On 27 February 2017, it was announced that the state of Arkansas was going to rush through the execution of eight prisoners in the space of eleven days. It was a pace unseen in recent American history – Arkansas itself had not carried out even a single execution in twelve years. Their reasoning was that their limited supply of midazolam, one of three drugs used in the state’s lethal-injection protocol, was approaching its use-by date and so, by extension, were these eight men. (Arkansas is no stranger to newsworthy death penalty decisions: this is the same state that, in 1992, saw then-governor Bill Clinton rush home from his presidential campaign trail to witness the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a man so mentally impaired by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head that he saved his last meal dessert, a slice of pecan pie, for after his execution. Refusing to pardon the man was a PR move on Clinton’s part. He wanted to look less soft.)
In a letter dated 28 March 2017, signed by twenty-three former death row staff from across the nation, they pleaded with Governor Asa Hutchinson:
‘We believe that performing so many executions in so little time will impose extraordinary and unnecessary stress and trauma on the staff responsible for carrying out the executions … Even under less demanding circumstances, carrying out an execution can take a severe toll on corrections officers’ wellbeing. For those of us who have participated in or overseen executions, we have directly experienced the psychological challenges of the experience and its aftermath. Others of us have witnessed this same strain in our colleagues. The paradoxical nature of corrections officers’ roles in an execution often goes unnoticed: the officers who have dedicated their professional life to protecting the safety and wellbeing of prisoners are asked to participate in the execution of a person under their care.’
The letter to Governor Hutchinson had little effect; within a month of it being sent, four men were executed and the other four had been given stays unrelated to its attempted intervention. Even the lesser number of four executions in a week, in one facility, stands alone in the modern history of American capital punishment.
I found Jerry Givens’s name at the bottom of this letter, attached to the news story that I had come across that morning. In the long list of signatories – wardens, captains, a chaplain – he was the only one listed as ‘executioner’. Modern-day executioners are anonymous, or at least they are to us; their identities are kept from newspaper reports, and their jobs are carried out behind prison walls. So why was an executioner not only publicly naming himself, but signing this letter about trauma? What happened?
To me, executioners were always a kind of satellite moon to the death workers I was interested in – they were not one of their group, but they existed within their orbit as other invisible people who work in the death trade. But an executioner is not the crime scene cleaner, scrubbing away the aftermath of something he did not do and cannot change. They are not the mortuary worker in the funeral home receiving the already dead body and writing the name on the refrigerator door. The executioner is there at the transition from life to death; they are the cause of it, in the most basic practical sense – the final part of a machine that carries out the directives of the government and the court, doing the work that others would rightly balk at. What is it like to walk into that room, strap a person into an electric chair and flip the switch? To turn a living, healthy person into a corpse and then go home, having done your job, having ended a human life? Why would a person take that job and keep it?
Here, in this letter, was an executioner trying to save another execution team from whatever it was he experienced. Maybe he would talk to me, and tell me how he felt; it seemed he now had a reason to do just that. I wanted to know how someone who has ended lives by planned, state-sanctioned murder deals with the psychological pressure of that fact. What does death mean to him if it is just another tier of punishment that can be handed down in a court of law? Does he fear death more or less now that he has seen not only the bodies, but the moment it happens?
This is not what I tell the woman at the hotel check-in desk as she’s plugging my credit card number into the system, when she pauses to say with all the honesty of someone who is tired and wants to go home, ‘My God. Why are you in Richmond, Virginia?’
I’ve been trying to pin Jerry down for a year and every time I ask him for a good day to meet he casually says to just let him know the week before I get into town. It’s a vague plan to fly around the world for, but I’ve probably done stupider things. So I wangle some other magazine work in America, the idea being that if he doesn’t turn up the trip isn’t a total bust, and organise the itinerary so that Virginia is on the way – despite the fact that Virginia, located where it is, is hardly on the way to anywhere I’m going.
On the day Jerry and I have agreed to meet, my boyfriend, Clint, and I drive the 250 miles down from Philadelphia in a shitty Nissan rental. I’ve convinced him to come with me because this trip is a little complicated to rely on cabs for, and while it’s a part of my job to talk to people in strange places – basements, remote film sets, small Scottish towns with one cab driver who is always in the shower when you call – after the crime scene cleaner, I’ve finally had enough of sitting and watching the dot of a car move slowly on an app towards me while I worry about patchy signal being the only thing between me and everything falling apart. Also, I’m meeting an actual executioner in a place he hasn’t yet specified, in a part of America where I know nobody – I’ll be honest, I feel weird about that. Not that I’m saying you should bring an English comedian with you if you fear for your life, but they are traditionally better at driving long distances in shitty cars.
