Reverend rebukes the ultimate condemnation

Former death-row chaplain explains his opposition to executing inmates

By Christine G.K. LaPado
christinel@newsreview.com


In Chico:
The Rev. Carroll Pickett will speak out against the death penalty 
Sunday (April 26), 6:30 p.m., BMU Auditorium (call 228-8356 for 
tickets/info). He’ll deliver a guest sermon at 10:30 a.m. at Trinity 
Methodist Church. Saturday, at 2 p.m., he’ll attend a Pageant 
screening of At the Death House Door.

“Nobody knew anything about that end of the prison. It was ‘out 
there.’ It didn’t become ‘live’ until 1982, when the warden called us 
all together to say, ‘We’re going to have an execution.’ ”

Those are the words of the Rev. Carroll Pickett, speaking by phone 
from his home in Montgomery, Texas, describing how two years after 
starting to work as chaplain at the infamous Huntsville Prison, he 
was informed that his job description was about to change.

Pickett would become intimately familiar over the next 15 years with 
the prison’s death row—the terra incognita “down that end of the 
prison”—a job that would cause him to be the “last friend” of 95 
condemned inmates put to death after Texas reinstated the death 
penalty, by lethal injection, in 1982.

The 75-year-old Pickett—now an outspoken opponent of the death 
penalty as a result of his “traumatic” experiences at Huntsville—will 
be speaking this Sunday (April 26) in Chico State’s BMU Auditorium at 
an event hosted by the Chico chapter of the ACLU, and co-sponsored by 
the Interfaith Council, the Chico Peace & Justice Center, and SCAR 
(Student Coalition Advocating Reform).

Joining Pickett will be former death row inmate Greg Wilhoit, who 
spent five years on Oklahoma State Prison’s death row after being 
wrongly convicted of the death of his wife, and Natasha Minsker, 
death penalty policy director for the ACLU of Northern California.

Pickett is scheduled to give a guest sermon at Trinity United 
Methodist Church on the morning of his university lecture. The day 
before, he’s set to host an afternoon showing of At the Death House 
Door, a documentary film about his death-row experiences, at the 
Pageant Theatre.

Pickett spoke passionately on the telephone for approximately 45 
minutes about the injustices and horrors he witnessed as death-row 
chaplain, such as seeing people put to death “who didn’t pull the 
trigger” but were condemned to die according to Texas’ Law of 
Parties, which allows a person to be executed for being involved in a 
crime in which someone is killed, whether or not they did the actual 
killing.

The innocent, the mentally impaired, and the “changed”—inmates 
rehabilitated so much in prison that Pickett “would not have been 
afraid to take them home”—are some of the people that Pickett watched 
die.

He brought up the 1995 execution of Mario Marquez, who had an IQ of 
65. “It’s terrible to stand with a kid who doesn’t know what’s going 
on,” he said. Pickett added that widely-known news anchor Ted Koppel 
witnessed Marquez’s execution and afterward told Pickett that he 
would never again witness another execution because it was the 
hardest thing he’d ever done.

Pickett also talked about 27-year-old Carlos De Luna, who was put to 
death in Huntsville in 1989 for a murder that another man bragged 
about committing after De Luna was executed: “That little Spanish 
boy, I was certain that he was innocent.”

He recalled being with De Luna when he was being administered the 
three successive shots of different chemicals—not simply one 
injection, as is commonly believed—that it takes to execute a death-
row inmate. Many times, said Pickett, it will take numerous tries to 
find a “good vein,” painfully “probing in the shoulders, ankles, 
different parts of the body” with a variety of different-sized needles.

After the second shot, of Pavulon—the brand name for pancuronium, a 
drug that “freezes the muscles, primarily the lungs,” and, according 
to Pickett, is no longer used by most vets to kill dogs and cats 
because it is too painful for the animals—a strapped-down De Luna 
raised his head to try to say something to Pickett, but was unable to 
talk.

“Those big brown eyes just kept lookin’ at me,” Pickett said 
emotionally in his warm, Texas accent. “He was hurtin’. I know that 
he was hurtin’. Of course, knowing that he was innocent is even worse.

“There were 62 more [executions that I witnessed] after him, but that 
one did it for me.”

De Luna’s story is featured in At the Death House Door.

The sense Pickett makes of his time at Huntsville is that “I can tell 
people what I saw. I just want to tell people. I can’t change a dyed-
in-the-wool [pro-death-penalty] person without the facts. And I’ve 
got facts.

“There’s hope,” Pickett continued. “We still have hope that we’re 
going to get rid of the death penalty. We’ve done it in several 
states. … We are killing innocent people. We are in the process of 
murder by state. … It’s not what America should be proud of. It’s not 
pleasant.”

http://www.newsreview.com/chico/content?oid=964975