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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Dead Poet's Society |
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by Chris Floyd
(No verified email address) |
12 Feb 2002
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Gray Davis is ambitious. He wants to be the president. He wants to challenge George W. Bush - the greatest convict killer in American history. So Davis needs a body count to pluck those "Heartland" strings. |
The state of California killed Stephen Wayne Anderson last week. Quietly, with little fanfare, Governor Gray Davis turned down international appeals for a death-row reprieve, and sent the Black Needle of American jurisprudence into Anderson's veins.
Who was Stephen Anderson? A nobody, of course. His parents - poverty stricken, mentally ill - beat him and abused him, almost killed him before finally kicking him out of the house when he was a teenager. He was left to fend for himself in the wild - literally, living outdoors in the hills of New Mexico. He survived by scrounging, stealing, pilfering.
He ended up in Utah - God's country, ruled by the self-proclaimed "saints" of the Mormon Church - where he fell into a life of petty crime and violence. He went to jail; killed a man in a prison brawl; ran off from a furlough program. He went to Las Vegas - ruled by the well-connected, well-protected warlords of the Mob - where he worked as hired muscle for a time.
At last he came to California, where again he lived rough, sometimes in the wild. Finally, one night in 1980, he broke into the house of Elizabeth Lyman, an 81-year-old retired piano teacher. He thought the house was empty. He was grubbing for loot when he heard a noise, someone stirring in the dark. He jumped, he panicked, he fired his gun. (You can always get one, no matter how poor you are; that's the American way.) Elizabeth Lyman fell dead to the floor.
That was the end of the road for Stephen Anderson. He knew it. This was the final transgression, the stepping-over. He covered the body with a blanket, turned on all the lights in the house, sat down at the kitchen table, and waited for the police to come. He waited three hours; he wasn't going anywhere. There was nowhere else to go.
At the trial in 1981, Anderson readily confessed his crime and expressed his remorse; the only thing at issue was the punishment. It was "morning in America" then, the early days of the Reagan-Bush Administration, and a new zest for death was in the air. While running guns and poison gas to Saddam Hussein, cutting deals with murderous Ayatollah Khomeini, arming Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan, and teaching assassination techniques to Latin American tyrants, Reagan and Bush were also pressing the American courts for more executions. Death was of the essence, death gave meaning to their power, it sealed their wealth and privilege with blood.
Anderson's prosecutors were glad to oblige. They asked for the death penalty, and they got it. At the sentencing hearing, the destitute convict was represented by court-appointed attorney Donald Ames - a notorious incompetent who was later described, by a judge no less, as "deceptive, untrustworthy and disloyal to his clients." Ames' own daughters testified against him in another case, saying he had abused them physically and emotionally. This learned counsel called no witnesses on Anderson's behalf, offered no mitigating evidence - not even the violence inflicted by his parents. (Maybe that cut too close to the bone for an old inflictor like Ames.)
So Anderson began the long death row wait. But something strange happened. With access to education for the first time, he began to read. He began to write. He used his words to dig deep into the nature of his guilt. His remorse - raw and broken at the first - grew into a vessel of understanding. It laid bare the agonizing truth of transgression: there is no redemption, no recovery of what it destroys. There is only the broken light of acknowledgement, of recognition, and the threadbare atonement this brings.
He wrote poems; they were published, and won awards. He wrote a play; it was performed. As the years went by, there were growing calls for clemency. He would never be free again, that was certain, he deserved it, and knew it - but let him not be killed, his new friends asked. They were joined in this plea by the family of Elizabeth Lyman, who told the court they "did not want or need" Anderson's death. The family of the man killed in the prison brawl also opposed the execution.
But the machinery ground on, and the final date was set. It all rested with the governor - with Gray Davis, the smooth, articulate "moderate" Democrat. His word could do what Anderson failed to do on that horrible night in 1980: spare a life from the eternal darkness, from the loss of the world and its broken light. He could display the sense of humanity and civilization that Anderson discovered far too late.
But Gray Davis is ambitious. He wants to be the president. He wants to challenge George W. Bush - the greatest convict killer in American history. So Davis needs a body count to pluck those "Heartland" strings. No moderate Democrat can afford to look "soft on crime" - not if he wants to join that world of wealth and privilege sealed with blood.
In that realm, mercy has no place. The wielders of state power float like gods above the common ruck, untouched, untouchable, wadded in honors and adulation. Somewhere there is a body - or a dozen bodies, or a thousand - blown to pieces on their order, hacked in two at their remote command, smothered in rubble at their casual nod. But what of that? The wielders will go on, holding their great offices, writing their dull books, collecting their handsome speaking fees, making their profitable investments.
The poor, the penitent, touched at last by conscience, burning with remorse - they are the ones who must die.
Chris Floyd is an American journalist living and working in Europe. A version of this column orginally appeared in The Moscow Times.
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http://www.commondreams.org/
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