It’s late afternoon in January. It’s dark. We’re aiming for Richmond but we don’t know where exactly, and Jerry calls to ask where we are. We’re stuffing our faces with crisps in an empty petrol station wondering just how loose this plan can get. We’re also wondering how long two people can survive on things they find in petrol stations, two people who wouldn’t have to live like this if whoever had done the itinerary factored in stopping for lunch. The car smells like old pizza and so do we. Jerry tells me to meet him at the school. He’ll be out front. Which school? He emails me the address. It’s a school in the suburbs – why does an executioner want to meet me there, hours after class has finished? We drive some more, following the crumbs across the world as he drops them. The licence plates on the vehicles in front of us say ‘Virginia is for lovers’, all of them manufactured by inmates at a prison shop west of the city centre.
It’s 7 p.m. We drive down a quiet street where the streetlights don’t work so well but the headlights of the car briefly illuminate a ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER’ banner hung from the roof of a community hall. We pull up by Armstrong High School, barely lit outside bar the lights from the lobby pooling out on the pavement. There’s nobody around except for the silhouette of a guy smoking by his car. He doesn’t react to our arrival, so I assume he isn’t Jerry. We grab our bags and walk over to the school entrance. Having travelled so far in a car with one working windscreen wiper and a bumper we reattached with a zip tie, I’m sort of resigned to whatever absurdity awaits us. I have no idea what to expect from someone who served as the state’s executioner for seventeen years.
I squint through the glass doors. I can see security guards and metal detectors – that surreal American high-school scene – and a few steps up, on the mezzanine, I can see a black man in his sixties, with glasses and a white beard, bending down so he can peer through the security gates at our faces. He grins and warmly waves us in. Aside from the few people here, it’s still, as far as I can tell, an empty school. Even the hallways off the lobby are dark.
‘They with you, Jerry?’ asks one of the guards.
‘Yeah, they are. All the way from London!’ He chuckles. He has a slow, Southern way of speaking, the kind of deep voice you want to hear on the radio late at night.
The guards go through our bags, pat us down for guns and knives. ‘We’re from England,’ I say awkwardly. ‘We’ve got nothing.’ They smile and wave us through. Jerry gives me a hug and says thanks for coming, he’s glad we made it. ‘We’re going to go and watch a basketball game,’ he says. ‘You like basketball?’
I didn’t expect a basketball game.
We walk through the dim halls, Jerry in his tan trousers and navy jacket, a slight limp from recent knee surgery. We give $14 to a man at a desk with a little petty-cash lunch box and he hands us a couple of ticket stubs, tells us to enjoy the game. ‘They with you, Jerry?’ he asks.
‘Yeah, they with me,’ he smiles, and limps on ahead.
Jerry pushes open the double doors to the high-school gym and the light is dazzling. It smells of fresh varnish and sweat, and the squeaks of shoes on the slick floor deafen. It’s the Wildcats versus the Hawks. We’ve arrived in time for the third quarter, and Jerry takes a seat in the bleachers, waving at people as he passes. The school principal stands grinning in his suit and purple tie by the home basket. A tiny girl with cornrows hugs her brother’s enormous white Nikes in her lap.
Clint and I squeeze in next to him, shoulders hunched in the way that trees grow in a forest so their canopies don’t touch, and Jerry tells me, in words that get lost occasionally in the squeaks and cheers, that he went to this school himself in 1967; when it opened in the 1870s, it was the first school to teach African Americans in Virginia. He tells me that for the last thirty years he’s been mentoring the kids here; he’d come after work, still wearing his prison uniform, and let them ask him anything they wanted about prison life while kicking the ball around at football practice. ‘It gave me some opportunity to steer these kids in the right direction, because a lot of them would go out and do the same thing that their parents did, what their friends did, and they’d end up on Spring Street. That’s where the jail was,’ he says. ‘That’s where they’d execute people.’
‘Travel!’ shouts a coach.
Someone blows a whistle.
