Stay in the Loop
BSR publishes on a weekly schedule, with an email newsletter every Wednesday and Thursday morning. There’s no paywall, and subscribing is always free.
The Terry Williams case, Part III: The 'rational' machinery of death
Terry Williams, Part III: A Life in the balance
Robert Zaller
Terry Williams is alive. On October 3, the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court heard the challenge by the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office to Judge M. Teresa Sarmina's stay of execution for Williams, which was granted the previous Friday. The Court heard Williams's defense plea as well.
(For background on this case, click here..)
October 3 was also the scheduled date for Williams's execution. Prison officials were preparing him for it, although Judge Sarmina's stay technically remained in force.
The Court had three choices: to uphold the stay, to overturn it, or to take further time to review the record of three days of testimony and the decision on which Judge Sarmina had based them. Should they take the last option, the execution warrant— scheduled to be carried out at 7 p.m.— would have expired, at which point Governor Tom Corbett would have 30 days to issue a fresh warrant.
Williams's defense team, whose lead attorneys have handled his case for 16 years, were prepared with three separate writs of appeal to federal courts should the Pennsylvania Court overturn the stay. But the judges had the option of delaying their decision until the last moment.
Proceed with the preparations
During all that time, the prison officials would be preparing the execution. Williams's cell was emptied of his personal belongings. He was readied for transportation to the execution site.
At a certain point, video cameras began taping everything done by and to him, so that there would be a full record that the execution protocol had been carried out as stipulated by law. That moment signified to Williams that the machinery of death had clamped down on him.
Although he had heard nothing about the Court's deliberation, the State's authorities were going about their business as if the outcome were in their hands, or rather the machinery they embodied. These were men behaving as the moving parts of a machinery, whose calm, rational purpose was the infliction of death, and who seemed to be acting at the behest of the camera itself. I tried to visualize the scene as it was described to me by an eyewitness, and was confounded.
What novelists saw
Melville and Sartre have tried to depict the condemned on the eve of their execution; so have James Hanley and David Malouf. They were all writers of fiction. But none of them was acquainted with the modern American capital system, in which hope and terror march in lockstep toward the execution chamber to the last minute, with at best a reprieve to be hoped for.
Albert Camus, in "Reflections on the Guillotine," describes the old penal system in France, in which condemned prisoners were never given specific execution dates, but might be taken out to die at any time. I believe such is still the practice in Japan. I imagine a numb fatalism setting in, in which each day holds its ration of hope and its drop of terror.
I found that terrible, and yet the American system of justice— in which the prisoner may be marched up and back to the execution chamber repeatedly at the whim of successive courts and judges— is worse.
The state as torturer
The death penalty, its supporters say, must be retained to punish the most heinous crimes. But what murderer, however depraved, could match the state as a torturer?
It keeps the condemned in the solitude and despair of death row year on year, decade on decade, each day beginning with the consciousness of the state's constant and unbending will to put one to death, no matter how long it takes, and no matter what repentance may be made.
(The torment of the actually innocent is a different and even worse story. I have met a number of exonerated death row prisoners, and they are scarred as only we might imagine refugees from hell.)
This year, Oklahoma executed Michael Smelsor, after 36 years spent on death row. Florida executed Robert Waterhouse after 32 years, at the age of 65. Not long before, a man of 77 was executed.
Abusing victims, too
It's fantastical to assume that any retributive purpose can be served by hauling old men out of their cells after decades of incarceration to execute a "justice" long forgotten except in the memory bank of the machine. It's hard to imagine even victim survivors being gratified after such a time lapse. The system abuses them as well.
Capital justice grinds so slowly because it is scrupulous, but only after the fact of condemnation. At trial, the accused— almost always indigent— is most often represented by lawyers who are ill paid, ill prepared and sometimes manifestly unqualified.
