"At the Death House Door"
What with the crashing economy, the North Koreans having a nutty and Iran
melting down - to name just a few of the crises spinning at the moment - the
status of the death penalty would seem to be near the bottom of President
Obama's list of priorities. Nonetheless, he'll have no choice but to take a
stand on the issue pretty soon, since the cases of six federal death row
inmates will probably see their stays of executions expire in the next few months.
Then Obama, who has the authority to pardon them or not, will have to
decide whether they live or die.
"The death penalty in the abstract is one thing," says Dianne
Rust-Tierney of the National Coalition Against the Death Penalty to "Politico."
"The reality of the death penalty and all of its nasty details is a very
different thing."
Perhaps the president might want to prep himself for this
decision by watching Steve James and Peter Gilbert's ("Hoop Dreams") wrenching,
sublimely restrained and expertly crafted documentary, "At the Death House
Door," which
will be released by Facets Video tomorrow. It concerns, in part, the strange
career of Rev. Carroll Pickett, who served as the Death Row chaplain at the Huntsville, Texas prison, ushering condemned
prisoners through the last 12 hours of their lives.
Pickett's first experience at the prison traumatized him. In
1974, inmates took several civilian workers hostage. Among them were two of his
parishioners.
He watched them get gunned down in a bloody shootout.
In 1982, six years after the Supreme Court had reinstated
the death penalty, Huntsville
Prison was in the business of executing people. Pickett, then the prison
chaplain and a compelling force for good who had already changed the lives of
many prisoners through his ministry and his choir, was enlisted into the "Lethal
Injection Team" as the person who would accompany the condemned through his (or
her; one victim was a woman) last day, offering them comfort and consolation
and, as the warden put it, "seduce" their emotions so they wouldn't "fight"
when they had to walk that last 8 feet to be strapped to a gurney and put to
death.
Given the murders of his parishioners in 1974, Pickett
initially, if abstractly - had no problem with the death penalty. His leather-tough
Texas
dad used to say "hang them fast and hang them high." But he discovered, as
Rust-Tierney noted above, that the reality is different. He was so shaken by
the experience that he made a tape recording of his feelings and impressions
after each execution. Thirteen years and 95 executions later, including that of
one man, Carlos DeLuna, whom he was certain was innocent, Pickett was no longer
in favor of capital punishment. Anyone who watches this film will be hard-pressed
to support it, either.
Be assured that the film is no screed, but a subtle and
complex interweaving of themes and narratives - including the investigative crusade
of two "Chicago Tribune" reporters seeking to
posthumously establish DeLuna's
innocence ("that's what newspapers are for," says one, reminding us what the
big deal about print journalism was all about). At the heart of the film is the
unforgettable, calmly tragic and utterly compassionate Pickett and his
briefcase full of shattering recorded memories.