Back in 1974, when Jerry first got his job as a correctional officer at the state penitentiary, there was no death penalty in Virginia – there was no death penalty in the country at all. The United States was in the midst of a brief nationwide moratorium on capital punishment, bookended by two court cases. Furman v. Georgia, in 1972, invalidated all death penalty sentences, arguing that they were cruel and unusual, and reduced them to life imprisonment while the country figured out a way of applying them with more consistency and with (supposedly) less racial discrimination. Statutes across the country were amended to meet Supreme Court guidelines, and in 1976, Gregg v. Georgia reopened the doors of the country’s death chambers.
Virginia – one of the thirteen original colonies, and home to founding father Thomas Jefferson’s Charlottesville plantation – has a long history of execution. What is generally agreed to be the first American execution was carried out there in Jamestown, by firing squad, ending the life of Captain George Kendall in 1608 for allegedly plotting to betray the British to the Spanish. But in 1977, when Jerry’s supervisor offered him a role on the ‘death team’, Virginia’s death row was empty. They hadn’t executed anyone there since 1962.
Jerry was just twenty-four years old at the time. If you had asked him then, he would have said he was pro-capital punishment – take a life and your life should be taken. He says he remembered being at a party when he was fourteen, seeing someone walk into the house and shoot dead a girl he’d been too nervous to talk to. The injustice of it had stuck in his mind. So he took the job, which he was told would come with a cash bonus for each execution carried out. When I ask him how many dollars an executioner would get per job, he says he doesn’t know; he never asked. He never accepted any extra payment for what he did, because it would have changed the purpose of his being there. ‘My job was saving lives,’ he says. ‘You know how many times I risked my life saving another inmate’s life, or an officer’s life?’
‘In fights?’
‘Mm-hmm. Stabbing and everything, inside the institution.’
Jerry didn’t know who else the supervisor had asked, but after he accepted the role he and those eight other guys met in the prison basement one night to swear anonymity. Nobody outside the death team knew who was on it. Jerry didn’t even tell his wife – and he wouldn’t, for the entire time he held the position.
Every death penalty state in the country has their own way of appointing an executioner – before the moratorium, some executioners were not even prison staff but worked as freelance ‘electricians’ called in just for the purpose of throwing the switch. In the state of New York, some were known to the public by name – one received death threats, one had his house bombed. Some made lots of money off it, going from state to state, collecting a check for each life ended. Others worked anonymously: one would change the plates on his car in his garage before he left in the middle of the night for the long drive to Sing Sing, so that he could not be identified or traced. The man who operated Florida’s electric chair would already be wearing a hood when the car picked him up at 5 a.m. to take him to the death house – it stayed on until he walked back through his front door. When the moratorium ended, fresh teams were formed across the country (Florida was less covert than most and put out an ad for the job in the paper; they received twenty applications). The new teams learned how to use whatever equipment was left behind by the old ones: gas chambers, electric chairs, nooses and guns.
Virginia’s original electric chair, constructed by inmates in 1908 from an old oak tree, was unpacked and reassembled (Jesus was a carpenter too, and the irony of creating the weapon of your own destruction was not lost on my teenage self – or Nick Cave). In 1982, they prepared it for use on Frank James Coppola – a thirty-eight-year-old former police officer who had bound a woman with the cord from a Venetian blind during a robbery, slammed her head repeatedly into the floor until she was dead, then fled with $3,100 in cash, plus jewellery. Jerry was only the alternate executioner that night. It would not be him who pressed the button for the first time in twenty years – someone else on the team had that job.
There was no media present to report what happened in that room. News items on executions tend to be unreliable and inconsistent anyway – dramatised and exaggerated both ways, bent to the newspaper’s politics. No corrections officials released details of the execution either. But according to one account by an attorney who was present as a witness, as a representative to the General Assembly of Virginia, it did not go well. The antiquated machinery set Coppola’s leg alight; smoke rose to the ceiling and filled the chamber with a foggy haze. During the second and final fifty-five-second jolt of electricity, the attorney heard a sizzling that he described as sounding ‘like cooking flesh’.
Coppola was not the first to experience a botched electrical execution: that wired crown goes to William Kemmler in 1890, New York – an alcoholic who had murdered his common-law wife in a drunken argument, hitting her twenty-five times in the head with a hatchet. He was the first to be executed by electrical current, if we don’t count the old horse they tested the voltage on.
He was also the first to demonstrate that the human skull is a poor conductor of electricity, as is skin: from the autopsy report printed in the New York Times the day after his execution, when the burned skin on his back was removed, the pathologist described his spinal muscles as looking like ‘overcooked beef’. Sweat, however, is an excellent conductor – being essentially salt water and therefore containing more conductive ions than pure water – and most people being walked to a death chamber and strapped into an electric chair will drench themselves in it. Execution teams learned to soak the sponge in saline solution and place it on the condemned person’s shaved head, between the skin and the helmet. Jerry tells me that many modern-day botched executions are as a result of prisons using synthetic sponges – instead of natural ones – which set the head alight.
