An American way of death

Charles Foley

Los Angeles It was not a very edifying mode of revival for the death penalty. Gary Mark Gilmore, 36, who wanted to die 'with dignity and grace,' lived twitching for two minutes after the bullets struck his chest and the blood flowed down upon his white prison slacks. The corpse was stuffed into a black body-bag and driven to the white concrete university school to be cut up. A nurse put surgical tape over the eyes to keep the corneas moist, for use by a young blind boy. The thigh bones and liver were taken out but the kidneys, because of his violent end, were unsuitable for transplant.

There were other by-products of the longawaited event which had stopped presses and TV programmes round the world. 'The ballad of Gary Gilmore' is moving up the charts. Gilmore's hundred love letters to Mrs Nicole Barrett, with whom he made a suicide pact and tried to marry in jail, are selling at £500 a shot to US and overseas newspapers. Mr Lawrence Schiller, the Hollywood entrepreneur, has made what a colleague referred to as `a killing.'

Known to his rivals in the field as 'the carrion king,' plump, full-bearded Mr Schiller was the only member of the 'media' allowed into the execution shed. He acted as `anchorman' for the bizarre press conference that followed. Schiller bought his way in for some £80,000 in the latest of a long series of similar coups he has made down the years— Jack Ruby, Marina Oswald, Madame Nhu, Lenny Bruce's widow, Susan Atkins. Now he is back in town with a team of ten for 'The Story of Gary Gilmore,' to be merchandised in a myriad ways: movies, books, tapes, magazines ...

Gilmore himself suggested to Schiller an ideal ending for this media spectacular. His death, he said, could be used as a TV commercial for Timex watches: after he had been shot, a man in a white coat would come out and place a stethoscope on his heart. 'Well, that certainly stopped, folks.' Then the watch would be held aloft. 'But the Timex kept on running.' It would make a mint, said Gary Gilmore.

There is some premature rejoicing at the prospect that publicity surrounding Gilmore's fate will, as my evening paper puts it, `alert murderers, muggers and rapists that they are no longer dealing with a marshmallow state.'

But will society indeed benefit from Gilmore's garish demise? Have other would-be murderers been deterred? Will the public demand for retribution be sated, or will America see the much-talked-of bloodbath which opponents of capital punishment warn is on the way ? Argument about capital punishment and deterrence has been going on in the US for 300 years now; but although the most exhaustive studies of university and other scientific teams indicate that death does not deter, the debate rumbles on.

A University of Pennsylvania research group compared states employing the death penalty with neighbouring states that did not. And they compared the murder rates in these states during times when the death penalty was in force, and when it was not. The differences were minuscule. In Delaware, a state which abolished capital punishment, only to re-introduce it later, the homicide level during abolition was actually lower than before or after.

But such examples fail to reassure proponents of the law, who tend to dwell on the number of convicted murderers who have been released, only to kill again, and to point out that the likes of Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan will be eligible for parole in a few years' time.

The abolitionists' main theme, these days, is that capital punishment cannot be made to operate fairly. It is discriminatory, and has been throughout US history. Its victims are the poor and the blacks—especially the blacks, who made up 72 per cent of all those executed in the South in the past four decades (and 89 per cent of men executed for rape). When mistakes are made, it is often the blacks who suffer: recently, two black men were released, after spending twelve years on death row in the South, when a white confessed to the crime for which they were convicted.

There are some 479 people, men and women, on death rows around the country and a good majority of the population—two to one at the last count—wants to see them dispersed of by gun or gas, the noose or electric charge.

Not all are Gary Gilmores, seeking their own death, but a psychological barrier to the penalty has gone. Eight of these convicted murderers were his comrades in Salt Lake City prison and one of them, a boy of eighteen at the time of his sentence, has complained on their behalf that Gilmore's insistence has prejudiced their appeals.

know the guy,' said Gilmore. 'A little fat man now, broken and frightened. I swore they'd never do that to me. Well, these guys can still appeal. They got themselves in trouble, it's their business not mine.'

Gilmore had been in trouble since he smashed a school window and went to reform school at fourteen. At thirty-six, he had spent eighteen of the next twenty-two years behind bars. He was a hell-raiser in jail and out. Twice, last summer, he killed on suc

cessive nights, making two Mormon students kneel and shooting them through the back of the head. He said in court that it had been 'like watching someone else pull the trigger, looking at the scene through a wall of water.' Schiller later asked him: `If you hadn't been caught, wOuld there have been a third or fourth victim?'

A: There would havebeen more than that. I was going to continue.

Q: How long?

A: Until I got caught or killed by police. I wasn't thinking. I wasn't planning. I was just doing. Murder is a thing of itself,a rage, and rage is not reason. If I feel like murder, it doesn't matter who gets murdered.

So much for psychological motivations, and the shrinks, who offer up the mixture as before: a hurt child's revenge on society, the classical sociopath, the exhibitionism of a suicidal personality (those two attempts to take his own life in jail). A Walter Mitty syndrome is inferred, the urge to go out grandly. 'Then [wrote Thurber], with that faint fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad—erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter M itty, the undefeated, inscrutable to the last.'

Would Gilmore, it is fairly asked, have killed two harmless young men if there had not been capital punishment in Utah ? Given his will for self-destruction, did he enlist the state's aid in ending his own life? There is something of a triumphant note in his jail meanderings: 'I ain't gonna ask you to forgive me, and I'm certainly not sorry for those bastards on the firing squad. don't care how bad they say they feel. They can drink some beer and next deer-hunting season go shoot something else:. As for filming executions, which a Texas judge approved, Gilmore said: 'Whoever wants to watch one, it's for a pretty base reason. Like when someone's standing on a ledge and they shout "jump." It's in you, it's in me. People just want to see some poor son of a bitch get his.'

He clearly felt that he had brought us all down to his own level. And that included those who had tried so frantically to save his life. `So many f— groups. The lawyers for these sorry-ass, hi-fl niggers—I'm a white man, goddam it—even the women's libbers.

Once or twice only, among the love letters, does a hint of pain slip through. 'Nicole, my Nicole, what will I meet when I die? Vengeful ghosts?' And in a last outburst : 'My soul is on fire and screaming to vacate this ugly house.'

Will the executions now begin to snowball ? Gilmore's is a freak case in a freaky state, but no one can be sure. The laws across America vary so widely that confusion abounds. As of today, fifteen states have no death penalty, the other thirty-five have reinstated it. In some, the supreme court has upheld the new laws, in others, rejected them.

In such conditions, justice seems no more than a spin of the wheel, and human lives are the chips. Gary Gilmore--wherever he may be—will be all for that.