The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 (19 page)

Crittendon said he doesn't recall making any gesture of overt triumph and that he could have been giving a “move 'em on up” signal to a driver who had witnesses waiting in a van. When I reminded him that the witnesses had already assembled in the courtyard, he said that he might have been beckoning to the “extraction team” to stand ready to remove Harris's brother if he caused a disturbance, as Crittendon had heard he might. In the event, Harris's brother watched in silence as the condemned man gasped and convulsed and turned blue before being pronounced dead, ten minutes later. (In 1994, U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Patel banned gas as the state's preferred method of capital punishment, declaring it cruel and unusual. After
some notorious executions, including two in Florida in the nineteen-nineties in which the electrocuted man's head burst into flames, thirty-seven of the thirty-eight death-penalty states use lethal injection as the primary method; only Nebraska still relies on electrocution.)

Now, after unlocking a door in the prison wall, Crittendon gave a ringmaster's flourish: “The
execution
chamber.” We stepped into an airless room dominated by a squat green apparatus that resembled a bathysphere. The woman employee circled it, peering at the iron doors, the thick windows, and the flat green chair within. As Crittendon watched her, his face took on a stoical, almost sorrowful cast. “The inmate who did that welding, in 1937, Alfred Wells,” he remarked, “was back inside six years later for three murders, and he died right here in the chamber he built. ‘I fought the law and the law won'—
bada bing, bada bam.
”

“When's the next one?” the woman asked. Crittendon explained the stay, and when she asked his opinion of the death penalty he parried coolly, “There are those who raise the argument—as is their absolute right—that you should not have state-sanctioned killing, even though the public supports it. One will see how it all plays out.”

Executioners seek to maintain their detachment, but they often begin to feel empathy or depression. John Robert Radclive said that visions of the prisoners he hanged between 1892 and 1910 “haunt me and taunt me until I am nearly crazy,” and Amos Squire, the doctor at Sing Sing who between 1914 and 1925 sat beside the condemned during a hundred and thirty-eight electrocutions, wrote that he finally quit when, after signalling for the procedure to commence, he began to feel “a sudden, terrifying urge to rush forward and take hold of the man in the chair, while the current was on.”

Crittendon's mother, Louise, always scrutinized him after an execution; she felt that each killing hardened her son a bit, but, she told me, “it didn't take root in him.” Yet Crittendon told me
that he has come to believe that lethal injection is inhumane—to the executioner. “You are eye to eye with the inmate as you have skin-to-skin touch, smelling his body odor, feeling his breath, and this is someone who has been in your care at the institution, usually without being violent, for at least fifteen years,” he said. “So transference occurs. I'm the only person who was there for all eleven of the lethal injections, and every single one of them I cannot forget—I close my eyes and I can see and hear it.”

 

O
N
D
ECEMBER
12, 2005, the night of Stanley Tookie Williams's scheduled execution, a crowd began gathering early outside San Quentin's East Gate and soon numbered about a thousand. Williams, widely known for building one of the country's most notorious street gangs, had become even more famous for his prison transformation: he was the most prominent cause célèbre for death-penalty abolitionists since Caryl Chessman, the charming serial rapist and author who, after twelve years in San Quentin, went to the gas chamber in 1960. Williams had been visited by such celebrities as Snoop Dogg and Jamie Foxx (who played Williams in a television movie, “Redemption”), and the crowd outside that night included Jesse Jackson and Joan Baez, who sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

At 7:20
P.M.,
Vernell Crittendon approached the deathwatch cell with mail and a pitcher of water. Williams, a barrel-chested man with gray cornrows, was seated on his mattress as if it were a throne. He had declined a last meal, a sedative, and the chance to vouchsafe his last words to the warden. The two men, born just days apart to absconding fathers and stern, religious mothers, stared at each other through the bars. Even then, Williams believed that the courts or the governor would intervene. “I brought the mail,” Crittendon said at last.

