Flynn's Harp: Capital punishment, hanging reflections (7-28-10)

The global and national outcry at the firing-squad execution this summer of Ronnie Lee Gardner in Utah, the last state where that form of capital punishment is possible, could presage a similar uproar directed at Washington State should the nation’s last gallows be prepared for use. Eight men on death row in Walla Walla await that possibility.

But at least some of the anger seemed focused on the fact Utah still has an “Old West” way of executing its condemned criminals, who are able to choose the firing squad over lethal injection.

Since Washington is the last state where a condemned man may choose to die by hanging, it’s pretty clear that the same sort of charge of “barbaric Old West justice” could rain down on the state should the day come for one of those eight men.

Thoughts about Gardner’s execution and an interview with a Seattle area student doing a paper on capital punishment brought back memories of the 1963 hanging of Joseph Chester Self, which I covered for United Press International as a young reporter. Self’s would be the last hanging in Washington State for more than 30 years.

The state doesn’t have a gallows in the Old West style, but rather a large room at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, a “death chamber” awaiting possible use should any condemned man choose to hang rather than receive a lethal injection.

Only men have been executed in Washington and of the 14 who have gone to their deaths since 1949, 13 were Caucasian and one was Hispanic. Two of the last four men to suffer the death penalty chose hanging, the last being Charles Campbell in 1995.

Washington’s governors have routinely passed on the opportunities over the years to interfere with the death penalty being carried out.

Mike Lowry, who was then in his first year as Washington governor, was the last to weigh whether to permit a condemned man to hang, although two men were subsequently executed by lethal injection during Gary Locke’s time as governor.

I asked Lowry to recall that hanging and his thoughts about it. In the process of answering, he disclosed that a personal visit with the condemned man at the state penitentiary had been part of what he referred to as “the considerable time” he spent reviewing Charles Campbell’s case.

“I received delegations from opponents of capital punishment and, of course, from family and friends of the people he murdered,” Lowry recalled. “In the end, I could not justify in my own mind reversing the 13-year legal process that included all the appeals that were made by his defense lawyers exercising his constitutional rights.

“One of the reasons I did not commute Mr. Campbell's sentence to life without possibility of parole is that there was a very legitimate fear that he might try to kill a prison employee or other inmate,” Lowry added.

Lowry conceded it’s possible there will be other executions in Washington State, noting:  “I feel for whoever is governor at that time and I hope he or she will explore every opportunity to find a solid justification to commute the sentence to life without possibility of parole.”

The case of Joe Self was different. When he made the short walk from his death-row holding cell to the door of the chamber, he had long-since converted to Catholicism and he had willed his eyes to an eye bank.

Self was convicted and sentenced to die for shooting a cab driver to death in a $15 robbery, the final criminal chapter in a life of otherwise petty crimes.

Spenser, the young man who contacted me for the interview for his project, told me he and a friend had decided to do a paper on the death penalty and had searched the Internet but found “mostly factual, neutral stuff. It was difficult to find sites that gave us opinions.”

I shared with him the details of the June evening of 1963 when two other young journalists and I were among the group of about 35 people on hand for Self’s hanging, by tradition just past midnight, “the first minute of the new day.”

Self, Warden Bobbie Rhay, a catholic priest who had become Self’s regular death-row visitor, and a couple of guards entered a door to the cement balcony against the back wall of the chamber, with the witnesses looking up from below. They walked to the center of the platform and stopped as Self stood above the steel door through which he would fall to his death when the door was sprung open.

Rhay asked Self if he had any final words and the condemned man replied: “Ask me if I’ve said my prayers, warden.”

With that, a hood was pulled over Self’s head. A straightjacket pinned his arms to his body. Rhay flipped a wall switch, signaling three men in a room below the death chamber that they should each flip the switches in front of them. Only one of the switches activated the trap door, through which Self fell in a moment, his neck snapping before onlookers could even grasp what they had witnessed.

That only three young reporters, all print journalists in their early ‘20s, were on hand (no radio or television news people and no seasoned reporters) to cover the execution was a commentary on the relative importance of a hanging then, though there was certainly media coverage in the weeks prior. After all, hangings occurred on average about once a year. But Self’s would be the last for decades.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Washington’s death penalty unconstitutional in 1972, but voters reinstated it, addressing the court’s concerns, in 1975.

By the time 30 years after Self that another death row inmate was to be hanged, the attention was widespread and went on for weeks, and all three of us who had been at Self’s execution found ourselves being interviewed by various media on “what it was like.”

Coincidentally, a week after Gardner’s execution, I got a card from Spenser that said: “Thank you for the interview. I got an A on my project.”