A Guilty Man
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WISEMAN DIDN'T REALIZE IT, but he was only the latest in a series of reformers who have introduced new technologies to make killing kinder. The idealists of the French Revolution developed the swift certainty of the guillotine as an improvement over messy medieval methods like being torn apart by wild horses. Well-intentioned reformers in the United States promoted the electric chair, and later the gas chamber, to replace hanging.
Wiseman's contribution to this dubious progress was utilized by Texas in 1982, where Charlie Brooks Jr. became the first person put to death by lethal injection. Liberal pundits and the ACLU were appalled, but it did seem to work as promised. A pleased Texas judge declared that "1983 will bring some more [executions]...and this humane way will make it more palatable." Since then, every death-penalty state except Nebraska has adopted lethal injection, and, as of this writing, 805 people have been killed with it. That's by far the lion's share of modern American executions nationwide. Since 1976, only 168 inmates have been killed by other methods: electrocution, the gas chamber, hanging, or firing squads. Oklahoma has been especially enthusiastic with the needle -- the only method the state now employs -- and has used it to end the lives of 77 men and women, including George James Miller Jr.
Miller's crime, the capstone of a long history of violence, was a horrific one. He was convicted of murdering an Oklahoma City motel clerk by stabbing him with a knife and a pair of hedge shears, battering him with a paint can, and then pouring muriatic acid down his throat. After years of failed appeals, his death was scheduled for last May 12.
Executions have grown so common in Oklahoma that I was one of only three journalists who showed up at the century-old state penitentiary outside McAlester to cover it. A half-hour before Miller was to die, a grand total of three death-penalty opponents were standing a glum vigil outside the prison's massive, whitewashed brick walls.
At 6 p.m. (killing time was moved up from midnight a few years ago, to make things easier on prison staff and witnesses), we were escorted through the prison's double gates, down a gleamingly clean concrete corridor, and into a narrow, brightly lit room. Facing a set of four windows, Miller's teary but composed mother, a few other relatives, and a handful of prison officials occupied a couple of rows of folding metal chairs.
On the other side of the windows lay Miller, bald-headed, mustached, and wearing a blue smock. Most of the straps holding him to the gurney were covered by a white sheet pulled up to his chest. He leaned up, smiled, and nodded at his family before lying back down, closing his eyes, and uttering his last words: "I love you."
Over the course of the next eight minutes, Miller was executed. There was almost no visible sign that anything at all was happening to him. An intravenous tube had been inserted into his arm before the witnesses arrived. It led through a hole in the wall behind Miller's head. Hidden by the wall, technicians fed a dose of sodium thiopental into the tube to put him to sleep; then vecuronium bromide, to paralyze his muscles; and finally potassium chloride, to stop his heart. Miller exhaled wetly a couple of times as the first drug began working. A few minutes later, his jaws and lips quivered slightly. Then his eyes opened just a slit, and stayed that way while a prison medical examiner checked him with a stethoscope, and pronounced him dead.
It was deeply disturbing to see the process of dying reduced to such spartan mechanics, with no ceremony, no last rites, nothing but an efficiently administered end to life. But it did look about as painless as such a thing can be.
That absence of pain and drama, says Richard Dieter, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center, has made lethal injection a huge boon to capital-punishment advocates. "I don't think the public today would stand for 60 electrocutions a year," says Dieter. "By now lethal injection is essentially the only method used. It's more palatable to guards, to juries, and to legislators. I think it has resulted in more executions than would otherwise have been the case."
Recently activists and lawyers around the country have begun calling into question whether the process is really as painless as it looks. Most states use drug combinations and dosages similar to those used in Oklahoma. But considering that these drugs are usually administered by untrained prison officials rather than medical personnel, and are given to convicts whose veins may be damaged from drug use and who are likely to be understandably agitated, it's possible that some condemned people might not get enough anesthetic to actually put them to sleep -- leaving them conscious but, paralyzed by the second drug, incapable of screaming or convulsing as their hearts are squeezed to a stop.
Death-penalty opponents have raised this argument before, but only in recent months has hard evidence emerged to back them up. Autopsies of inmates executed in Kentucky, South Carolina, and North Carolina have found concentrations of anesthetic that could have left the condemned conscious as their lives were taken. In April, the British medical journal The Lancet published a study that analyzed toxicology reports of 49 executed inmates in four states; it concluded that 43 of them showed levels of anesthetic lower than that required for sur- gery, and 21 "had concentrations consistent with awareness." If an inmate were indeed conscious when the potassium chloride hit his veins, a Columbia University anesthesiology professor testified at a recent hearing in Connecticut, it would cause a searing pain similar "to that of boiling oil or branding with a red-hot iron."
Citing such evidence, death-row lawyers have mounted challenges to lethal injection itself in a number of states. None have succeeded in banning the procedure so far, but Kentucky and New Jersey suspended executions so the courts could examine the issue. (Kentucky has since rescinded its ban.)
Oklahoma, however, has taken no pause. A spokesman for the Department of Corrections brushes aside such concerns, saying simply, "We believe the amount of anesthetic we use is sufficient."
The day after Miller's execution, Wiseman, dressed in a blue turtleneck and khakis, led early-morning prayers for a handful of worshippers at a little nondenominational chapel on the University of Central Oklahoma campus. The readings included Psalm 102: "For the Lord looked down from his holy place on high; from the heavens he beheld the earth; that he might hear the groan of the captive and set free those condemned to die."
Wiseman has long since left politics. In 1979, with Ronald Reagan's brand of conservatism increasingly defining the party, he decided he couldn't call himself a Republican anymore and switched to the Democrats. He was trounced in the next election and never ran again. Since then, he has worked for an oil company, run his own public relations business, and been a university lecturer and administrator. Now he's getting ready for a whole new career.
With his two sons grown up and moved off to New York, Wiseman is finally accepting the vocation that has called to him since childhood. After years of part-time studies at theological seminaries in Tulsa and Austin, Texas, he has been ordained, and come December he'll serve as an Episcopal priest at a Tulsa church. There he aims to re- turn to the issue that has plagued his conscience for almost 30 years. He intends to make preaching and advocating for the abolition of the punishment he inadvertently abetted a central part of his ministry. "I'm sorry for what I did," he says simply. "I hope someday to offset it by helping us realize that capital punishment is wrong and self-destructive."
For Wiseman, whatever the courts eventually decide about lethal injection is beside the point. "I'm aware of my responsibility," he says. "It keeps me tied to the problem. And the problem is that we're killing people. That's what's wrong, not how we're doing it."
Vince Beiser is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist specializeing in criminal justice issues. He is a former editor of MotherJones.com.
