ABOUT THE TIME CARLOS DELUNA arrived on death row, Rosie Esquivel was working in a warehouse in Garland, Texas, with Mary Conejo, the wife of Carlos’s half-brother Danny. Mary asked Rosie if she’d be willing to write to Carlos sometimes to help keep his spirits up. Although Rosie had never met Carlos, she was about his age and, in her succinct and straightforward way, said she didn’t have a problem with that. Over the next six years, she wrote to Carlos and received “hundreds” of letters back from him. She saved them in a big box for a long time but threw them out a couple of years before the private investigators found her in Garland in 2004.
Rosie also visited Carlos on death row a few times and was struck by how handsome and well mannered he was, a lot more so than the guys who paid her any attention on the outside (figure 16.1). Even so, it was hard to invest that much time in someone on death row without asking the obvious question, and, in her straightforward way, Rosie asked it: Did he kill the girl?
“Carlos never liked talking about what happened. He would rather look to the future,” Rosie remembered. But when she asked Carlos, he answered. “[H]e did not kill the woman . . . it was another Carlos, I think Hernandez.”
Rosie believed him. “I know you hear that [they are] all nice guys. They are really not nice,” Rosie said, emphasizing the “not.” She’d had her share of bad experiences with cons and ex-cons, including Carlos’s brother Manuel some years later, and felt confident in the comparison based on experience: “Carlos, he was [a nice guy]. He was a gentleman. I don’t think he could have done it.”
FIGURE 16.1 Carlos DeLuna on October 27, 1989, when he was brought back to Corpus Christi for the hearing at which his execution was set for December 7, 1989.
Rosie tried to follow Carlos’s appeals—his lawyers, his chances—but it was confusing. “Carlos fought all the way to the end,” she knew. “He maintained his innocence all the way to the end.” He told her that his lawyers were doing something called “habeas corpus.” She didn’t know what that was, but she knew that it wasn’t about his innocence. Carlos told her that he’d talked to his lawyers many times about Carlos Hernandez. “I tell them this. I give them all the information,” she remembered him saying. “They just don’t want to listen.”
“He fought the way he could fight,” Rosie said finally. “Sometimes he just wanted to give up. They just would not listen to him when he told them it was someone else.”
Rosie knew that Carlos’s last appeal hadn’t worked out for him, but she was surprised when she got a call on a Wednesday in early December 1989 from Carlos’s sister Rose. “She told me that Carlos was up for execution that night. They were hoping for a stay of his execution.” Carlos “was afraid,” his sister had said. Rosie prayed for him.
. . .
Ever since Judge Hayden Head had ruled against him on his first habeas petition in federal court in June 1988, Carlos had done his best to prepare himself and his sisters for what might be next. He said he was prepared to die, and that if he should be executed, “it’s okay, don’t worry, I’m okay.”
Most of the time the best explanation he could come up with for what was happening was simple fatalism. Someone else laid the cards on the table, and he just played along—that’s how Karen Boudrie described his thinking. “Whatever happens, happens,” he told his sister Rose. “But I did not commit this crime,” he continued. “I want you to know that.”
Other times, he tried to find some justice in his situation and found it in the bad things he’d done—putting his mother and sisters through all their trips to bail him out of jail, not calling out Carlos Hernandez right from the start, dragging his family to death row to see him. “I don’t blame any one but my self,” he wrote. “[T]hat is why I well accept If the state of Texas decides to execute me.”
“[I]n his heart,” his sister Rose said, Carlos “accepted that he was going to be executed. That it was going to be okay, because of all the hurt that he caused, all the hurt that he did—not on this crime that he was convicted for—but all the other things that he did, [that] would even things out.” Rose believed that Carlos had found some peace. “He knew that he was forgiven,” she said, by her and by God. There was one letter in particular that Carlos had written, late in the ordeal, which had made her feel that way. She lost the letter and other things from Carlos when a garage flooded out, but she continued to find solace in the forgiveness he said he felt.
During the first week in December, Carlos went back and forth between the fear he’d admitted to Houston Chronicle reporter Kathy Fair and the peace his sister Rose described. In a letter he wrote to Karen Boudrie late on Tuesday night, December 5, he said he’d felt scared all day Monday. But Monday night, for the first time ever on the row, he’d slept soundly and straight through his alarm clock going of. “I woke everybody else up in the same tank with me,” he wrote to Boudrie. “I can’t believe I am sleeping too good with all this happening.”
Boudrie read the letter to the investigators in a videotaped interview years later, smoothing out Carlos’s spelling and punctuation. “‘But you know what, Karen?’” she read, “‘I am not scared like I was yesterday. I feel like this peace came from somewhere and entered my body, and I feel very peacefully about everything.’”
. . .
