The prisoner’s name was Aaron Mitchell, a black cop killer who had appealed his conviction all the way to state and federal Supreme Courts, and had, each time, been sent back to San Quentin State Prison to await execution on death row.
On April 11, 1967, at 10 a.m., he died in the gas chamber, which was how they did it then. The night before, there were demonstrators outside the rented house that functioned then as the governor’s mansion. While they protested, my father prayed with the Rev. Donn Moomaw, the pastor of my parents’ church at the time. My father said later that it was the longest night of his life. He believes in the death penalty, believes it deters crime, but when you have to make the final decision about ending a life, beliefs are cold comfort.
I wanted to be against the death penalty. I probably even said that I was that night, although I don’t remember now, it’s been so many years. But I remember the weight in my heart, the gray shadows that refused to divide themselves into black and white, right and wrong. I felt my father’s agony, the pain that was masked by a show of authority and conviction, of political decisiveness. I also felt the agony of the people protesting his decision and his refusal to give clemency to Aaron Mitchell. He did a horrible thing, they argued. Keep him locked up, but don’t kill him.
It was so long ago, but it feels so close. Among the demonstrators outside the prison where Timothy McVeigh was executed, a few were filmed counting down to his moment of death-gleefully celebrating the end of his life. Their glee made me cringe, yet I understand.
I always thought that as I got older I would take a firmer stand on capital punishment-maybe not publicly, but at least inside myself. I haven’t. In fact, the shades of gray are murkier now-thicker, harder to see through. Because the longer you live, the more you can trace the face of evil in all its guises. You can’t escape it, there’s too much of it out there. And you feel the rage that comes up in you-the hatred, the desire to extinguish that evil by extinguishing the life behind it. I can acknowledge the feeling, but I can’t support it; I can’t turn it into an ideological stand.
I felt it when John Hinckley opened fire on my father on that March day in 1981, wounding him and three others. I have felt it whenever I get another letter from a prisoner who has been writing obsessive, lewd, insane letters to me for the past 17 years. I know what it’s like to imagine killing him with my bare hands if he ever gets out on parole, and parole is a possibility. I have felt it often when news broadcasts detail the horrors that some people are capable of. I wish that I didn’t, but it’s there, a reminder that I do have a dark side, whether I like it or not.
I envy those who can take a stand on capital punishment-on one side or the other. I don’t think I will ever be one of those people. But I am certain of this: Executing those who have committed horrific, evil crimes doesn’t erase the evil, and it doesn’t free us from them. They have crawled inside us by making us want to kill them; they have lifted up corners in our hearts where we didn’t think darkness was. See? They have said, look at the hatred that was festering there. Even people who are opposed to the death penalty feel hatred for Timothy McVeigh. That’s the way evil grabs hold-deep inside you, turning you into someone you never wanted to be.
A few months after Aaron Mitchell was executed, a store owner in Sacramento, Calif., was robbed at gunpoint and found himself on the floor with a gun at his head. According to the letter he wrote my father, he said to the thief, “If you kill me, you’ll get the gas chamber.” With Aaron Mitchell’s death fresh on his mind, the man fled, sparing the store owner’s life. In his letter, the man thanked my father for saving his life. The story was told and retold often, as if the agony, the weight, the memory of that long night preceding Mitchell’s execution could be made lighter by drawing out the story with the happy ending. A man lived because another died. No one actually said it that way, but I know that thought was woven through the need to keep repeating the store owner’s tale.
Timothy McVeigh is ashes now. But he isn’t gone. Maybe he knew he would never really leave; maybe he stared straight ahead at the people he knew were behind the glass because he was certain he had won. He twisted the coils in their hearts, their souls, he instructed all of us in the cold art of evil. Maybe he knew it didn’t really matter if they executed him or not. In the ways that matter, he will never die.
