The Chamber (Page 52)

Sam snorted and blew smoke across the table. "Problems? You could say that."

"How much do you know?"

"Come on. They died within fifty yards of me. We sit in our cells all day long and think about death. Everyone on the Row knows what happened to those boys."

"Tell me about them."

Sam leaned forward on his elbows and stared absently at the newspaper in front of him. "Meeks was the first execution in Mississippi in ten years, and they didn’t know what they were doing. It was 1982. I’d been here for almost two years, and until then we were living in a dream world. We never thought about the gas chamber and cyanide pellets and last meals. We were sentenced to die, but, hell, they weren’t killing anyone, so why worry? But Meeks woke us up. They killed him, so they could certainly kill the rest of us."

"What happened to him?" Adam had read a dozen stories about the botched execution of Teddy Doyle Meeks, but he wanted to hear it from Sam.

"Everything went wrong. Have you seen the chamber?"

"Not yet."

"There’s a little room off to the side where the executioner mixes his solution. The sulfuric acid is in a canister which he takes from his little laboratory to a tube running into the bottom of the chamber. With Meeks, the executioner was drunk."

"Come on, Sam."

"I didn’t see him, okay. But everyone knows he was drunk. State law designates an official state executioner, and the warden and his gang didn’t think about it until just a few hours before the execution. Keep in mind, no one thought Meeks would die. We were all waiting on a last minute stay, because he’d been through it twice already. But there was no stay, and they scrambled around at the last minute trying to locate the official state executioner. They found him, drunk. He was a plumber, I think. Anyway, his first batch of brew didn’t work. He placed the canister into the tube, pulled a lever, and everyone waited for Meeks to take a deep breath and die. Meeks held his breath as long as he could, then inhaled. Nothing happened. They waited. Meeks waited. The witnesses waited. Everybody slowly turned to the executioner, who was also waiting and cussing. He went back to his little room, and fixed up another mix of sulfuric acid. Then he had to retrieve the old canister from the chute, and that took ten minutes. The warden and Lucas Mann and the rest of the goons were standing around waiting and fidgeting and cussing this drunk plumber, who finally plugged in the new canister and pulled the lever. This time the sulfuric acid landed where it was supposed to – in a bowl under the chair where Meeks was strapped. The executioner pulled the second lever dropping the cyanide pellets, which were also under the chair, hovering above the sulfuric acid. The pellets dropped, and sure enough, the gas drifted upward to where old Meeks was holding his breath again. You can see the vapors, you know. When he finally sucked in a nose full of it, he started shaking and jerking, and this went on quite a while. For some reason, there’s a metal pole that runs from the top of the chamber to the bottom, and it’s directly behind the chair. Just about the time Meeks got still and everybody thought he was dead, his head started banging back and forth, striking this pole, just beating it like hell. His eyes were rolled back, his lips were wide open, he was foaming at the mouth, and there he was beating the back of his head in on this pole. It was sick."

"How long did it take to kill him?"

"Who knows. According to the prison doctor, death was instant and painless. According to some of the eyewitnesses, Meeks convulsed and heaved and pounded his head for five minutes."

The Meeks execution had provided death penalty abolitionists with much ammunition. There was little doubt he had suffered greatly, and many accounts were written of his death. Sam’s version was remarkably consistent with those of the eyewitnesses.

"Who told you about it?" Adam asked.

"A couple of the guards talked about it. Not to me, of course, but word spread quickly. There was a public outcry, which would’ve been even worse if Meeks hadn’t been such a despicable person. Everyone hated him. And his little victim had suffered greatly, so it was hard to feel sympathetic."

"Where were you when he was executed?"

"In my first cell, Tier D, on the far side away from the chamber. They locked everybody down that night, every inmate at Parchman. It happened just after midnight, which is sort of amusing because the state has a full day to carry out the execution. The death warrant does not specify a certain time, just a certain day. So these gong-ho bastards are just itching to do it as soon as possible. They plan every execution for one minute after midnight. That way, if there’s a stay, then they have the entire day for their lawyers to get it lifted. Buster Moac went down that way. They strapped him in at midnight, then the phone rang and they took him back to the holding room where he waited and sweated for six hours while the lawyers ran from one court to the next. Finally, as the sun was rising, they strapped him in for the last time. I guess you know what his last words were."

Adam shook his head. "I have no idea."

"Buster was a friend of mine, a class guy. Naifeh asked him if he had any last words, and he said yes, as a matter of fact, he did have something to say. He said the steak they’d cooked for his last meal was a bit too rare. Naifeh mumbled something to the effect that he’d speak to the cook about it. Then Buster asked if the governor had granted a last minute pardon. Naifeh said no. Buster then said, `Well, tell that son of a bitch he’s lost my vote.’ They slammed the door and gassed him."

Sam was obviously amused by this, and Adam was obliged to offer an awkward laugh. He looked at his legal pad while Sam lit another cigarette.

Four years after the execution of Teddy Doyle Meeks, the appeals of Maynard Tole reached a dead end and it was time for the chamber to be used again. Tole was a Kravitz & Bane pro bono project. A young lawyer named Peter Wiesenberg represented Tole, under the supervision of E. Garner Goodman. Both Wiesenberg and Goodman witnessed the execution, which in many ways was dreadfully similar to Meeks’. Adam had not discussed the Tole execution with Goodman, but he’d studied the file and read the eyewitness accounts written by Wiesenberg and Goodman.

"What about Maynard Tole?" Adam asked.

"He was an African, a militant who killed a bunch of people in a robbery and, of course, blamed everything on the system. Always referred to himself as an African warrior. He threatened me several times, but for the most part he was just selling wolf."

"Selling wolf?"

"Yeah, that means a guy is talking bad, talking trash. It’s common with the Africans. They’re all innocent, you know. Every damned one of them. They’re here because they’re black and the system is white, and even though they’ve raped and murdered it’s someone else’s fault. Always, always someone else’s fault."

"So you were happy when he went?"

"I didn’t say that. Killing is wrong. It’s wrong for the Africans to kill. It’s wrong for the Angles to kill. And it’s wrong for the people of the State of Mississippi to kill death row inmates. What I did was wrong, so how do you make it right by killing me?"

"Did Tole suffer?"

"Same as Meeks. They found them a new executioner and he got it right the first time. The gas hit Tole and he went into convulsions, started banging his head on the pole just like Meeks, except Tole evidently had a harder head because he kept beating the pole with it. It went on and on, and finally Naifeh and the goon squad got real anxious because the boy wouldn’t die and things were getting sloppy, so they actually made the witnesses leave the witness room. It was pretty nasty."