The Reverend Carroll Pickett would soon dig more deeply and expertly into what Carlos DeLuna was thinking, and how well equipped the young man was to understand what was going on.
Between 1982, when Texas ended an eighteen-year hiatus in executions, and 1995, the Reverend Pickett quite literally ushered ninety-five men to their death by lethal injection. He also ministered to dozens of death row inmates who began the day thinking they would die at midnight but ended it alive, with a stay of execution. If Texas went through with DeLuna’s execution, it would be Pickett’s thirty-third (figure 16.2).
A bit of a historian and chronicler of Texas’s modern executions, Carroll Pickett was aware, even before meeting DeLuna, that the date scheduled for his execution was the sixth anniversary of the first-ever court-sanctioned execution by lethal injection in the world, on December 7, 1982.
Pickett had stood beside Charles Brooks, Jr., the man executed that day. The minister had been handpicked for the job by the prison warden, a member of Pickett’s former Presbyterian congregation in Huntsville, where the Death House was located. Not long before, Pickett had given up the large congregation, believing that his mission there was complete. The warden asked him to become chaplain at the Walls Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections—“the Walls,” everyone called it—and to move his family into a home on the prison grounds.
FIGURE 16.2 The Reverend Carroll Pickett.
Pickett was impatient with the many people who mistook him for a death row chaplain. Death row chaplains ministered to “the living,” Pickett explained. He ministered to the soon-to-be dead. He had never in his life visited death row, at the Ellis Unit sixteen miles outside of Huntsville. State law required Texas to execute people “at Huntsville,” and so the Death House—the small building where executions occurred—was located at the Walls Unit inside that city’s limits. Pickett was the “death chaplain”—or a “Death Angel,” as he preferred to be called. His ministry was to be with each man for a single day, the day he was to die.
. . .
Executions have been around for millennia, ever since there has been something resembling a “state” to execute its people. Still, Texas’s lethal injection of Charles Brooks was an experiment, the first legal killing ever carried out in that manner. “There was no book to go by, no manual to go by,” Pickett explained later. “Nobody ever executed a person this way. So nobody, including the doctors, could tell us what to expect.” For the fifteen years he was part of the lethal injection process, Pickett said, it was “a fearful situation, all the time, because we never knew” what might happen.
The warden wanted everything to go smoothly: to get the inmate quietly onto the gurney so the executioners could strap the prisoner down and insert drips for three lethal drugs into veins in both arms. That’s a big part of why the warden hired Pickett and provided him with a place to live only fifty feet from the Death House.
“My responsibility, according to the warden, was to be there in the Death House . . . when [the condemned prisoner] walked in. I was to be the face that he saw outside of the guards. That was important,” the preacher explained in his slow, soothing cadence. “Because every inmate distrusts guards. They have to. They’re taught that. They’re abused by them” sometimes, Pickett said. “[The warden’s] charge to me was, and these are his words, ‘to seduce their emotions so they won’t fight getting out of the cell or getting up on the table.’
“I could be a pastor to them, I could be a minister to them, I could work with them whatever their religious presence was. But he told every one of them, the first warden did, and all the other ones that followed him . . . ‘I suggest you talk to him because he’s a good counselor. If you don’t want to talk about religion, that’s fine. But whatever you do, just talk to him.’
“And all but one of those ninety-five talked to me,” Pickett recalled, quietly proud of how well he had carried out his second calling as a pastor. “Of course there were fifty or sixty more that came in and got stays [of execution]. But as far as going to the table, I did that ninety-five times.”
Every bit of Pickett’s time, from early in the morning to after midnight, on every “execution day was set aside just for that.” Most of the day was spent talking to the prisoner, going over the steps that would lead to his execution that night, advising him about his burial and the disposition of his things that required a lot of paperwork, and mentally preparing him for his last moments. There also “were reports to give the warden, reports to give to the executioners, and there was a time when I would go visit with the [inmate’s] family” to help them decide whether to watch the execution or not. And there were confessions to hear, a lot of them.
Pickett was serious about his work and attentive to each detail that could pacify or rile up a condemned inmate in his charge. The holding area of the Death House, for example—a small, “dungeonlike” room with a cell for the inmate and some space outside of it where Pickett and the attending guards stayed—had only a single small window to let in a little outside light and air.
The chaplain noticed that an inmate’s mood would often darken when he glanced at the window. He realized that the men were using the tiny patch of natural light to gauge the progress of their last day’s journey into night and the execution that awaited. “I sought and was granted permission to have the panes of the window painted black,” he disclosed in his book on his last ministry, Within These Walls: Memoirs of a Death House Chaplain.
