Cruel and Unusual Punishment
by William Kunstler's Last Speech
Not long before he died of a heart attack, Bill Kunstler spoke
at the Verso bookstore in New York. It was a big event, sponsored by WBAI,
The Nation Institute, and Verso, on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal, currently
on death row in Pennsylvania.
MOST OF YOU KNOW that the death warrant was signed in this case on June
2, I believe, of this year, and four days later the constitutional court,
an eleven-member body in South Africa, abolished the death penalty in that
country as being uncivilized. South Africa is our nearest competitor in
the amount of people on death row. They were way behind us because we're
approaching 3,000 now on death row, and the executions are proceeding apace.
. . . But even if they execute five or six a week, they may not even begin
to catch up with what they have on death row and the increments that occur
and will be starting in the state of New York in September of this year,
as we join the 38 states that have the death penalty. After South Africa
abolished the death penalty, on June 6, Bishop Tutu said, "It's making
us a civilized society. It shows we actually do mean business when we say
we have reverence for life."
I want to relate to you three incidents out of my own life to indicate what
the death penalty means, whether it's applied to Mumia or only political
dissidents or anybody because I don't narrow it down just to any one group.
There are people on the death rows of this country who never had a political
thought in their mind-but who were black or poor and received the death
penalty because the victim was white. And as you know, the Supreme Court
has accepted the statistics that you stand an 80% chance more of getting
the death penalty if the victim is white. Ergo, instead of the old three-fifths
of a man in the original Constitution, whites are four-fifths better and
more valuable in the loss of their lives than anybody else. And, of course,
in this case, the victim, Daniel Faulkner, was a white police officer, and
Mumia is, of course, a black man.
[The first of the] three incidents in my life [was] walking into the gas
chamber in 1960 and watching a man die. The gas chamber in California, which
began to operate again just months ago after a long hiatus, is composed
of two perforated aluminum chairs, the A chair and the B chair. They bring
you in, if you're unlucky enough to be in that position, and they seat you
in the A chair. (I don't think they've done two at a time yet although they've
done one after another on the same day.) They seat you in the A chair; under
the A chair is a bucket of fuming sulfuric acid. Over that bucket is a little
funnel holding a number of cyanide pellets, potassium cyanide. The victim
is led to the chair, strapped in. We sit outside where we can watch. He
is sitting perpendicular to us; we see his side, not his front. And then
from a hidden hand, you see the funnel turn over. And into the fuming sulfuric
acid go the pellets. And it's a colorless gas, so you don't know when it
hits until you see the head of the person jerk. There is attached to that
person two stethoscopes leading to some doctor somewhere, one to measure
respiration and the other to measure heartbeat. They sit with a score card,
and they check off the amount of respiration and heartbeat until the last
box, where it states 00. And then they signify death. At that moment someone
gives a command and a large fan in the ceiling begins to whir, and the gas
is swept out of this hermetically sealed chamber so the guards can come
in and take the body away.
They told me that in the old days, the seagulls flying over San Quentin
would fly through this gas as it was emitted and die by the hundreds and
fall into the fan where they were chopped up. As a mark of essential decency,
the State of California installed then a wire mesh so that it would prevent
the fan from chopping up the birds. Now they just scoop them out with shovels,
intact. Barbara Graham was the last woman to die in the gas chamber-she
and her lover, one after the other, on the same day. Some of you may have
seen the film with Susan Hayward, who plays the role of Barbara Graham.
I can't remember the name of it-A Rage to Live or I Want to Live. And as
she walked into the gas chamber-and I have that little scorecard for Barbara
Graham-the guard said to her, "Barbara, just breathe in quickly, you
won't feel a thing." And she turned to him and said, "How do you
know?"-which is a good question to ask. One judge on the ninth circuit
court of appeals held that the gas chamber was inhumane and cruel punishment
under the Eighth Amendment, but he was overruled. That was number one.
Some years earlier, 18 in fact, I witnessed a hanging at Camp Forest, Tennessee,
of a GI, a Black. And while I didn't see as much as I saw in California,
I watched a man stand on a platform with a hood over his head, and you could
see the end of the noose roped over the top of the bar. Then I heard that
awful noise when they pull the switch and the world drops from under him,
and he crashes down. They had weights on either foot and his neck was broken
in a minute, or a second, and he passed on into the great scheme of things.
In 1995, in Texas, at Huntsville, there's a place called the Walls. The
Walls is a part of the death row complex, where there's almost 300 men waiting
now to be executed. Ronald Kuby and I represented Robert Drew, who had been
on death row for some 12 years. Robert Drew is a Vermonter, or was, who
hitched a ride on the way to a job with his uncle in Houston. And a psychopathic
killer was also picked up in the car driven by two young men from Alabama.
