After the botched springtime execution of a black man in Oklahoma, questions about the humaneness and racial equity of capital punishment were in the news. The next person in the United States scheduled to die was Willie Trottie, a black man who had murdered his common-law wife and her brother. I visited Trottie on death row at the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville and filed a report a few months before the Ferguson riot erupted.
In a strange bit of meaningful coincidence, Trottie typed his appraisal of my story from his prison cell on the very night of Michael Brown’s killing. The envelope was stamped with pictures of Christmas wreaths and the caption “Joy to the World.” I received his correspondence after I had returned from Missouri.
Long letter short: Trottie was not happy with the piece, calling it biased and unfair.
You being my FIRST interview, he wrote, I should not have expected much from the “media,” or rather “PRO-DEATH” reporters . . .
Everyone is a media critic nowadays, I supposed.
Trottie’s letter was sad and deflating. Even though his case was open and shut—he’d admitted to murdering two people and shooting two others—he characterized his homicidal rampage as a crime of passion rather than one of premeditated murder. And premeditation is a prerequisite for the death chamber. Trottie argued in his letter that his court-appointed attorney did not—and did not allow him—to make this important distinction to the jury.
It wasn’t justice that the system was seeking, Trottie argued. It was the quick and easy death of a black man.
I didn’t buy his legal distinction when I’d met him then and I wasn’t buying it now. But what would it have hurt to let the man make his case to the jury? Every American is entitled to that.
Trottie seemed equally perturbed by the claim of his former sister-in-common-law that he had written her from prison asking that she place money in his commissary account so that he might purchase snack cakes and skin lotions.
She was lying out her teeth, penned Trottie, ever the jailhouse lawyer. I’m sure she retained those letters as proof?
Willie Trottie was pronounced dead at 6:35 p.m. on September 10, 2014—twenty-two minutes after receiving a lethal injection of phenobarbital. His last words were: I’m going home, going to be with the Lord. Find it in your hearts to forgive me. I’m sorry.
He closed his eyes, then his mouth, and then he moved no more. His sister-in-common-law was in attendance. She said she did not—and never would—forgive Trottie. And she had never bothered to keep his letters.