“That it took so long to determine the cause” of the inmates’ darkening moods “angered me,” the Death Angel wrote. “My job—‘seduce the prisoner’s emotions, calm him, help him in whatever way you can’—had been undermined by my own inability to recognize an elementary problem.”
. . .
A description of that darkened window introduces chapter 13 of Pickett’s book, to illustrate the importance he placed on “reading” the personality of each man on death watch and “avoiding] any attitude or mannerism that might set [the inmate] of”. “It was those prisoners who were mentally retarded,” Pickett wrote, “who were the most difficult to read.”
Pickett then discusses two Death House inmates. The first is Johnny Paul Penry, who, Pickett wrote, “came to the Death House in 1989 with crayons and a coloring book and comics he couldn’t read.” Penry was never executed, however. The Supreme Court gave him a last-minute reprieve and overturned his death sentence.
It was in Penry’s case that the Supreme Court had criticized Texas for making it difficult for jurors to consider “mitigating” evidence. Kristen Weaver spent the day scheduled for DeLuna’s execution trying to convince the Court to apply its Penry decision to Carlos DeLuna, as a reason to grant him a last-minute reprieve.
Pickett wrote in chapter 13 that, after hours “trying in vain to make [Penry] understand what would happen to him once we entered the death chambers,” and just before the Supreme Court intervened, the minister noticed his latest congregant “idly thumbing through a comic book . . . lost in a world of make-believe [and] occasionally laugh[ing] quietly to himself.” Penry’s “innocent, childlike sounds chilled me,” Pickett recalled.
. . .
“Carlos DeLuna shared a troubling kinship with Penry,” Pickett wrote, introducing the other inmate whose Death House day Pickett chronicles in chapter 13. “Though he was twenty-seven when I met him, he seemed much younger. That he’d managed to pass through the first nine years of public school was a sad commentary on our education system,” the minister wrote. “As we talked, I found myself trying to imagine my own children—teenagers at the time—attempting to grasp the concept of their own death.”
Much of what Pickett did during the hours he spent with an inmate was to answer questions about how the killing process would unfold. Chapter 13 categorizes inmates by the amount and quality of their curiosity about their impending death. Inmates of average and above-average intelligence had “an endless series of questions” about the different steps of the process. Those of lower intelligence “seemed disoriented.” Some couldn’t latch onto any thought at all. That was Johnny Paul Penry.
Pickett placed Carlos DeLuna on the same end of the scale: “[H]e demonstrated the characteristics that, since Penry, I’d so often prayed never to see again. . . . [H]e had no real understanding of why he was there.” “[A]ll DeLuna was concerned with was what pain he might feel when the needles were inserted into his arms.”
Pickett replayed his conversation with Carlos:
“It’ll be like getting a shot in the doctor’s office,” I tried to explain.
“You promise it won’t hurt?”
“I promise.”
“Will you hold my hand?”
That, I told him, would not be possible.
“Why?”
Because, I explained, his hands would be taped down to the gurney. . . . [W]hen the warden removed his glasses, it would be the signal for the injections to begin, and I assured him that once they started it would be no more than seven to twelve seconds before he was unconscious. Several times before the time came for him to leave the cell, we counted the numbers off together: one . . . two . . . three. . . .
. . .
During a decade and a half as the death chaplain, Carroll Picket sought psychological help only twice. Both times were a result of Carlos DeLuna’s trip to the Death House. “I’ll never forget Carlos DeLuna,” Pickett told the private investigators in 2004.
Carlos arrived at the Death House early on the morning of December 6. As Pickett did with all the condemned prisoners, one of the first things he did when he met Carlos was to mentally sort him by type. Some prisoners were “inmates,” the pastor said. They had “adjust[ed] to the fact that they [were] in prison, for right or wrong, for innocent or for evil,” and were “honest and . . . supportive” most of the time, not “troublemakers.” A “convict,” however, was “a troublemaker,” who had “committed multiple felony crimes,” resisted the rules, and didn’t “care how he act[ed]” or how often he was punished.
“We had people who were sent in to be executed who were convicts, and we had some who were inmates,” Pickett said. Right away, he could see that Carlos was an inmate. Carlos was cooperative throughout the day, Pickett recalled. He “came in [that morning] quiet, very, very scared. Because he was so young. He was basically a child.” All day long, Pickett commented, “I was with a boy. He was a man by age but he was a boy.” He was “simple. He began to hang on me . . . he didn’t want me to leave. He wouldn’t let me leave.”
The only thing that Pickett knew about the twenty-seven-year-old was what he’d read in an article that Kathy Fair published in the Houston Chronicle on November 30 under the headline EACH TICK OF CLOCK INCREASES TERROR OF CONDEMNED KILLER. DeLuna, he’d read, was accused of stabbing Wanda Jean Lopez in a convenience store robbery while she was on the phone with 911 begging for help. “Shortly afterward, police found him hiding beneath a truck parked only a few blocks away.” Yet DeLuna claimed he was innocent and that another man had committed the crime.
