The Smell of Death

The reeling Bush campaign is pulling out all the stops to show that George W. is not only a true leader of men but a warm soul. "He's had to sit in the chair," cries Gov. Carroll Campbell of South Carolina whose state faced a February 19 primary touted as crucial for Bush. "He's had to make life and death decisions." "He has a human touch, a personal touch that most candidates don't have," an aide whispers to the New York Times. But it's hard to reinvent George W. at this late hour, when most Americans' access to his warmth is through bulletins of the Texas Department of Corrections announcing executions in the months ahead.

It'll be a busy time in the Huntsville Death House. February 23 sees Cornelius Goss strapped down for his last shot, followed the very next day by Betty Beets. March will bid adieu to Odell Barnes, Timothy Gribble, and Dennis Bagwell, and Super April will be crueler yet, with lethal injections for Orien Joiner, Victor Saldona, Robert Carter, Robert Neville, and Ricky McGinn. Carruthers Alexander goes to his maker on May 3. Six whites, four blacks, and one Hispanic. Such at least is the present schedule. Check it out on www.gwbush.com, carefully described on Yahoo! as a parody site, but as useful a place as any to locate Gov. Bush's leadership skills and decision-making powers.

As he methodically okays each execution, George W. no doubt reckons that his peremptory refusals to commute these death sentences do him no harm with the voters, and this may be true in South Carolina. But we doubt it's helping him nationally. There are plenty of killers either holding or seeking higher office. John McCain attained the status of war hero by spending a grand total of ten hours dumping high explosives on peasants with an insouciance that prompted a Spanish shrink who examined him in his POW camp to comment upon his singular lack of remorse for these homicidal excursions. But people don't associate McCain solely with this phase of his career. Bush, on the other hand, has nothing else to boast about.

You can feel it. History is moving away from George W. Bush and though he still might grab hold of its shirttails for a while, the long-term prognosis is poor. The man, we all know, has many vulnerabilities. For one thing, he's not very smart. In terms of scandal the ice under his skates is paper thin: imputed sex trysts in Mexico, a slimy business career in Texas. And there's the open file on his drug habits. Out there is someone with the ability--though not yet, perhaps even never, the inclination--to describe publicly what he has been confiding privately about George W's cocaine trading activities at Yale.

So? There's no constitutional amendment decreeing that dumbness is a bar to the presidency. Bill Bradley is dumb. John McCain has waded through business slime up to his waist and so has Al Gore, who would most certainly decline a polygraph on his own drug past.

But Bush has these two vulnerabilities he can't disguise, since they are his only known attributes in the minds of about 95% of the American people: he's the son of George H.W. Bush and he's chief executive officer of the Texas death industry. We already know the fatal political consequences when voters are reminded of his parentage. It took but one brief outing by his parents to New Hampshire, one characteristically jaunty throw-away line by the former president about "this boy, this son of ours," to double the margin of George W's terrible defeat. He would do better if he claimed he'd been turned out on a mountainside in infancy and suckled by wolves.

But can it be counted as a deficit to have signed more death warrants than any other elected official alive today in America? Don't polls show that a robust majority of Americans favor the death penalty? Bill Clinton sent Ricky Rector into the hereafter amid the heat of the 1992 primary in New Hampshire, and there's no evidence this sacrifice of a mental incompetent did Bill any political harm. (The execution did come amidst the life-affirming Gennifer Flowers scandal.)

But we're eight years further down the road, and there are compelling signs that popular opinion is changing. Take a Public Policy Institute poll of Californians, released on January 2. In recent years, asked whether they favor the death penalty, Californians have been giving a robust vote in favor of death by 3 to 1. The Public Policy Institute poll asked a different question. If the choice was between death and life imprisonment without possibility of parole, what would the respondent choose? This choice produced nearly a dead heat: 49% pro-death and 47% for life imprisonment. Hispanics opted 57% against the death penalty, and Democrats opposed it 65% to 38%, which suggests that Democratic candidates may soon feel as free as the governor of Illinois to raise doubts.