Only with the appellate process is the playing field sometimes leveled to some extent. But appellate attorneys are hamstrung by a trial record in which (as in Terry Williams's case), critical evidence has often been ignored, suppressed or falsified. The result is a Kafkaesque lottery in which sometimes life is awarded, and sometimes death.
Blackmun's regret
No one designed this system; it evolved from a multitude of jurisdictions and a plethora of rulings. It has now reached the last state of absurdity.
Justice Harry Blackmun, who concurred in the majority decision in Gregg v. Georgia that reinstated the death penalty after its suspension by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972, lived to regret it, and to view with dismay the bewildering variety of appeal cases that ultimately landed at the Court's door. Blackmun said finally that, for his part, he would "no longer tinker with the machinery of death," and thereafter he voted for stays and reversals of execution in all cases.
Two other members of the Gregg majority, Lewis Powell and John Paul Stevens, also later voiced regret at their support for the decision. But the Frankenstein process that Blackmun and his colleagues set in motion goes about its business, unfazed by its creators' own repentance.
Abused since 13
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has asked for more testimony and argument in Terry Williams's case. Given the evidence introduced at this month's hearing, one would hope that the Court will uphold Judge Sarmina's ruling, which not only stayed execution but also voided Williams' death sentence.
The Court could go further, however, particularly as it undertakes hearings of its own. Terry Williams was guilty of a homicide. The man he killed, however, had sexually abused him since the age of 13. Such a case does not merit first-degree murder prosecution; but both the Philadelphia police and the prosecutor knew of, and concealed, the mitigating circumstances involved. They proceeded nonetheless, and sought not merely life imprisonment but the death penalty.
As long as Williams's conviction stands, the best he can hope for from the Commonwealth is life imprisonment. But is it fair to condemn a man raped as a teenager to a lifetime behind bars for turning on his predator?
Terry Williams has already spent 26 years on death row, a punishment arguably even more severe than a life sentence. Not only his sentence was unjust, but his trial itself.
That Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams continues to defend both the trial and its death sentence only shows how far local law enforcement officials are from accepting responsibility for the wrongful past behavior of their jurisdictions. That is the vicious cycle of injustice that continues in Philadelphia.♦
To read Robert Zaller's previous essays about this case, click here and here.
(For background on this case, click here..)
October 3 was also the scheduled date for Williams's execution. Prison officials were preparing him for it, although Judge Sarmina's stay technically remained in force.
The Court had three choices: to uphold the stay, to overturn it, or to take further time to review the record of three days of testimony and the decision on which Judge Sarmina had based them. Should they take the last option, the execution warrant— scheduled to be carried out at 7 p.m.— would have expired, at which point Governor Tom Corbett would have 30 days to issue a fresh warrant.
Williams's defense team, whose lead attorneys have handled his case for 16 years, were prepared with three separate writs of appeal to federal courts should the Pennsylvania Court overturn the stay. But the judges had the option of delaying their decision until the last moment.
Proceed with the preparations
During all that time, the prison officials would be preparing the execution. Williams's cell was emptied of his personal belongings. He was readied for transportation to the execution site.
At a certain point, video cameras began taping everything done by and to him, so that there would be a full record that the execution protocol had been carried out as stipulated by law. That moment signified to Williams that the machinery of death had clamped down on him.
Although he had heard nothing about the Court's deliberation, the State's authorities were going about their business as if the outcome were in their hands, or rather the machinery they embodied. These were men behaving as the moving parts of a machinery, whose calm, rational purpose was the infliction of death, and who seemed to be acting at the behest of the camera itself. I tried to visualize the scene as it was described to me by an eyewitness, and was confounded.
What novelists saw
Melville and Sartre have tried to depict the condemned on the eve of their execution; so have James Hanley and David Malouf. They were all writers of fiction. But none of them was acquainted with the modern American capital system, in which hope and terror march in lockstep toward the execution chamber to the last minute, with at best a reprieve to be hoped for.