“Fine. Send it to Barbara,” Williams said, referring to Barbara Becnel, a community-services activist and his most loyal
supporter. He would not take the water or speak again. A week earlier, Williams had told Crittendon, “I don't even want to talk to you—you're one of the people trying to get me executed.” He had asked a captain to stop Crittendon from bringing his mail, and told the warden that he didn't want the spokesman present during discussions about the schedule.

In the years after Williams came to San Quentin, in 1981, convicted of four murders, Crittendon said that he would chat with him about black pride. “I'd play the race card,” he recalls, “saying, ‘How come that white officer can go down to talk to that skinhead, and you see me as an enemy—and yet we're brothers, and your whole thing is black pride?'” The talks can't have been very convivial, as Williams not only hated cops, whites, and almost everyone—as he demonstrated by repeatedly attacking other prisoners—but had no use for Crittendon, whom he referred to as an “Uncle Tom” and “Mr. Lickspittle.”

But beginning in 1993, after what he described as a gradual spiritual awakening, Williams stopped fighting and began to apologize for his past. An autodidact with a fondness for words such as “braggadocio” and “anent,” he went on to co-write, with Barbara Becnel, nine children's books decrying the gangster life style. Becnel says, “Vernell was very helpful at first. Stan was in the Hole and couldn't get phone calls, and Vernell would maneuver and break the rules and allow us to speak on the phone.”

Crittendon says he secretly hoped that Becnel would help him to persuade Williams to renounce the Crips and name his accomplices in the murders—crimes that Williams insisted he didn't commit—and to do it on television. (Becnel and Crittendon agree that he never broached any of those topics with her.) As Crittendon recalls it, in the mid-nineties Williams finally responded to the last of a series of invitations Crittendon made to him to unburden himself on Larry King's program: “A man don't rat,” Williams said. “And I'm a man.” Crittendon says that
he realized then that Williams was just a hustler who would never quit the game. “If I could have got
him,
that would have been great! Not for Vernell,” he quickly clarified, “but for public safety.”

However, in notes that Williams typed before meeting one of his lawyers in 2005, he scorned the idea that he and Crittendon had once had a promising relationship, noting that in twenty-four years in San Quentin “there was
never
a reason for him and I to speak at length.” Becnel believes the turning point for Crittendon occurred in 2000, when Williams, who had helped broker a gang truce in Los Angeles over the telephone (and would later broker another truce in Newark), was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Peter Fleming, Jr., one of Williams's lawyers, told me, “The clear sense I had with Vernell was ‘This convicted murderer's getting all this attention—why am I not getting it?'”

Certainly Crittendon took the case personally. Beginning in 2004, after Williams's appeals had been exhausted, Crittendon waged a largely clandestine media campaign against the inmate. (He first sought and received approval for his efforts to “correct public misimpressions” from the state attorney general's office and the C.D.C.R. spokesman in Sacramento, who himself acted as liaison to the governor's office, which would have to rule on Williams's petition for clemency.) Crittendon's démarche was usually accomplished through quiet suggestion: Rita Cosby, who conducted the last television interview with Williams on her MSNBC talk show, says, “Vernell's appraisal caused me to be more skeptical, and gave me some questions to ask Tookie: was he still involved in organizing gang activity behind bars?”

A month before Williams's scheduled execution, Crittendon gave an interview to the Associated Press in which he said of Williams, “I just don't know that his heart is changed,” and suggested that Williams was still orchestrating gangland activities. This was an unprecedented attack for a prison spokesman to make. “To turn public opinion in favor of executing Tookie Wil
liams was not just weird—Tookie simply minded his own business—it was wrong,” the former warden Daniel Vasquez told me. “Vernell may have gotten addicted to his own image of what he could do.”