Two years after the Virginia death team executed Coppola, Linwood Earl Briley sat in that same oak chair. He and his two brothers were responsible for a seven-month robbery and murder spree across the city of Richmond, in 1979, that officially left eleven people dead, though investigators suspected them of killing almost twice that. The lead executioner called in sick that day, so Jerry took the role – strapping the man in, wetting the sponge and placing it on his shaven head, standing behind a curtain and pushing the button that would send the current through his body and stop his heart. Was the previous executioner actually ill, or could he not face the death chamber after what had happened to Coppola, knowing it was his finger that started it all? I can’t ask him – Jerry won’t say who it was. He still respects the promise of anonymity he made that night in the basement when he was twenty-four. At any rate, that person was never the lead executioner again. Of the 113 people killed in the Virginia death chamber since its reopening, the next sixty-two of them were Jerry’s – twenty-five by electric chair, and thirty-seven by lethal injection.
We follow the tail-lights of Jerry’s Kia to Red Lobster for dinner, another brightly lit American chain island in a car-park ocean. Walk through the front doors and before you’re shown a table, you meet the inmates: a tank of condemned lobsters awaiting execution, little rubber handcuffs around their immovable claws, walls of cloudy Perspex dividing up their prison cells. They stare up at us, unblinking.
‘Pick one,’ says Jerry, grinning.
I stand there, Caligula in a cagoule, choosing which one is going to die. They crawl over each other to get a better look at us.
There’s a Charles Addams cartoon I think about sometimes: two half-dressed executioners in a brick alcove, a kind of pre-beheading dressing room, wearing their hoods and cloaks, pulling on their long black gloves. One of them is leaning on his axe saying to the other, ‘The way I see it, if we don’t do it, someone else will.’ It pops into my mind now. Someone else has marked these lobsters for death, and if I don’t pick one someone else will. Even so, I can’t do it. I can’t press the button on a lobster’s life. I tell Jerry I’m going to order something else and he laughs. Clint and I stare into the tank while he wanders off and waves to the staff. They know him here too. He’s halfway to the table and I’m still weighing my guilt next to the four-pound crustaceans.
I’ve barely slid into the booth when he starts telling me that God put him in the position to kill people, so if I’m here to find out why he was chosen for the job, I’ll have to speak to God directly. ‘He had his reasons. I didn’t ask why, I just took on that position. I didn’t put myself in that. You think, at twenty-four years old … and a black man to do this?’ He looks incredulous. ‘But –’ he shrugs – ‘it was gonna be done regardless if I did it or not. Because the state can do it.’ There’s that Charles Addams cartoon again. I glance back at the lobsters. He picks up his menu and says he doesn’t know about us, but he’s going to go for something called the Ultimate Feast.
Paul Friedland writes in his book Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment in France that this image we have of an executioner as an agent of the law, someone whose job it is to carry out a sentence handed down from above, is a relatively modern idea purposely put in place by Enlightenment reformers who were trying to construct a different kind of penal system – one that was rational and bureaucratic, one that dispersed responsibility, and therefore blame, among many cogs in a vast system. Prior to this, in France at least, the executioner was considered an extraordinary being, an outcast, a universally reviled person ‘whose touch was so profane that he could not come into contact with other people or objects without profoundly altering them’. They lived on the edges of towns and married within their kind. The role of executioner was usually one that was inherited: you were damned by having executioners’ blood run in your veins, as if you yourself had let the blade of the guillotine fall. When executioners died, they were buried in a separate section of the cemetery, for fear that their presence – alive, dead, there was no difference – would contaminate the general population. They were untouchables, in the literal sense, given long-handled spoons with which to take produce from market stalls, and wore special insignia so that no one might mistake them ‘for someone honourable’. ‘Throughout the early modern period, and indeed through the Revolution as well,’ writes Friedland, ‘one of the most effective means of impugning someone’s moral character was to insinuate that they had been seen dining with the executioner.’ Jerry politely signalled to the waiter that we were ready for him to take our order.
‘Did the prisoners ever know you were the guy pressing the button?’ I ask. Incarcerated men have a lot of time to think. I imagine they would have their theories about the wardens and captains – being an executioner is not a full-time job.
