Beneath the Cross
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT AND OTHER SORROWS

Heading into Holy Week on Palm Sunday, I looked ahead to “Good Friday” with foreboding. Images of crucifixions, not just the Hollywood variety but even tiny crosses with the dying figure of Jesus, bring to my mind unpleasant memories and unresolved conflicts. One memory is of an execution I witnessed at San Quentin Prison in 1960. Another is of a summary public execution by a Saigon street mob in 1971. I don’t like the idea of capital punishment. I don’t linger long before crucifixion paintings and sculptures by the great masters in museums. I don’t even like looking closely at crucifixes. Usually Protestant Christians don’t fix the corpus on their crosses, but the imagery is vivid nonetheless. There is something unsettling about adopting a crucifix as the primary symbol for a religion that is supposed to address suffering and bring peace to a conflicted world. Oh, I know the theory, the doctrine, the statements of essential beliefs about the suffering, dying man-God, spotless and unblemished like a Paschal lamb, paying the penalty of death for the sins of the world.

In spite of having forgiveness and redemption as a core principle of the Christian faith, the church has filled the record books of history with accounts of its executions by burning, hanging, beheading, and drowning dissenters. Perhaps crucifixion would be thought sacrilegious. As civil law replaced church law in many parts of the world, execution remained as punishment for the most egregious crimes. In our own country since 1819 in Texas, a bastion of American Christianity, 1153 people have been legally executed. More recently the condemned have been killed by lethal injection; the latest was Michael Richard on September 25, 2007. In Texas various methods of execution have been used: hanging, firing squad, and electrocution. George W. Bush during his six year term as governor of the state of Texas approved 152 executions, more than any other governor in the recent history of the United States. In my own state of California capital punishment is a legal form of punishment. In my part of the state, the first recorded execution in San Diego County was in 1778 for conspiracy to commit murder. With apparent approval by the church, four native Americans were shot. Since then there have been 724 executions in the state; there are 667 people now on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.

In 1960 I was witness to the execution of Richard Harmon at San Quentin Prison in San Rafael, California. Harmon and I were the same age. He was condemned to die in the gas chamber for his assault on a guard at another prison, leaving the correctional officer in a vegetative state for the rest of his life. I was a graduate student with a wife and child. I had to work to stay in school. I took a job as guard at San Quentin because I could work from four o’clock in the afternoon until midnight or from midnight until eight o’clock in the morning. The pay and benefits were good, much better than the salary I had earned as a public high school teacher in the two years between college and graduate school. I saw Richard Harmon first when I was assigned to Death Row for two weeks as part of my orientation as a correctional officer.

Midway in my first year at the prison my name came up on the list of guards who were required to attend an execution. My watch finished at eight o’clock in the morning and the execution was scheduled for ten. After twenty-five-years of Sunday school, vacation bible school, and church membership, I had not developed the moral understanding or courage to stand and say to my watch lieutenant that executions are abhorrent, wrong, criminal, and that I couldn’t participate.

At the appointed time that morning I went with other guards into a room adjacent to the death chamber to get my assignment. Correctional officers were appointed to stay close to people in the witness area who might need help if they should became ill or should faint. I was assigned to stand with a nineteen-year-old airman from Hamilton Air Force Base who had made an official request to be a witness. Anyone over the age of eighteen is eligible to apply to attend an execution in California. In a grim lottery he had been a winner. My young airman told me he had no connection to the case. He was just curious.

At the signal I went with him into the execution area. Located in the center of a large empty room, the gas chamber was a green metal, octagonal room-within-a-room. Its single oval door stood open. There were windows all around the chamber for witnesses... who didn’t sit, but stood gathered around as people might have crowded close around a platform at the Tower of London to watch beheadings. My airman went directly to the chamber and stood close to a window. I followed and stood directly behind him. The condemned man had not yet been brought into the room. We waited. I felt sick. I thought I might faint. I desperately wanted to be anywhere else.