Pickett told the investigators that before he’d even met DeLuna, “I had questions . . . about Carlos’s guilt or innocence.” His instincts about criminals, honed by years of listening to them confess what they’d done and why, told him that a detail in Fair’s story didn’t make sense. “The average convict will not stop a block away and hide underneath a truck. If they’re going to run, you keep running and running and running. You get as far away from the scene as possible,” Pickett explained.
Pickett spoke to Carlos about the Chronicle article several times during the day. It was his way of introducing the question of what happened at the time of the killing, in case Carlos had anything he wanted to get off of his chest. Bringing condemned inmates to a point where they trusted the pastor well enough to confess their sins after only a day together was a big part of Pickett’s peculiar ministry. But it would be a while before DeLuna would be ready for that.
In the morning, to gain the inmate’s trust, Pickett talked about other things, beginning with the family members who were expected at the prison that day and how much time the inmate wanted to spend with each. Early in this discussion, Carlos revealed that he’d never met his father and never felt good about his stepfather. Pickett knew that he was making progress when at some point during the morning, Carlos “wanted to know if he could call me ‘daddy,’ if it would hurt my feelings. Because he had never had anybody stick by him who was in a fatherly position.”
Pickett told Carlos that would be fine, but “it sort of shook me,” Pickett admitted to the investigators. “I’ve got four children and three step-children and fourteen grandchildren, and I know what ‘daddy’ means.” After that, Pickett could see, Carlos “was willing to discuss anything” with him.
Carlos had a lot of family members to attend to, Pickett recalled. Several were at the prison that day, including his sister Rose; his half-siblings Vicky, Mary, and Danny; and their spouses. Later Carlos made phone calls to his half-sister Toni Peña in Corpus Christi and his brother Manuel, who was in a prison unit south of Houston. Carlos also contacted Karen Boudrie. In the middle of a move from Corpus Christi to a job with a television station in Georgia, Boudrie wasn’t covering Carlos’s story any more. He reached her by phone in Cincinnati, where she was visiting her parents.
“[T]hey were good people,” Pickett remembered. “A lot of inmates who died have good people.” Whatever the inmate had done wrong, “their families were innocent,” and Pickett made it his business to treat them with dignity.
Family visits with inmates about to be executed occurred in a building near the Death House incongruously called the “hospitality house.” Carlos wanted to see his people separately, not all at once. According to Pickett’s notes, Carlos saw his sister Rose and her husband Brad from 10:00 A.M. to noon, Danny and his wife for the two hours after that, half-sisters Mary and Vicky from 2:00 to 3:00 P.M., and Rose and Brad a second time after that.
The first time Carlos faced an execution date, in October 1986, officials hadn’t yet moved him to the Walls when he got his reprieve from Judge Head. As Rose drove over to the prison that morning in 1989, she remembered that day three years earlier as a “happy moment.” But she knew that “when you go to the Walls, that’s it. The chances of you getting out of there are thin.”
Still, Rose, a deeply religious woman, was filled with hope. Recently she had hired a new lawyer, Kristen Weaver, to get a reprieve for her brother, and he had asked the United States Supreme Court to grant a stay of execution. If that failed, Weaver would ask Governor William Clements for clemency.
It was “very painful,” Rose said, seeing Carlos at the hospitality house that morning. He was as thin as she’d ever seen him, “maybe 125 pounds.” She could see that her brother was nervous, but he was also “very quiet, very peaceful, more peaceful than the ones there that were not in that situation”—including Rose herself. She and Brad spent their time with Carlos in the morning talking about the Supreme Court and the governor. “I thought, for sure, for sure, he was going to get out of it. Deep in my heart, I believed God’s going to get him out of this. And I told him that,” Rose recalled.
That afternoon, they heard that the Supreme Court had rejected Carlos’s petition.
. . .
Kristen Weaver remembers the days leading up to December 6 as “a flurry of [court] filings and denials, then more filings and denials,” which he orchestrated from his office in Dallas, 175 miles north of the Walls. “And finally, when we’d run out of everything else,” he placed a phone call to the governor’s general counsel and chief of staff, Rider Scott, “trying to explain all of the different reasons I thought [Carlos] shouldn’t be executed, and then waiting for Rider to call back. That was basically the process.”
In deciding whether to spare a man’s life, most governors look for evidence of what lawyers like to call “actual innocence”—not legal reasons why the verdict wasn’t fully reliable, but facts to show that the condemned man didn’t commit the crime. The courts have already decided the legal reasons repeatedly. For a governor considering whether to stick his own neck way out and give a convicted killer a break, there’s no percentage in second-guessing the judges. For the governor, it comes down to a simpler question of justice and truth: Did the man do it?