‘Uh-uh,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘Some of them would guess. They’d get to the end and go, “I’m willing to bet it’s you, Givens, that’s pulling that switch.” I said, “No bud, it ain’t me.” I’m not gonna sit there and tell them that I am! So I laughed it off. “It ain’t me, bud. It ain’t me.”’
Executions, during Jerry’s time, happened at 11 p.m. – as late as possible to allow for last-minute appeals, with a spare hour in case there was a fault with the equipment (miss the midnight deadline and you have to wait for the courts to hand down a new date of execution). Jerry had many waking hours to think about it, watching the clock tick down to either a stay or an order, a life or a death. His job was preparation, for both the inmate and himself.
‘I prepared a guy for his next phase of life,’ says Jerry, forking a deep-fried shrimp as the plate is slid in front of him. ‘I don’t know where he was going, so it’s between him and his maker, between him and God. But my thing is to get you ready. How do you prepare yourself to be killed? I studied him, I talked to him, I prayed with him. Because this is his last everything.’
While he was inside helping the condemned to put their affairs in order, both spiritual and practical, death penalty advocates would gather outside the prison, selling T-shirts, holding banners, celebrating. Abolitionists would crowd around their candles nearby for a silent vigil. To the condemned man, the hours felt like minutes. To the executioner, the seconds dragged as if the hands of the clock were stuck. How do you psychologically prepare yourself for ending the life of someone you’ve been caring for as a warden?
‘I blocked everything out,’ he says. ‘I focused on what I had to do. I don’t talk to nobody. I don’t even look in the mirror, because I don’t want to see myself as the executioner.’
A cheery waiter comes by and puts some drinks down while I picture a man avoiding himself in the mirror. ‘This whole time, with your wife not knowing – didn’t you feel like you wanted to tell her?’
‘No, because if you was my wife, and you knew I had an execution, then whatever stresses I’m going through you’re going to go through too. You’re going to feel for me. So I never put that on her.’
Every state is different, but typically the identity of the executioner is kept vague not only to the inmate and the witnesses but to the death penalty team itself, so everybody feels that it is nothing they did on their own. Sometimes there are two switches pressed simultaneously and the machine decides which button will be live, then automatically deletes the record, so no one can be certain they were the one who dealt the blow – either electrical or chemical. Put enough robotics between you and the act and you can fool yourself into believing it barely happened, like drone strikes. Other times, it’s the person themselves who diffuses the responsibility: Lewis E. Lawes, a warden at Sing Sing from 1920 to 1941, directed the execution of more than 200 men and women in the electric chair but looked away when the switch was flicked, allowing him to claim that he had never seen an execution. But despite the fact that Jerry’s team, like all death teams, split up their tasks among themselves so that no one person shouldered the burden alone, it was only Jerry who pressed the button on the control panel. It was only Jerry who watched the lethal chemicals travel from the syringe in his own hand, down the tube and into the vein of the man strapped to the gurney. But even with this certainty, or maybe because of it, he has managed to place a block between himself and the act of killing someone: God.
Jerry believed the death wasn’t truly an end because there was an afterlife – and so did many of the inmates, after enough years on death row. Even the former atheists needed something to look forward to, some higher power to ask for forgiveness when the state would not give it to them. They needed some hope of an intervention, a last-minute reprieve, some force that might make the phone on the wall of the death chamber ring – another irony, looking for clemency from the same guy who permitted his only son to be killed by way of state execution. It seems that everyone on death row, from the prisoners to the wardens, to the politicians and judges who refused the pardons, shifted the weight of responsibility onto God. I’ve always been wary of anyone using religion as a shield, or a proxy; to me, it says they’re choosing not to think too deeply on whatever it is they’re doing because it doesn’t matter, it’s someone else doing it. They’re only following orders from above. In a place like Virginia’s death house, God is the soft focus everyone puts on the scene.
But for Jerry, all of this is a retrospective rewrite – a first draft with plot holes and contradictions. He tells me that God put him in that position, and he was doing God’s work. He says he talks to God every day, but when I ask when that conversation started, the date he gives me is years after he left the job. The timeline doesn’t fit – he wasn’t talking to God when he was in that death chamber, he wasn’t talking to anyone. I cannot, no matter how many times I prod or rephrase the question, get into his headspace in those early executions: what he was thinking as he put on his pressed uniform, as he avoided himself in the mirror and kissed his wife goodbye. Maybe he can’t either; the body tucks our trauma away in dark spaces, we build narratives with blank spots to save ourselves.