Albert Camus, in "Reflections on the Guillotine," describes the old penal system in France, in which condemned prisoners were never given specific execution dates, but might be taken out to die at any time. I believe such is still the practice in Japan. I imagine a numb fatalism setting in, in which each day holds its ration of hope and its drop of terror.
I found that terrible, and yet the American system of justice— in which the prisoner may be marched up and back to the execution chamber repeatedly at the whim of successive courts and judges— is worse.
The state as torturer
The death penalty, its supporters say, must be retained to punish the most heinous crimes. But what murderer, however depraved, could match the state as a torturer?
It keeps the condemned in the solitude and despair of death row year on year, decade on decade, each day beginning with the consciousness of the state's constant and unbending will to put one to death, no matter how long it takes, and no matter what repentance may be made.
(The torment of the actually innocent is a different and even worse story. I have met a number of exonerated death row prisoners, and they are scarred as only we might imagine refugees from hell.)
This year, Oklahoma executed Michael Smelsor, after 36 years spent on death row. Florida executed Robert Waterhouse after 32 years, at the age of 65. Not long before, a man of 77 was executed.
Abusing victims, too
It's fantastical to assume that any retributive purpose can be served by hauling old men out of their cells after decades of incarceration to execute a "justice" long forgotten except in the memory bank of the machine. It's hard to imagine even victim survivors being gratified after such a time lapse. The system abuses them as well.
Capital justice grinds so slowly because it is scrupulous, but only after the fact of condemnation. At trial, the accused— almost always indigent— is most often represented by lawyers who are ill paid, ill prepared and sometimes manifestly unqualified.
Only with the appellate process is the playing field sometimes leveled to some extent. But appellate attorneys are hamstrung by a trial record in which (as in Terry Williams's case), critical evidence has often been ignored, suppressed or falsified. The result is a Kafkaesque lottery in which sometimes life is awarded, and sometimes death.
Blackmun's regret
No one designed this system; it evolved from a multitude of jurisdictions and a plethora of rulings. It has now reached the last state of absurdity.
Justice Harry Blackmun, who concurred in the majority decision in Gregg v. Georgia that reinstated the death penalty after its suspension by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972, lived to regret it, and to view with dismay the bewildering variety of appeal cases that ultimately landed at the Court's door. Blackmun said finally that, for his part, he would "no longer tinker with the machinery of death," and thereafter he voted for stays and reversals of execution in all cases.
Two other members of the Gregg majority, Lewis Powell and John Paul Stevens, also later voiced regret at their support for the decision. But the Frankenstein process that Blackmun and his colleagues set in motion goes about its business, unfazed by its creators' own repentance.
Abused since 13
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has asked for more testimony and argument in Terry Williams's case. Given the evidence introduced at this month's hearing, one would hope that the Court will uphold Judge Sarmina's ruling, which not only stayed execution but also voided Williams' death sentence.
The Court could go further, however, particularly as it undertakes hearings of its own. Terry Williams was guilty of a homicide. The man he killed, however, had sexually abused him since the age of 13. Such a case does not merit first-degree murder prosecution; but both the Philadelphia police and the prosecutor knew of, and concealed, the mitigating circumstances involved. They proceeded nonetheless, and sought not merely life imprisonment but the death penalty.
As long as Williams's conviction stands, the best he can hope for from the Commonwealth is life imprisonment. But is it fair to condemn a man raped as a teenager to a lifetime behind bars for turning on his predator?
Terry Williams has already spent 26 years on death row, a punishment arguably even more severe than a life sentence. Not only his sentence was unjust, but his trial itself.
That Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams continues to defend both the trial and its death sentence only shows how far local law enforcement officials are from accepting responsibility for the wrongful past behavior of their jurisdictions. That is the vicious cycle of injustice that continues in Philadelphia.♦
To read Robert Zaller's previous essays about this case, click here and here.
Sign up for our newsletter
All of the week's new articles, all in one place. Sign up for the free weekly BSR newsletters, and don't miss a conversation.