The governor in question, George Ryan, announced a couple of weeks ago that he is suspending imposition of the death penalty in his state forthwith on the grounds that he "cannot support a system which has proven so fraught with error." Since 1997 Illinois has executed 12 and freed 13 from Death Row on the grounds that their innocence had been conclusively established. Nationwide, the number of people spared the execution chamber (sometimes by as slim a margin as a day or two) on grounds of proven innocence is 85.

Ryan's decision is one of huge significance in the unending national debate on the death penalty. Here's a Republican who had been pro-death, now stating flatly that the police and judicial system of Illinois cannot be trusted to produce a just conviction in trials on capital crimes.

If Illinois is in this sorry condition, what can we say of Texas, where defendants are denied trained lawyers, appeals are rushed through often as mere formalities, and clemency is almost never granted? In Bush's gubernatorial term 113 have been put to death, with clemency granted in only one case, that of confessed serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. In 1995 Bush oversaw passage of a law accelerating death penalty appeals in state courts, a move defense lawyers have called the "speed the juice" law. And even though Texas now has a law prohibiting execution of mentally ill prisoners, this same law explicitly exempted death sentences handed down before it was passed, and so Bush recently okayed the lethal injection of Larry Robison, a lunatic who killed 6 people in 1982.

It's not as though Bush will face direct challenge from his political opponents on the issue of the death penalty. It's more a matter of the steady drip of public information about how Bush and his state convict and kill people. They do it with a gleeful callousness summed up in Bush's heartless gibes in the wake of the Carla Faye Tucker execution where he ghoulishly mimed the dead woman's voice: "please don't kill me." George Bush's Texas is the state which affirmed the death sentence of George McFarland, originally handed down in 1991, even though his lawyer slept through most of the trial. The lawyer, 72-year-old George Benn, later explained he did so because he thought the proceedings "boring." The judge let the trial proceed, saying that "the Constitution doesn't say the lawyer has to be awake." In this decision the judge was subsequently supported by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

Clearly enough Bush wants to kill people. He's hastened the appeals process and vetoed a law to replace the legal resources centers eliminated by Clinton and Congress. His staff says he spends between 15 and 30 minutes on each case, and of course Bush declares his confidence that no innocent person has been executed on his watch. A few years ago he would have probably had a majority of Americans on his side. But now, particularly after Ryan's stand in Illinois, there isn't as ready and eager an audience as there used to be for the Executioner's Song. Governor Jesse Ventura of Minnesota (one of the few states--all in the midwest--without executions) lost no points when he came out against the death penalty last year, saying that he personally could not abide the thought that he might doom an innocent being. Bush has never had the humanity even to admit that fear. It's part and parcel of Bush's eerily two-dimensional quality, which has engendered a campaign defined by the millions he's raised, and paced by the drumbeat of executions carrying the thumbprint of his approval.

A final footnote on George W's most recent assignment for the executioner, Betty Lou Beets, scheduled to be executed by the state of Texas on February 24. Betty is a 62-year-old great-grandmother--I quote from the advisory being circulated to people prepared to urge clemency--who had a perfect prison record for 14 years with no disciplinary cases against her. She had been sentenced to death in 1985 for the murder of her fifth husband, Jimmy Don Beets, an alcoholic who beat her and her children and terrorized them with guns. In order to make the case eligible for the death penalty, the State claimed that she had murdered her husband in order to claim insurance money, although in fact she was unaware of the existence of insurance at the time of the offense. Born into a poor sharecropper's family, Betty had a mentally ill mother and an alcoholic father. At 6, after suffering from measles-encephalitis, she recovered with organic brain damage and a hearing disability. On past form, appeals for gubernatorial clemency don't have a prayer, unless Bush wants to get some of the smell of death off his hands. But then, he wants to win in what he so stupidly called "Bush country," and probably thinks that Betty Lou Beets' blood will fertilize that cause.