Heard the one about Jones and Laverty? In 1981, at the age of 23, George Jones was charged with home invasion, aggravated battery, armed violence, attempted murder, and the rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl. His trial–a death penalty case–was under way when Area Two violent crimes detective Frank Laverty came forward and testified that he had written a memo saying that Jones’s arrest had been a case of mistaken identity, and that the other detectives who had testified knew there was evidence implicating a different man. Laverty’s commanding officer took the stand and admitted that he had locked up Laverty’s memo and had shown it to no one. The judge ultimately dismissed the charges against Jones, saying that some of the detectives’ behavior in the case “bordered on deliberate misconduct,” and a federal jury later awarded Jones $801,000 in damages. The Police Department showed its appreciation of Laverty when he requested a transfer from Area Two: the detective was moved to headquarters, where he was given the job of watching police recruits give urine samples.
The stories of Jones, Tillis, Cobb, and Lewis come to mind in the wake of the death of Charles Walker, who was executed September 12 for the murders of Kevin Paule, 21, and his fiancee Sharon Winker, 25. But for the abnormal courage of Frank Laverty (who was later shunned by his fellow policemen), the fluke of Mike Falconer reading a Chicago Lawyer story (he was berated for coming forward by the prosecutor in the case), and the persistence of Steven Beckett, Cornelius Lewis’s last attorney, Jones, Tillis, Cobb, and Lewis might now all be sitting on death row, waiting to follow Mr. Walker to the state’s execution chamber.
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The obvious lesson would seem to be that justice administered by human beings will always be imperfect, that policemen, prosecution witnesses, and even prosecutors will sometimes lie and mislead juries even though someone’s life is at stake. And even juries are not always as rational as we would like to believe they are: in 1985, a jury foreman in Daytona Beach, Florida, said that some of her fellow jury members, who had just given out a death sentence, had conducted their deliberations hurriedly because they did not want to miss a “happy hour” at a local tavern. Despite all this, and despite a state history that includes the execution of at least four innocent men, the death penalty in Illinois remains immensely popular.
The machine was designed by the now infamous Fred Leuchter Jr., a Boston-area man who until two months ago seemed to have a lock on the market for execution hardware in the United States. That lock on the market led him to expand–foolishly–into a new field, that of expert witness on the subject of gas chambers. Leuchter was first recruited for that role by Ernst Zundel, a Canadian bookseller and the publisher of the 1974 booklet Did Six Million Really Die?, which argued that the number of people executed by the Nazis in World War II had been exaggerated. Zundel was charged with violating a Canadian law prohibiting the dissemination of false information that is damaging to social tolerance. Desperate to find an expert witness, Zundel wrote to corrections officials in states that deployed gas chambers for execution. A warden in Missouri, a state that has since switched to the lethal injection method, wrote back and recommended Leuchter.
Carnes went on to tell the following story: In July, as the execution of an Alabama inmate named Wallace Thomas approached, the prisoner’s attorney filed a motion claiming that the state’s electric chair was unreliable. The Alabama attorney general’s office then paid Leuchter $450 for an affidavit in which Leuchter said that there was nothing wrong with the old system except that it was old and that he did not anticipate that there would be any problem with the scheduled execution. The state also secured testimony from an electrical and biomedical engineer who had inspected and tested the chair, and after seeing the two experts’ testimony, the federal district court dismissed the prisoner’s motion, allowing the countdown to the execution to continue.
The abolitionists’ Freedom of Information Act petitions also netted a copy of the “Leuchter Machine Operating Manual,” and they asked Dr. Edward A. Brunner to analyze it. Brunner is chairman of the departments of anesthesia at Northwestern University Medical School and Northwestern Memorial Hospital; in addition to holding a medical degree, he also holds a PhD in pharmacology. In an affidavit later filed in federal court as part of a class-action suit on behalf of other inmates on death row, Brunner said the procedures outlined in the Leuchter manual were in some places incoherent and in other places could be interpreted in such a way that the inmate would suffer extreme pain. Brunner said that unless adequate precautions were taken, the initial dose of sodium pentathol could sensitize the prisoner’s pharynx, causing him to choke, gag, or vomit, and that the prisoner could then choke on his vomit or swallow his tongue and suffocate. Brunner also said that the manual did not state whether the initial sodium pentathol injection would be done intravenously or intramuscularly; if it was done intramuscularly, the prisoner would feel an extreme burning sensation in his muscles. Brunner also charged that the dosage of sodium pentathol called for in Leuchter’s manual would be inadequate to sedate 20 percent of the population, and a prisoner given an inadequate dosage could “suffer an extremely painful sensation of crushing and suffocation” followed by an excruciating burning sensation in his vein, “equivalent to the sensation of a hot poker being inserted in the arm.” Brunner went on to raise questions about the state execution procedure, which called for the dosages to be determined by “qualified health care personnel,” a term that has no recognized meaning in Illinois law or in the medical field. The state responded with an affidavit, signed by Warden Roth, saying that licensed physicians had been consulted to determine the types and amounts of drugs to be utilized and that three doctors would assist and observe the execution.
Perhaps of greater consequence, however, was the fact that in agreeing to participate in the execution the three doctors seem to have agreed to violate state law. The Illinois Medical Practice Act forbids a physician to prescribe, administer, distribute, or give a narcotic for other than medically accepted therapeutic purposes. No matter what defense the doctors might concoct, the end result was that they would be enabling Walker to be killed, and death is not generally accepted as therapeutic.