Weaver didn’t have any good answers for the governor on that question. He hadn’t done his own investigation, and the records from DeLuna’s trial and appeals gave him nothing to go on. Sure, Carlos said he was innocent, and Rose had pleaded with Weaver about that. But the only thing they had was a dubious name, Carlos Hernandez, which everyone from the prosecutor and jury to Federal District Judge Head had rejected as DeLuna’s shameless invention. Weaver felt he had to concede, as he told the governor’s counsel right of the bat, that DeLuna’s was a “case where guilt was clear and obvious.”
With no other leg to stand on, Weaver urged the governor to do exactly what the governor had said he would not do: second-guess the courts. Fresh of losses in five successive courts, Weaver argued the Penry issue again, urging Scott to advise the governor that all the courts were wrong. The Texas statute had kept the jurors in DeLuna’s case from giving proper weight to “mitigation.” Fresh of five victories, the State’s attorney, William Zapalac, made his same arguments as well. DeLuna didn’t have a Penry issue because his lawyers didn’t present any mitigating evidence that a jury could have been confused about. Johnny Paul Penry’s lawyers, Zapalac reminded the governor’s aide, had presented substantial evidence that he was mentally defective. Carlos DeLuna’s lawyers had presented none.
After listening to both sides, Scott said that he had already gone over the case with the governor earlier that evening and had taken the phone call from Weaver armed with the governor’s decision: because “we find that there are no new issues of fact or law that have not had an opportunity to be resolved in the appellate courts or the trial courts,” Scott announced, “the Governor has indicated that he will not substitute his opinion for that of the appellate courts of this country. . . . I have been empowered by the Governor to tell you that he would deny the reprieve.”
Weaver phoned Carlos to give him the news, which he remembers Carlos accepting calmly with a “thank you.” Before and afterward, Weaver always found a way to save his death row clients. Carlos, the one exception, just “fell through the crack,” he said.
When Weaver heard from the investigators a decade and a half later that Carlos had twice been given a chance to plead guilty to avoid a death sentence and had twice turned down the offer, citing his innocence, the lawyer was surprised. He had never heard about that before. “It just breaks your heart,” he said.
. . .
Rose was shocked when she heard that the Supreme Court and Governor Clements had rejected Carlos’s pleas. “We thought for sure he would get out of this because [of] our faith,” she told the investigators tearfully. “I’m not angry with God anymore,” she continued, now fifteen years later, but for a long time it had shaken her faith.
After getting the bad news, Rose asked to see Carlos a second time, late in the afternoon. Earlier she had decided to view the execution if it came to that, but now she realized that she wouldn’t be able to watch Carlos die. She wanted to see Carlos one last time and make her real goodbyes.
. . .
With all his visits, Carlos had no time for lunch that day, but just after 6:00 P.M., after seeing Rose for the last time, he had his dinner—the fabled last meal.
Pickett was critical of records kept by the Texas Department of Corrections listing what each inmate ate for his last meal and said for his last words. It wasn’t the use of antiseptic routines to paper over the deliberate killing of people that bothered Pickett. Rather, it was the prison system’s failure to get the details right. Pickett understood from experience, however, why mistakes always happened. No matter how good your routines are, he explained, when it is the deliberate killing of someone that you’re part of, you’re going to be “in shock,” “your emotions are going to be involved,” and “you’re not going to hear or report exactly what [happened].”
Carlos DeLuna’s last meal was a case in point, Pickett explained. At first Carlos had said that he didn’t want any dinner. That was typical. Despite all the hoopla about the steak and lobster that condemned killers devour on the last night of their existence, most of them don’t want anything or just pick at their food. In Pickett’s experience, it was only the “mentally challenged” who displayed much of an appetite. In any event, the Texas prison didn’t serve steak and lobster, the chaplain pointed out. What the corrections department records said about that just “wasn’t true.”
“About six o’clock,” Pickett recalled, he asked Carlos if he was sure he didn’t want anything. Carlos asked if Pickett could still get him something. “Just tell me what you want,” the warden said. Carlos’s answer was “[s]trawberries and ice cream and a shake.”
“Now the book,” Pickett said during his interview with the investigators in 2004, reaching over for the volume—“the classic book” by the Department of Corrections “about what happens on Texas death row, what they eat and the last meal”—says that DeLuna “ate nothing. I sat right there by him, and he ate strawberries and ice cream and drank the shake, and we talked.”
. . .
