EPILOGUE

The journey continues.

In April 2004 Susan Sarandon telephoned to tell me that James Allridge, a man on death row in Texas with whom she had been corresponding, had a date of execution of August 26, and she felt the date was real. She was shaken. I could hear it in her voice. She had written to James for eight years and come to know him as a person, alive and filled with insight, allowing the alchemy of seventeen years on death row to transform his life. On several occasions when I visited Susan in New York, she had shown me James’s art. Using ordinary colored pencils, he had found a most amazing way to draw light out of flowers.

“What should I do?” she asks.

“Just what you’ve been doing,” I answer. “Be his friend. You give him dignity.”

She said that she’d visit him, but try to keep it quiet. (Which proved to be impossible. Media awaited her when she arrived at the prison.)

One month later when Susan and I talked, she dropped a bombshell: “James wants you to be with him if he’s killed.”

I said, “Oh no, Susan, you should be with him. You’ve been his friend for eight years.”

She said, “No, no, Helen, you saw the film, this is what you do.”

I thought, What is this? Life imitating art imitating life?

That’s how it came about that on August 26 when James Allridge became the 325th person killed by the state of Texas, I was with him as his spiritual adviser. His appeals lawyer, Jim Marcus of the Texas Defender Service, and his hardworking team* 5 did their utmost to save James’s life. They had a video made of James’s transformed life and sent it to the six members of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, hoping to convince them to grant clemency, and in the petition to the appeals court and the U.S. Supreme Court James’s legal team presented two new constitutional issues:

The first asked, Does the Eighth Amendment prohibit the state of Texas from incarcerating a prisoner for seventeen years, rehabilitating him into a model inmate, who enhances the safety and stability of the prison society, and then executing him based on the erroneous prediction that he would pose a threat to society if sentenced to life in prison? As had happened in the case of Karla Faye Tucker, James Allridge once again raised the question: Why kill a person who is rehabilitated?

The second questioned the constitutionality of the Texas capital sentencing statute, which, though demanding that a jury find proof beyond reasonable doubt for guilt (a requirement of “due process”), drastically reduced the standard for determining punishment. The Texas statute requires that for a sentence of death to be imposed a jury only need determine the probability that a defendant would continue to pose a threat of future dangerousness to society. The injection of the word probability, however, drains the “beyond a reasonable doubt” of any meaning (it would be like telling the jury it could convict if they believed—beyond a reasonable doubt—that the defendant might be guilty. When Jim told me of the “future dangerousness” argument, I couldn’t help but wonder that if jurors in capital cases already face the impossible task of analyzing people’s past actions to determine the “worst of the worst” murders, how on God’s green earth can they be expected to predict how human beings might act in the future? At least past actions yield tangible evidence that can be examined; but what is the content, the raw matter for predicting future actions? Doesn’t it fly in the face of “due process of law” to punish people for what they might do in the future? The issue of “future dangerousness” raises a constitutional challenge particularly for Texas, which is one of only three states to allow this highly speculative consideration to play a crucial role in life and death decisions made by juries.

Unsurprisingly, the Texas Defender Service’s (TDS) study of 155 Texas capital cases in which prosecutors hired experts to predict defendants’ future dangerousness revealed that the so-called experts’ predictions were wrong 95 percent of the time. (The study, “Deadly Speculation: Misleading Texas Capital Juries with False Predictions of Future Dangerousness” is available at: www.texasdefender.org/publications.htm.)

That’s a stunning number of wrong predictions, but what else can be expected of a process based on sheer speculation? As the TDS study points out, “Beginning in the early 1980s researchers and professionals concluded that ‘mental health professionals cannot predict dangerousness,’ ” and the American Psychiatric Association states, “the unreliability of psychiatric predictions of long-term dangerousness is by now an established fact within the profession.” Predictably, prognostications of future dangerousness, are fertile fields for racial prejudice to insinuate itself. In at least seven death cases reviewed by the TDS a licensed psychologist, hired by the state, testified that, in his opinion, being a member of a minority race makes a defendant more dangerous.

As is their pattern, neither the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals nor the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to consider the constitutional issues raised in James Allridge’s petition. The U.S. Supreme Court did not give a reason for not hearing James’s case (it rarely does). The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (the Texas supreme court for criminal cases) stated that it would not allow consideration of James’s claims because they should have been raised by James’s previous lawyers. (In other words, Sorry, Mr. Allridge. It looks like, even though you have provocative and interesting constitutional challenges, you’re petitioning too late. It’s regrettable that your previous lawyers did not have the smarts and creativity to raise the issues within the timeframe we’ve mandated. So, it looks like you die, Mr. Allridge.)

So, once more we see the machinery of death at work in the courts: procedural requirements valued over substance, legal mechanisms trumping what Jesus called the “weighty matters of justice and mercy.”

I hope I go to my death with a tiny fraction of the poise and grace James Allridge possessed as he stepped into eternity. He asked pardon of the victim’s family, thanked family and friends for loving him, and as calmly as if he were talking about going on an errand, departed with the words: “I came into this world in love and I leave it in love.” And once again I found myself standing as mute witness to the protocol of death, this time in the busiest killing chamber in the United States. The night before James was killed by the state of Texas, another man, Jasen Shane Busby, had been killed, and Jim Marcus predicted fifteen more executions before the end of January 2005. As of September 27, the state of Texas accounted for half of the total number of U.S. executions in 2004. Regional disparity in the application of the death penalty could not be more pronounced, and the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of “equal protection of law” could not be more flagrantly ignored. Yet the official guardians of the Constitution continue to allow procedural requirements to shield them from taking a fresh look at the constitutional challenges that continue to arise in death cases. Justices’ rigid adherence to stay the course of their own legal precedents, no matter how wrongheaded, renders them unwilling to admit, as did Justice Harry Blackmun, that “the death penalty experiment has failed.” And so the southern machinery of death clanks on, for that is what it truly is, a predominantly southern practice that goes back to the days of slavery.

The last cry of the heart is my own.

I invite you to join me in the struggle to end the death penalty in the United States and around the world. Its practice demeans us all.

A page of resources follows. For a jump start go to www.moratoriumcampaign.org. For photos of Dobie Williams, Joseph O’Dell, and Lori Urs and me with Pope John Paul II, go to www.deathofinnocents.com and www.sisterhelen.org.

Now that this book is finished, I’ll once again be on the speaking circuit. It means leaving the quiet writing haven and getting on airplanes again.

See you on the road.