Momentarily Richard Harmon was brought into the room. He was escorted, held up by two officers. They entered the room slowly. The condemned man was wearing street clothes: navy blue trousers and white shirt. His head hung forward, his chin on his chest. He could obviously stand and walk only because he was supported. His shirt, wringing wet, was plastered to his body. I thought at first that the wetness was deliberate, that perhaps the cyanide gas would be more effective and quicker if his clothing were wet; but I learned later that he had been sweating profusely for more than an hour.

I decided that I would try not to look. I fixed my eyes on the neck of the boy in front of me, but peripheral vision forces us to see more than we sometimes want to see. The two guards guided, mostly carried Richard Harmon through the open door into the chamber. They seated him in the left one of two rude, ugly chairs and quickly fixed sensors to his chest to monitor his heart, and they secured his arms, legs and chest. One of them leaned close to him and said something, then they left quickly, closed and sealed the door.

The man about to die began to take exaggerated, gasping breaths. I thought the cyanide pellets had been dropped into the acid bath under his seat, but in a minute it became clear that he only wanted it to be over quickly. Then he suddenly went into a convulsion, the kind I had seen epilepsy cause.

The young airman’s neck a few inches in front of my own pale face suddenly turned paper-white. He let go of the railing and fell straight back. I caught him and sat holding him on the floor where I was glad finally to be unable to see the man dying and glad to have something to hold onto. After twelve minutes we were allowed to leave the room. Richard Harmon was dead. He had been killed by the state. I had been part of it.

Another airman who had been a witness helped me get his friend to his feet. Outside I hurried to a wall as far from the chamber as I could get and vomited. When I returned to work that night, I went directly to the watch captain and told him that if my name was ever on the list again, I wouldn’t participate even if it meant losing the job. My name never appeared on the list again.

I have witnessed only one other deliberate killing of a human being. It happened thirty-eight years ago in the city that was then called Saigon. In 1970 I was living with my wife and children in the Republic of Singapore some four hundred miles from Vietnam. In spite of the war, I volunteered to go to Vietnam to participate in a two-month program designed to train Vietnamese teachers. I suppose I was trying to be noble; but looking back on it, I realize I was mostly just foolish. Those of us who were teachers in the program and the program itself were another absurdity for a poor country that had become a battleground for political forces from outside its borders.

Although the war raged furiously all over South Vietnam, I saw mostly only the dreadful consequences of it in the lives of Vietnamese civilians in places like Da Nang, Vung Tau, Nha Trang, Dalat, and Saigon. The execution I speak of happened late one morning near the central market almost in shadow of the great cathedral in Saigon. My friend Gary and I were walking back across the center of the city from our teaching session to the compound where we were staying near the American Embassy. As we got closer to the market we heard angry shouts. Our interpreters weren’t with us, so we couldn’t understand any of it except the anger. There were no sirens and no gunfire, so we walked on toward the confusion. As we came near the entrance to the market, a mob emerged from the far side of the large main building. It was advancing slowly on a man who was walking backward facing a crowd of mostly men. He was waving his arms and trying to speak to them. They shouted, brandishing boards and lengths of wood and metal. Suddenly, as if at a signal, the mob broke into a run and overtook him. They beat him to death in a couple of minutes. There were no police or soldiers. Gary and I ran like hell. We heard later at the embassy that the disturbance had been a labor dispute between veterans who wanted special consideration and shop owners who had not been part of the Regular Army.

Both these tragedies came threading through my memory last weekend as I watched the procession at the beginning of Palm Sunday services. Two thousand years after that famous dreadful execution on a cross, where is the peace on earth, the good will of men? The Christian movement continues to promise and reassure.

I was glad to hear from my friend Robert Smith that the United Method Church Book of Discipline, Paragraph 164A, states complete opposition to capital punishment and urges for complete abolishment of it in all states.

Kyrie eleison,
Christe eleison,
Kyrie eleison.
Gloria in excelsis Deo,
et in terra pax hominibus
bonae voluntatis...