But whether you shift the blame onto God, a judge or a jury, when a person is executed by the state, the official manner of death on their certificate reads ‘homicide’. Whether you believe it is a fitting and fair punishment for the horrific crimes committed, ‘the machinery of death cannot run without human hands to turn the dials’ wrote David R. Dow, founder of Texas’s oldest innocence project, and those hands were Jerry’s; he has to live with them. I can tell he’s getting frustrated with me for pointing this out, over and over, while the waiter leans over to take our empties.
‘Listen,’ he says, cutlery in his fists, resting on the edge of the table. He’s not angry, he’s chuckling at the obviousness of it all, at the naivety of me. ‘I didn’t kill nobody for myself,’ he smiles serenely. ‘You was gonna be killed anyway. I was just in a position to press that button. I’m the last resolve, I’m the last one that will take responsibility for what you did. You understand? You knew exactly what you were getting into, when you went out and you murdered this person. You forfeit your life. You made a bad choice. There was a consequence. It’s suicide, sweetheart. It is.’
We look at each other over the ruin of napkins and fish and I say nothing. I don’t know what to say. He’s spent years – within prison walls and without – building up this mental scaffolding that allows him to carry on without collapsing, and who am I to try to pull it down? Joan Didion wrote in The White Album, ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live … We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.’ Even the death squad leaders in the 1965 Indonesian genocide told themselves they were cool Hollywood gangsters, like James Cagney, as they garrotted countless numbers on rooftops bathed in blood. Someone in the booth next to us laughs. The bland pop ballads are punctuated by bells from the kitchen. More than anything, Jerry is likeable and sweet – the way he is with the kids at the school, the way he is with the waiting staff who know him as a regular and the way he is with me. I just can’t picture him being the executioner at all.
‘But,’ I start, ‘didn’t you think, the first time you had to take a life, I can’t do this? Or did you know you would be capable of—’
‘Listen,’ he says, picking up the bread basket and dumping the last two cheese biscuits onto the table. ‘Sweetheart. You losing it. I didn’t take his life. He took his own life. This the inmate –’ he waggles his phone – ‘this the river.’ He holds up the empty bread basket and plonks it back down. ‘If you do wrong, you’re going to fall into this river and die.’ He choo-choos the bread basket across the table between the bottles of beer and iced tea, parting a sea of napkins. ‘You’re gonna do wrong?’ He throws his phone in the bread basket. ‘You die. I’m here, behind this big building –’ he moves the ketchup bottle into play – ‘with a button. I haven’t pushed it, I’ve never used it. Don’t have to use it. Make right choices, you don’t come past me – you go right by me.’ He pushes the bread basket, it sails on past the sticky bottle. ‘Don’t give me a chance to use that button. Do you hear what I’m saying? Don’t put the blame on me. It’s nothing that I do. I’m not gonna lose no sleep over it.’
I say, ‘I can’t help feeling like I would have lost sleep over it.’ I also can’t help feeling like this would have been an easier explanation if we’d gone somewhere with a sushi train.
‘Yeah, you know why? You would have blamed yourself. If don’t nobody come to you, what you gonna blame yourself for? If don’t nobody come to death row, what are you gonna blame yourself for? You don’t know? Come on. What are you gonna blame yourself for?’
‘… If nobody comes past and I don’t have to do it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘… Then I haven’t done anything.’
‘OK. OK, then,’ he says, sitting back, looking accomplished, raising his hands like he’s resting his case. The bread basket sits between us. ‘How can you be accused of something if you did nothing?’
There’s a face I do when I’ve had too much to drink. I squint one eye closed so I can see things in single vision, try to understand the confusing world of a bus timetable or a kebab shop menu. I’m completely sober but I’m doing this face now, trying to pick my way out of a frustrating impasse of questions answered but not really answered. Jerry is chuckling again.
In order for his theory to hold that what he was doing was right and good, Jerry had to have complete faith in the justice system. He was not there at the scene of the crime, he was not present in court, he had no place on the jury. He needed to believe that everyone in the chain above him had done their duty and convicted a guilty man in a fair trial. And he did believe the system worked: his faith in it was solidified early, when he was befriended by police officers as a young boy – two black officers who would come to the school to teach judo and karate. They had their own cars – Jerry still remembers their ID numbers: 612 and 613. Nine-year-old Jerry wanted to be a police officer when he grew up, mostly because he wanted to drive his own car. His faith in the justice system was as resolute as his later faith in God.
