The Death Penalty

Editor’s note: The author of this article, John Brummett, is a regular columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. This story first appeared in the magazine edition of Talk Business & Politics, which you can read here.

The re-emergence of the death penalty debate in Arkansas – not about whether, but how – provides an opportunity to revisit a couple of the many adventures of Steve Clark.

He has been up and he has been down and he has been back again. And often he has been in the thick of things.

He was the early-30s Democratic attorney general of the state when, in 1983, he pushed for the law to switch the state’s method of carrying out the death penalty from electrocution to lethal injection with a series of drug infusions.

There had been ghastly electric chair malfunctions around the country. Bodies had been disfigured. Eyeballs had popped out. Several states had switched to the injection of a series of killing chemicals, and the ambitious young centrist Democrat serving as attorney general thought Arkansas should join them.

Clark’s uncle, the late Sen. John Bearden of Leachville, sponsored the bill. Clark remembers Uncle John telling him the requisite 18 votes were hard to come by in the Senate. “He said, ‘Those for the death penalty thought [lethal injection] wasn’t cruel enough and those opposed to the death penalty thought it was too cruel.’”

In time Bearden would pass the bill and send it to the House. It passed there after a debate in which a legislator memorably pleaded for compassionate support for the supposed more humane process of lethal injection. He asked his colleagues to “try to act more like human beings than legislators.”

Some would suggest that admonishment as a general rule, even a mantra, perhaps suitable for engraving on yet another state Capitol lawn monument.

SWINDLER AND SIMMONS
Seven years later Clark was the veteran attorney general standing by on site when, after a nearly two-decade hiatus owing to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Arkansas again put someone to death.

First, in June 1990, came convicted murderer John Edward Swindler. His conviction had predated the 1983 change of method and he had choice of method. He picked the electric chair.

A week later, monstrous killer Ronald Simmons, murderer of 14 family members including a daughter who also was his granddaughter, waived all appeals from his 1989 conviction and was the first person to be put to death in the state by the lethal three-drug injection.

Clark, now heading the Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce, was in an adjoining room when Swindler’s electrocution went quickly and without incident.

Wanting nothing to go wrong, the state had fine-tuned the chair’s electrical system. It had polished the hardware. An extra strap had been attached owing to Swindler’s size. A natural sponge rather than synthetic one was used because it carried a greater charge and increased the likelihood of death occurring within a second without a gruesome mishap sure to make national headlines.

And all went … actually, “well” may not be the most appropriate way to put it. It went quickly, certainly, and without incident other than a man’s efficient death at the hand of the state.

One week later Clark sat in the room looking through the witness’ window when Simmons’ lethal injection shook him … Clark, that is, not Simmons, whose thoughts were unknown.

As Clark describes, the curtain opened to this scene: Simmons was raised slightly on the gurney to face the audience. He had a long white beard and was draped in white. His arms were spread for the IV insertions.

21 MINUTES
Clark recalls instantly thinking of crucifixion “and all the symbolism of church and faith.”

“I hadn’t expected that,” he said.

Then three drugs were injected. Then Simmons went to sleep. Then 21 minutes passed before Simmons was pronounced dead by a doctor.

Clark and other officials had been told the three-drug cocktail would take Simmons’ life peacefully within three to five minutes.

Clark said he came during the course of those 21 minutes to think of himself as a gawker in a scene that might have been compassionate in a way for Simmons – an ironic way at best – but was hardly compassionate as a general exercise by the people through their government.

“Minutes turned to … well, not hours, but it almost seemed like it,” Clark said. “The doctor checked three times, I think, and Simmons’ heart hadn’t stopped. It just wouldn’t stop. The silence was deafening. So you’re just sitting there. This is not a small-talk type of thing. You don’t turn to the guy beside you and bring up the weather. You sit. You wait.”

KNOWLEDGEABLE BACKGROUND
Today Clark carries no evolved or evolving view of the death penalty itself as a matter of morality or policy, or at least none that he cares to relate. But what he does carry today is an informed context.

“I remember we’d sit in the AG’s office and complain that if only the 8th Circuit would get out of our way and quit delaying us we could have an execution,” he said. “But when you’ve been there, when you’ve seen it, when you’ve had 21 minutes to sit and wait for a man to die, you realize we don’t need any kind of rush to judgment.

“These people who say they want to watch the killer get his – that he deserves just what he gave his victim, and worse – that’s easy to say, and it’s understandable. But it’s not the kind of thinking that I had when it was right in front of me.

“And if anybody deserved it, Ronald Gene Simmons deserved it.”

Clark said these two examples – Swindler’s and Simmons’ – make a counter-intuitive case that the electric chair is more humane than lethal injection.

“That’s not to say that’s the general case, or that we ought to bring back Old Sparky [the electric chair]. But it shouldn’t take a man 21 minutes to die, and certainly not while you sit there and watch.”

Two years after the Swindler and Simmons executions, then-Gov. Bill Clinton would return from the presidential election campaign trail to be in the state – as he saw his duty – on the night the state applied lethal injection to Rickey Ray Rector. He was a convicted cop-killer who subsequently had blown off part of his own brain in an apparent failed suicide attempt.

Rector saved the pecan pie from his last meal, telling prison officials he would eat it later.

Then it took the medical staff 50 minutes to find a suitable vein for the IV, apparently because of Rector’s obesity and the presence in his system of anti-psychotic medicine.

As officials labored to make the injection, the witness room curtain remained closed and witnesses reported hearing Rector moan several times.

Whether that’s compassionate – whether that’s better than electrocution – is a debate that probably hinges on how efficiently the electrocution goes.

Whether that word – “compassionate” – is even relevant or appropriate in this context is a worthy question.

UTAH AND THE FIRING SQUAD
For now, the state Supreme Court has approved a new lethal injection system to replace a former process beset by legal challenge and the growing unavailability of the needed drugs.

In the recent session, legislators passed another law amending that method – giving pharmaceutical suppliers anonymity, supposedly, among other changes – and a suit was promptly filed on behalf of Death Row inmates challenging the new law on several grounds.

So the cycle of debate and delay continues.

Clark was asked about Utah’s reliance on a firing squad for executions. He replied by saying he’d been telling someone a few days before that it might be that a firing squad was as good as anything else, even better than some methods.

In Utah, five rifles are extended through portals, aimed by specially chosen police officers (some of whom have asked for the assignment) at a target on the heart of the head-covered person to be executed. One of the guns holds blanks.

Then there are five booms and a man is dead.

The American Civil Liberties Union says the firing squad method makes Utah look backward and gruesome.

But it’s not a 21-minute death punctuated by gawks from a witness room. It’s not 50 minutes of moaning in messy search of a vein.

And by whatever method, Rickey Ray Rector doesn’t get to eat his dessert.