Crittendon's observations carried weight because he represented a government authority and because reporters liked and trusted him. But those observations seem to have derived more from the spokesman's animus than from the inmate's misconduct. Crittendon had told the A.P. that Williams's prison bank account was suspiciously large, but there was only sixteen hundred and eighty-two dollars in it. Crittendon had found it troubling that Williams was not counselling his son, Stanley IV, a former gang member in prison for murder, but he acknowledged to me that he checked Williams's mail only in the final month or so—and hadn't read Williams's autobiography, in which he details his extensive correspondence with and counselling of his son—“so I can't say for sure he wasn't writing his son.” When asked whether he now considered his campaign unusual or unwarranted, Crittendon said it “was approved through the department” and “an appropriate response to the questions that were asked by the media.” Yet he also eventually acknowledged that Williams hadn't actually been orchestrating gangland crimes. The spokesman's problem, then, was that Williams's ongoing defiance of Crittendon—and the system that Crittendon had come to embody—made him a living symbol of the Crip life style.

At eight-thirty that night, Crittendon slipped off to the staff rest room in the prison's abandoned schoolhouse, as he always did on the eve of an execution, to change into his black suit and then sit and think about the condemned man. Crittendon often began to empathize—but not this time. “I was thinking how the gang Stanley created had destroyed the African-American community,” he recalls, “how you can shoot someone on the corner in
broad daylight and no one who sees it will say anything, because they fear the Crips.”

At midnight, Crittendon took up his customary post in the death chamber, facing the window at the foot of the green chair, “directly across from Williams's head, so that I could look right up his nostrils. It was part of my duties to watch, because if we have a blowout and a vein starts spurting blood I have to escort the witnesses out.” As thirty-nine witnesses looked on in increasingly tense silence, a nurse repeatedly tried to establish the standard backup I.V. in the convict's left arm as Williams seethed and finally made an impatient remark. When the nurse exited, after twelve minutes, the second I.V. still wasn't in, but Warden Ornoski, not realizing this and having found the delay excruciating, said, “Proceed.” The chemicals began to flow into Williams's right arm.

“I always wanted to be able to see the moment when the life had left the person,” Crittendon said. “Stanley went motionless pretty quickly, consistent with what you'd expect. Whereas with Manny Babbitt”—a murderer executed in 1999—“you could see a tightening in his throat, little shivers and twitches when he felt it coming on.” Crittendon demonstrated, jerking his head rapidly to the side and grimacing. “Stephen Wayne Anderson”—a prison escapee and murderer who was executed in 2002—“was looking around and saying ‘I love you! I love you!' to his loved ones, then he laid his head back and to the side, and I could see, Oh, he's gone. But you're under such scrutiny there's not time for emotions. The sniper, when he fires off that shot, there's not time to think, I just took a human life. No, he's got to sight on another target before someone fires at him.”

Barbara Becnel, who felt that she had just seen a prolonged “torture-murder,” whispered a suggestion to two of the other witnesses, and as they left the chamber they cried, in unison, “The State of California just killed an innocent man!” Shirley
Neal, a Williams supporter, happened to look at Crittendon at that moment, and she recalls that “he looked shocked and frightened.” Crittendon says that he was merely surprised by the outburst, and that no personal reflections entered into it. Indeed, he says that his efforts to discredit the condemned man were unrelated to the failure of their relationship: “My goal was never to reach and change
Stanley.
He was just a tool for me to have an impact. If you pick up a cup and it's all dirty, do you worry about why it's all dirty, or do you pick up another cup and quench your thirst? I put the dirty cup down and quenched my thirst.”

 

O
NE MORNING IN
J
UNE OF
2006, Crittendon introduced me to Lonnie Morris, a lean black lifer he has known for more than a quarter century. It was the day before Morris and a handful of other star inmates would be the subjects of a two-part series on “Larry King Live,” taped in the prison's courtyard. “You've got to educate tomorrow, man,” Crittendon told Morris. “The public lives in generalities and paranoia, where you're the bogeyman.”

Just before the taping, Crittendon gathered the inmates in the chapel for a briefing. He predicted, accurately, the topics that King would raise—including drugs and violence—and explained that the inmates didn't have to address them. “This is not about you,” Crittendon said. “It's about the millions of incarcerated men you represent—speak for them.” The inmates stayed tenaciously on message. When King asked “What about rape dangers, male to male?” Morris said, “Honestly, you're going to find in prison the same thing you find in society,” and then began talking about the Real Choices program.