The psychopathic killer took the driver out of the car about 50 yards away
and stabbed him to death. He later confessed to the crime and was given
60 years in prison. The only witness against Drew was another occupant of
the car who said at the trial he saw Robert go over to where the other man
was stabbing the driver. He recanted his testimony. But because of a Texas
rule, now abolished, thank God, that if you didn't get new information 30
days after the day of sentence, you couldn't bring it up in any proceeding,
Robert Drew was executed.
In Huntsville, in the Walls, there's a gurney. It again is faced, parallel
now, to the spectators. When you walk into the spectators' section, they
give you a scorecard as you would get at a baseball game. It tells you all
about the person about to be executed, what his last meal was. It described
the next five to come up in case you're interested in seeing more of the
same. . . . It's printed very quickly to include the last meal of Robert
Drew. Drew is on this gurney with five straps holding him down. There's
a needle in his arm leading to a long tube. The tube goes out the back of
the room through a little window where there is a funnel. And at the appointed
time when the warden drops his hand, a hand-or two hands-in surgical gloves,
with a bottle, pours into the funnel a mixture of three drugs: sodium pentathol,
potassium chloride, and another one (I can't remember what it is). And then
you wait for it to hit the man on the gurney. And you can hear, because
there are perforations in the plexiglass between you and the victim, you
can hear that indrawn breath, that "Ahhhhh" as the drugs hit.
And if you think this is a painless method of death, you have only to remember
the sound if you ever hear it of that indrawn breath and that agonized cry
of "Ohhhh" that comes from the gurney. After about five or six
minutes -the doctor is in the room-the man who took the Hippocratic oath
to save and preserve life-and a prison official-and they do the usual with
a stethoscope as to whether death has occurred.
. . . We had Bobby cremated and his ashes scattered over Vermont, as he
had wished. Just prior to his execution, a man named Harrier was executed
in that same Walls room. Harrier had been convicted of the murder of one
of two murdered police officers in the Rio Grande Valley. While he was on
death row and long after 30 days had expired, a 16-year-old boy walked into
the authorities and he said, "I was 9 when my father murdered those
police officers. I was in the car. I watched him shoot them both. My father
has just died, and I want someone to know this, that it was my father and
not the man that I've read about that killed the police officers."
He brought with him the lawyer of his dead father, who said that yes, the
father had indicated to him too during his lifetime that he had murdered
the police officers, but that because of the attorney-client privilege,
he could not reveal it until death. Harrier was executed. In denying the
stay, the Supreme Court said innocence is irrelevant in this case. That
is what is happening in this so-called kindly disposed state of ours, this
so-called beneficent national community.
Mumia faces the lethal injection on August 17. I agree with everything Clark
Kissinger said. There is a time to act. There is a time to break the law.
Wasn't that how we were formed in the first place? Don't we celebrate that
every July-how we shot British soldiers down at Concord and Lexington, how
we burnt British flags? And now we're tinkering with an amendment to make
that a crime. I propose . . . that that prison be surrounded with people,
that they see us everywhere-in Philadelphia, here in New York-on August
3rd, that we be out there, and they hear those feet again because, just
to paraphrase Franklin D. Roosevelt, the only thing they have to fear is
us. And that's the truth of the matter. There is only one thing that moves
government on any level. It's utter, stark fear. And if you will recall
when Richard Nixon sent the troops into Cambodia in April 1970 to look for
Vietcong strongholds and shelters in that country, the United States went
on a tear that culminated, as you know, in four young people being shot
down at Kent State, and two at Jackson State, and in the closing down of
300 colleges and universities. And it forced the President of the United
States to walk to the Lincoln Memorial, where students were gathered, and
tell them he was withdrawing the troops from Cambodia because he was scared
shitless. And that is the only thing that moves them-not whether you vote
for them tomorrow or the next day. Electoral politics doesn't really bother
them that much. They always think that there are enough lunatics out there
to vote them back in. And as you know, the lunatics are running the asylum
right now.
So all of us have to do what we have to do. Some of us do things that others
will not. In Chicago I remember Dave Dellinger saying, "Some of you
may break the law, some of you may write letters to the editor, in between
there may be varieties of action. Do what you can do, what your conscience,
your will, your state of mind can lead you to do. But do it.
I wrote a sonnet about this. The last two lines come from a more kindly
person than myself, I must add. But it's called "The Ordeal of Mumia
Abu-Jamal":
His case was tried before a hanging judge, who saw to it that justice was
not done. His lawyer was an ineffective drudge, who claimed he was not ready
for the run. The witnesses were puppets on a string, who said just what
the D.A. told them to. The officer with truth kept vanishing to keep from
testifying what he knew. He's tried to make his country understand that
murder by the state is murder still. They silenced him, he took his pen
in hand to tell his captors that they must not kill. The message from the
cross is old yet new. Forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do.
I would go stronger than Jesus went-with apologies to all. Thank you very
much. -July 27, 1995
NCX Feb/Mar 1996
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