But two things happened that made him question his belief in judicial accuracy. The first was Earl Washington Jr, a man with the IQ of a ten-year-old, a convicted rapist and murderer, who spent nearly eighteen years on death row before being exonerated by DNA evidence. He was just nine days away from dying in Jerry’s death chamber.
Washington Jr’s innocence, for Jerry, threw doubt on the others, both past and future. It shook his confidence, but still he did not leave. He had it in his mind that he wanted to get to 100 executions – a nice, round number – before he bowed out. By this point he considered himself an expert and so did others: he was sent to other states, like Florida, to investigate botched executions, correct their method, make sure they weren’t using a synthetic sponge. So, he says, given that the first hint didn’t work, God threw him a second curveball to tell him he’d done enough: his own trial before a grand jury, a guilty verdict, and fifty-seven months in prison for perjury and money laundering.
Jerry still claims innocence now, in a story that doesn’t make sense time-wise or logic-wise, something about a loaded gun hidden in a prison typewriter, peppered as most of his stories are with messages from above. He says his mind was on other things when he was in that witness box: he was mentally preparing to execute ten people in a three-month timespan – the most concentrated number in his tenure as executioner. But he wasn’t going to tell the court that. He wasn’t going to tell twelve strangers on a jury if he couldn’t even tell his wife. There was a storm in his mind when he was being interrogated about a vehicle purchased with drug money he says he didn’t know was drug money. But, he thought, if they could convict him of this, they could convict anyone of anything.
That’s how his wife eventually found out that her husband had been the state executioner for Virginia for the last seventeen years – a state now second only to Texas in the number of executions carried out since the reinstatement of the death penalty. When his conviction hit the news, she read it in the local newspaper. Jerry still doesn’t know who told the press.
As the letter to the governor of Arkansas stated, signed at the bottom by Jerry and the many others who worked on death row, the long-term mental-health repercussions for prison staff are not something that tends to be a focus in the death penalty debate. The spotlight generally falls on justice, revenge and the statistically unproven idea of a deterrent. But it’s there if you look: short opinion pieces about decades of sleepless nights from former superintendents, the stress and anxiety of practising to kill someone over and over, worrying about it going wrong, living with it going right. Some former executioners become abolitionists, they write memoirs, they travel the world trying to convince those in power to stop the killing. Robert G. Elliott, who executed 387 people while working as a freelance executioner across six states, finished his memoir Agent of Death with this line: ‘I hope that the day is not far distant when legal slaying, whether by electrocution, hanging, lethal gas, or any other method is outlawed throughout the United States.’ His book was published in 1940. Lethal injection was yet to be added to the list.
Prior to the chair and the needle, executions used to take the form of public hangings, but there hasn’t been one of those in America since 1936. Many have argued (Norman Mailer and Phil Donahue among them) that if America is serious about killing members of its public, then it should do so with a public audience, perhaps even broadcast the spectacle on television. If we can’t see it, we can’t truly fathom what is happening, and so it continues to fester below the surface of the judicial system unstopped. Seeing someone die by a planned, bureaucratic method can change minds about the death penalty in a way that hearing about it does not. Albert Camus wrote about the guillotine, about the effect it had on his pro-capital punishment father, who came home from witnessing it in action on a child murderer, vomited beside his bed and was never the same. Camus wrote that if France truly supported the killing of convicted prisoners, it would haul the guillotine in front of a crowd where it used to be, not hide it behind prison walls and euphemistic speech in the breakfast news reports. If France truly stood by what it was doing, he said, it would show its people the executioner’s hands.
Jerry spreads his hands now, preacher-like, and tells me that when he left his jail cell four years later, his mind had been changed. ‘All of us, everybody in the world, has a death sentence,’ he says, calmly. ‘Death is promised to all of us. It’s guaranteed. It’s gonna happen. But the thing is, we don’t have to kill to demonstrate to the world that killing is wrong. We know that.’ He now believed that not only was the judicial system unfair and flawed, but that the death penalty was, to him, pointless. He offers an alternative punishment: just let them sit in prison, let them suffer for the rest of their lives with the knowledge of what they did. ‘On the anniversary date that he took the life of that young lady, that old man, it’s gonna come back on him,’ Jerry says. ‘They gonna live in that cell with him. The walls will start closing in on him. It’ll be just like him being in a grave. That’s what the guys used to tell me. They said, “Givens, it’s just like me getting buried alive.”’