Around 8:00 P.M., the guards let Carlos use the telephone to call relatives. His conversation with his oldest half-sister, Toni Peña, was short and unadorned, and years later Toni spoke about it to an investigator in that same way. The investigator’s notes record the moment: “Toni told me about the phone call from Carlos the night of his execution. . . . Carlos told Toni he loved her. At this point [in the interview], tears welled up in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. It was a very painful and sad moment.”
Carlos also called his brother Manuel at a prison farm in South Texas. It was while Manuel was there that another inmate, Miguel Ortiz, had called him out to the rec yard and recounted Carlos Hernandez’s chilling confession to three killings, including one at a gas station for which “Carlos DeLuna” had taken Hernandez’s “rap.”
“[D]on’t blame God, if I am killed and I am innocent,” Carlos told Manuel, having heard their sister Rose blaming God earlier in the day. Manuel wanted to hear it straight and clear from his brother, however, so at the end of the conversation he asked Carlos directly: “Did you kill the lady at the gas station?” Carlos said he didn’t. Carlos Hernandez was the killer. Manuel believed his brother. He said he could always tell when his little brother was lying, and Carlos wasn’t lying.
. . .
The Reverend Pickett had the same question for Carlos as had Manuel, but the prison chaplain had a lot more experience helping his charges get things of their chest.
When Carlos finished his family phone calls, it was almost 10:00 P.M. The time set for the execution was a little over two hours away. It was at this point that Pickett explained to the inmate exactly what would happen as they strapped him into the gurney and prepared his veins to receive the injections. “Now, I want you to follow me in there,” Pickett would tell them. “And don’t fight. Because I’ll have some guys with me. You’ll be two feet behind me and just follow me.”
It was in those final two hours, Pickett said, that the inmates often became eager to confess their crimes to him, even crimes for which they had never been convicted. Curious to know whether inmates were embroidering their records for his sake, Pickett said he checked out some of the things he heard with friends in law enforcement. “They were true,” he said. “There was a lot of confession. At ten o’clock to midnight is a very traumatic situation.”
Pickett didn’t leave anything up to chance, however. He spent the whole day preparing each inmate for this moment, gaining the inmate’s trust, promising that he himself would tell the truth about anything the inmate asked, no matter what. He did this repeatedly with Carlos. Then he would calmly and in detail explain the procedures the executioners would use to inject three drugs into his veins to kill him, and the violence the guards would have to use if he resisted. Again, he would invite as many questions as the inmate had, promising to answer each honestly and in detail, which he would do.
Finally, the reverend would ask the guards to leave, to give him complete privacy with the inmate, and he would invite the prisoner to do just what he had been talking about doing, and doing himself, all day: tell the truth. “It was our program, our philosophy,” Pickett explained, “that I will ask questions and guide [the inmate] and talk to him. Whatever he wanted to confess to or talk about, that was fine.”
As a final step in the program, Pickett would ask a set of questions he carefully tailored to each inmate. In Carlos DeLuna’s case, Pickett had repeatedly talked to Carlos about Kathy Fair’s November 30 article in the Houston Chronicle and the account it gave of the killing of Wanda Lopez and Carlos’s arrest. Using that account, Pickett worked out two simple questions to ask DeLuna: one about a detail of the crime that only the killer would know, and one about circumstances of the arrest that Carlos would surely recollect.
“So, I explained all this to Carlos,” Pickett told the investigators, at the point in his narrative where he had just taken DeLuna through the steps that would be used to execute him. Then the chaplain put the question directly to Carlos: Did he want to tell the truth? “I did them all that way,” Pickett explained.
Carlos said he did.
“Go ahead,” Pickett said. “I want to know the whole story.”
Carlos told him first what was at the front of his mind and had been all day. He was scared. He was “not so afraid of dying,” Pickett said, but of “how, and what’s going to happen after that.” Mainly Carlos wanted to know what it would feel like. Would it hurt?
Pickett explained the process to Carlos again, letting him ask questions and answering as honestly as he could. “[It]’s going to take . . . nine to twelve seconds for that first medication to go to work. And you’ll be totally asleep, you won’t feel another thing.” He promised Carlos that, apart from two pinpricks when they put the needles in each of his arm, the process would be painless. Carlos asked him, “Will you be with me, daddy?” Pickett assured him, “I’ll be right with you.”
With the guards now out of the room, Carlos said he “wanted to talk about” the crime. The reverend was ready himself with “those two issues”—the questions he’d formulated for Carlos using the Houston Chronicle article.
“Why did you let her talk on the phone[, and] why did you stay [under] the truck” rather than run far away?
“I didn’t do it,” Carlos said.
That was “clear as a bell to me,” Pickett told the investigators. “And I believed him.”
