told me rang true. I had once heard a lecture by an FBI agent. He talked about how children used in pornography fear for the rest of their lives that their identities and the perverted acts they were once forced to perform will some day come to light.
“Didn’t you tell anyone?”
“No. I was ashamed.”
Johnny was more terrified of being recognized in the pornographic films he had made as a child than he was of his impending execution. He had not even told his attorneys about the films.
Johnny was not the first death row inmate, and would not be the last whom Jonathan and I saw, who preferred death to disclosure of his past. At the end of our examination, I asked Johnny to allow me to tell his attorney what he had told me. Johnny hesitated. “It could help your case,” I encouraged.
Johnny was not convinced.
“They might use it. They might humiliate me,” came Johnny’s response.
“No, it won’t be used that way. The lawyer will use what we share with him just for your appeal,” I reassured. Patiently, I explained that the judge should have known about these porno movies at the time of Johnny’s trial. These experiences could have been used for purposes of mitigation. It might not be too late. I assured Johnny that he could trust his lawyer to use the information only to try to save Johnny’s life. He would not use it to humiliate him. Reluctantly, Johnny agreed to let me share the secrets of his childhood with his lawyer. As I left, I repeated my assurances that Johnny could trust his own lawyer.
I was wrong. Actually, I was right and I was wrong. I was right that Johnny’s lawyer would not make public Johnny’s humiliations; he kept them secret. I was wrong that he could be trusted to use them to help Johnny. Johnny’s court-appointed attorney kept those secrets so well that, as far as I could tell, he never even bothered to read about them himself. When I sent him my report about Johnny, I assumed that he would run with the information. I provided him with evidence of brain damage, psychosis, torture, child pornography. All of these issues should have been raised at Johnny’s trial, if not at the guilt-innocence phase, then at least at the sentencing phase. These were important appeals issues. But this lawyer did not run with the information I sent him—nor did he walk. He sat on it. When my report arrived on his desk, he shoved it into a cardboard file box with the rest of the papers pertaining to Johnny’s case, and promptly forgot about it. The beatings, the burn, the sodomy, the psychosis, the brain damage, the pornography—everything that Jonathan and I identified that might have been of help remained secret, locked in Johnny’s mind and stuffed in a file box in the attorney’s office.