Jerry got a new job driving trucks for a company that installs guardrails along interstate highways – another role he sees as saving lives, although this time others would see it that way too. And since his anonymity was blown anyway, he went public with his story. He now travels the world giving talks about the death penalty, about how we don’t need it, about what it does to the people who have to carry it out. Morgan Freeman put him in his documentary series about God, in an episode about wrestling with ourselves and our faith in order to do what we believe is right. This week Switzerland wants him, last week it was someone else, today it’s me – he’s scrolling through his phone showing me how wanted, how needed he is, how he’s making good come from the bad because he’s someone who’s seen it with his own eyes. He still mentors the kids down at his old high school, trying to starve the system of newly condemned. He even wrote a memoir: Another Day Is Not Promised. It’s filed under ‘Religious Fiction’.
Despite all of this, Jerry says he doesn’t regret his role in the deaths of sixty-two men – he believes their suffering ended with them. But I suspect it was the beginning of his own. I’m sitting here asking him what it’s like, and he can’t really talk about it in any meaningful way; he travels the world to talk about it, yet he cannot actually talk about it. Through God, through placing blame on a condemned man’s past actions, he has managed to minimise his outsized role as a dealer of death, but there’s an enormity here he will not allow himself contact with – he even managed to eat breakfast as usual on execution days. I think he has only half-convinced himself of any of what he’s telling me. It’s kind of heartbreaking to watch him reason it out over bits of fish and shrimp. What does he do when he wakes in the middle of the night and all he’s got is himself?
His specific concern now is the execution team, and when he advocates for the end of the death penalty it is they, the staff, he is fighting for. Jerry is much clearer talking about the pain and torment of colleagues, and sitting there listening to it all, I get the feeling that everything he describes of trauma is also true of him. ‘You’re holding a lot in, and the average person can’t hold that in,’ he says. ‘A lot of them take their own lives. They turn to alcohol. They turn to drugs. The condemned, he’s already gone. You sit on death row for twenty years and psychologically you’re already dead – they’re ready to accept whatever and get it over with. What you have left is the people that are carrying out the execution. They’ve got to carry on his death. His death lives through them until they die. It’s going to be a part of them, and eventually they will break.’
And break they do. Dow B. Hover, a deputy sheriff, was the last person to serve as executioner in the state of New York. Unlike his predecessor Joseph Francel, whose name was known to the public and who was plagued by death threats throughout his career, Hover’s identity remained a secret. He’s the one who would change the plates on his car before he left his garage to drive to Sing Sing for an execution. In 1990, he gassed himself in that same garage. John Hulbert, who served as New York’s executioner from 1913 to 1926, had a nervous breakdown and retired. Three years later, in his cellar, he shot himself with a .38-calibre revolver. Donald Hocutt, who mixed the chemicals for the gas chamber in Mississippi, was haunted by nightmares in which he repeatedly killed a condemned prisoner while two others waited their turn. He died of heart failure at fifty-five.
‘There’s nothing like being free from this,’ says Jerry. ‘If you say it don’t affect you, then something is wrong with you. If you don’t feel anything from it, then something is wrong with you. The condemned man is gone. He don’t have to sweat no more. You’ve got to sweat, you’ve gotta breathe, you’ve got to think about the things that you’ve been doing.’
We get up to leave, Jerry handing me a box of leftovers and insisting I take them. We follow his slow limp to the door, passing the lobsters, who watch us leave. Clint has been mostly silent throughout dinner – he doesn’t usually come with me to interviews, and he didn’t want to accidentally derail any of the conversation. But he asks, as I push open the doors to the January cold, if a condemned man can still choose to be killed by firing squad. Sure, says Jerry, but he’s not sure where. Maybe Utah.
‘But think about it,’ Jerry says, standing there in the overlit dark of the car park, holding his own box of shrimp. ‘You’ve got five guys. One live round. But it’s gonna be with those five guys for the rest of their lives. They’re all gonna think they were the one.’
I slip my gloves on and we wave goodbye. I imagine the full firing squad slipping their gloves on, waving their goodbyes, thinking theirs were the hands of the executioner.
Jerry died of Covid-19 on 13 April 2020. Obituaries link his illness to an outbreak at Cedar Street Baptist Church in Richmond, where he sang in the choir.
The death penalty in Virginia was abolished on 25 March 2021, less than a year after Jerry died.