Pickett ministered to hundreds of terminal patients in the prison hospital—“heart attacks, C.O.P.D., AIDS, cancer, you name it,” he said—and he watched ninety-five prisoners die in the execution chamber. “I went through this for sixteen years, listening to them on their last days and nights. I spent way too many hours, I suppose, listening to their last confession. But some of them I believed. And some of them I checked out.” “I fully believe Carlos DeLuna was an innocent man,” he continued, “and I will always believe that.”
Pickett helped Carlos practice his last words. The pastor felt that he understood exactly what Carlos wanted to say, and why.
. . .
The chaplain had gotten Carlos permission to make one last phone call, at 11:00 P.M., to Karen Boudrie in Cincinnati. She was the last person DeLuna called.
The television journalist had thought about this moment for a long time and expected a confession, especially, she said, after Carlos “chose me to be the last person to talk with.” In the past, he had admitted many other wrongs to her and had curbed what he said about the killing of Wanda Lopez only because of his appeals. Those were over now. “He had nothing to lose at this point,” she told the investigators. There was no reason left why he wouldn’t tell her the truth.
Boudrie wasn’t sure how to start a conversation with a man an hour away from death, to whom she had no relation, and who had chosen her to receive his last call. So, “ever the journalist,” she said with a laugh, she just “gave him the opportunity . . . to say anything he wanted to say, to get it of his chest.”
“Do you have something you want to confess to me? Do you have something you want to tell me, Carlos?”
“No,” he said quietly. “[T]hey’re putting to death an innocent man.”
For the first time, Boudrie said later, recalling what Carlos said, “it really hit me that maybe they were.”
Boudrie was “devastated.” She hung up the phone and grabbed her mother, “just crying and crying.” She didn’t think that it was going to happen so soon and felt guilty that she had never done the investigation she planned. “There’s any number of things I could have done,” she told the investigators, but it “wasn’t until that last phone call that I really, truly believed him.” By then, it was “too late.”
. . .
As midnight approached, Carlos asked the Reverend Pickett to pray with him. Carlos had a little card in his pocket with a prayer printed on it. He said to Pickett, “I want to pray this prayer, but I can’t read very well.” Again, the chaplain was overcome by his impression of the young man. Even much later, as he thought about it again, he could barely keep his composure. This was not a hardened murderer. This was an immature, poorly educated, helpless boy on the verge of execution.
Carlos asked if he could hold Pickett’s hand. “We were not permitted to touch an inmate,” Pickett explained, “but . . . he wanted me to hold his hands. I’d been warned by the warden . . . never put your hands through the gate, through the bars. Because they can either pull you forward—And we had on death row out here, not long ago, a chaplain put his hands through, and the guy had a knife, and he slit his arm open wide. But that didn’t bother me about Carlos.”
Pickett put his hands through the bars. Carlos grasped them and held tightly. As Carlos gripped his hands, Pickett began to pray. He soon felt the downward tug of Carlos sinking to his knees. “By the time I finished the prayer—and it was probably four minutes, five minutes long—he was on his knees, crying,” Pickett remembered.
Carlos got up from his knees and asked Pickett to recite the twenty-third psalm again and explain what it meant. Pickett read the psalm and said to him, “We’re in the valley of the shadow of death, Carlos.” The guards entered the room and saw Pickett holding Carlos’s hands, but they didn’t say anything. “The warden knew what I was doing,” Pickett explained.
. . .
Carlos stood up and said he was ready to go. The guards walked him into the execution chamber and strapped him down (figure 16.3). As he had promised, Pickett held Carlos’s left hand, at the same time checking to make sure Carlos’s veins were suitable for injection—another of Pickett’s execution-day responsibilities.
When the two executioners came in, they wanted to start on Carlos’s left side, so Pickett switched hands. The executioners firmly taped down Carlos’s left arm and went for a large vein in the middle. Pickett had promised Carlos that the first prick of the needle would be the only pain he would feel. Watching it pierce DeLuna’s skin—the thirty-third time he’d seen it happen—still made Pickett wince.
Carlos asked again: Would Pickett keep holding his hand? Pickett told Carlos that he could do so only until they strapped down the other arm.
FIGURE 16.3 The Texas execution “table.”
“Would you hold my leg?” Carlos asked. The executioners switched arms and inserted a second needle into Carlos’s right arm. Pickett let go.
After strapping Carlos down with needles in both arms, the executioners left his side and entered a little room next door where they would release the chemicals. The warden left the execution chamber, shutting the heavy metal door behind him. “He gave me about forty-five seconds. I had about forty-five seconds, just me and the inmate. And that is the forty-five seconds that is never recorded anywhere,” Pickett explained.
In their last seconds together, Carlos told Pickett, “I just want to thank you, daddy, for being my daddy for one day.” He asked Pickett again to hold his leg when it started, and Pickett put his hand on Carlos’s knee.
Just then, the witnesses took their places. None of Carlos’s people were there, nor anyone from Wanda Lopez’s family, though they’d been invited. The known witnesses, besides the Reverend Pickett and the prison officials and guards, were Michael Graczyk, an Associated Press reporter, and Jim Mattox, the elected attorney general of Texas. Mattox would occasionally slip over from the capital in Austin to watch an execution. Mattox came, Pickett noticed, when he felt a need for a last-minute confession or new details on a crime.
“Carlos looked over at [the witnesses],” Pickett recalled, “and then he looked back. He kept his eyes on me, and he said he was going to [keep his eyes there]. He said, ‘Will you be where I can see you?’ I said, ‘Yes, I’ll stand right here. I won’t move.’”
The warden asked Carlos if he had any last words. Carlos gave his final statement. With that, everything was ready. Pickett kept his hand on Carlos’s knee.
. . .
According to Pickett, Carlos’s last words were not accurately recorded in the press or in the prison record—they almost never were, he said. By all accounts, Carlos did not confess to the crime and offered no pleas for forgiveness or understanding.
Carlos’s first concern was his family. The press accounts confirmed this, and so did the Reverend Pickett. Although she wasn’t there, Rose DeLuna Rhoton confirmed it as well. Several days after the execution, Rose received a letter from Carlos that Pickett had mailed later that morning. Although the letter, along with all of Carlos’s last possessions, was lost in a flood in Garland, Texas, Rose would never forget Carlos’s final gesture to her. “He knew that I would be hurting for him,” Rose recalled, and he said “he was so sorry for all the pain he had caused” over the years “to his family members and to . . . our mother.”
Carlos’s other concern was the friends he was leaving behind on death row. To them, his last words—which Pickett knew were “very, very important” to him—were “Don’t give up.” That was Carlos’s message, Pickett said, to others “striving to prove their innocence.”
. . .
Carlos’s time was up.
After he said his final words, Pickett recalled, “he looked up at me, and he had these big old brown eyes. I’ll never forget those brown eyes. I can dream about those brown eyes.” Pickett motioned to the warden that it was time.
The warden took of his glasses—his signal to the executioners to start the process of dripping the three chemicals into Carlos’s veins—and then he focused his eyes on his watch.
The first drug, Pentothol, was supposed to put Carlos to sleep in seven to twelve seconds. The second, Pavulon, would start to flow after twenty-four seconds and would paralyze him, so that he couldn’t breathe. The third, potassium chloride, would stop his heart.
Pickett had promised Carlos that he would be asleep within twelve seconds. But after the twelve-second mark passed, Carlos raised his head and fixed his brown eyes on Pickett again. That scared Pickett. “I knew the time had passed. The other guys had gone to sleep. They’d given their cough or whatever it was. And I wonder, to this day, what was he thinking,” Pickett said, and what he was feeling.
If the first drug failed—and Pickett was sure it did, at least at first—then Carlos would be awake when the second drug started suffocating him. He also would feel a torturous burning when the third drug—a poison with no therapeutic use—entered his veins. But the paralysis from the second drug would prevent him from showing any distress. Carlos would be tortured to death, but only he would know it.
Ten seconds later, over twenty seconds into the execution, Carlos raised his head again. Pickett was frantic, though he kept himself stock-still so that none of the observers would be alarmed. “Nobody had ever done this,” Pickett explained, “Those big, brown eyes were wide open. Here I am, five inches from his knee, five feet from his face, and he’s looking straight at me. . . . And I don’t know what the question was in his brain. I don’t know what he was thinking. If I wanted to be paranoid, I could say he was thinking, ‘You lied to me.’”
After the twenty-four second mark, the paralytic drug flowed into the tubes. Carlos closed his eyes and didn’t raise his head again. The whole process was supposed to take six minutes. Carlos was not pronounced dead until ten minutes had passed (figure 16.4). The extra minutes were excruciating for Pickett. No one will ever know what they were like for Carlos DeLuna.
. . .
DeLuna’s execution haunted Pickett. He was unable to sleep for the next five nights running. For the first and last time, he had to seek counseling. “That’s when I started thinking,” he told the private investigators, “we are killing innocent people. We are killing children. We are killing [the] mentally retarded.”
FIGURE 16.4 Carlos DeLuna’s grave site in Corpus Christi, where his family brought him back to be buried. The inscription reads, “I’m with God.”
The day after the execution, the Associated Press summarized the intersecting tragedies of Wanda Jean Lopez and Carlos DeLuna in two sentences early in its short article: “The lethal injection began at 12:14 A.M. [Carlos DeLuna] had insisted all along that he was not responsible for the death of Wanda Jean Lopez, 24, whose final words of terror on Feb. 4, 1983 were captured on a police emergency dispatcher’s tape recording.”
