We drive the three hours from Indianapolis to Michigan City cradled by friendship and yet haunted by fear. We take our time – no point arriving at count or shift change. The prison’s schedule has long defined our own. After exiting the interstate at Rensselaer, mile after mile passes in quiet conversation on a tattered country road hemmed in by empty cornfields. Grey clouds billow over the faded stubble. The trees are skeletal; the lawns a Brillo pad in beige. As we near Lake Michigan, the stark white of seagulls pocks the barren rows as the birds peck at what remains, the hardened kernels of yesterday’s corn.
Our clients know we are coming. Both men have spent over a decade entombed in solitary, windowless cages awaiting death by natural causes or execution. Visits are better than Christmas, crack cocaine or huffing glue.
At the final turn, onto Park Row, the concrete walls and great coils of razor wire loom large, guillotining the horizon. Two correctional officers, shotguns at the ready, appear at the lip of the twenty-five foot security tower and lower a metal bucket for our bar cards and car keys. We comply. We have stripped ourselves of jewelry and hair clips and our files of staples, paper clips and metal bindings. We each have one quarter for a locker and one plastic pen. We are seasoned enough not to have worn an underwire bra. The ladies room floor is littered with the wires that women have cut out of their bras so they can clear the metal detector and get inside. Our arms, cleavage and knees are covered. As we wait, we check and recheck our files, our pleadings, our legal incantations. Under the guards’ hostile impersonal observation, the air between us goes dry.
My friend Jan Dowling, one of the premier death penalty defenders in Indiana, is representing Gary Burris. His case is in the end stages. A good lawyer has come too late. I am lead counsel for Bill Spranger on a resentencing trial ordered by the Indiana Supreme Court. Both of us are fighting an extermination. Both of us are steeling ourselves against the fear of losing a life, the blood of omission blooming on our weary hands – the agony of being condemned to the singular hell of the second guess, to wake in the night tortured by thoughts of what we might have done differently. Two clients. Two lawyers. Two impending executions.
A year later, both men are off death row. Gary was executed. Bill spared. As we cast Gary’s ashes in Jan’s rose garden, Bill is alive – eking out his existence in the thin hard soil of a maximum security prison. But alive.
BILL SPRANGER
Bill Spranger was eighteen when he and a man he’d hitched a ride home with from the Double Drop Bar set in motion the events that would place Bill on death row. It was an evening fueled by alcohol, an evening that deteriorated from petty vandalism to deadly violence in less time than it takes a light to turn from red to green. Even before last call, they’d been cut off, but the man had a pint in his glove box. They kept drinking. They smoked Marlboros down to the quick and flicked the butts into the tasseled corn. In that dark hour just before the first glimpse of dawn, they drove towards Bill’s girlfriend’s trailer, but they never made it. Less than a mile from the trailer park, a car sat abandoned on the pitted shoulder of the country road. Someone had already smashed out a window. Bill’s ride wanted to see if the thief had missed anything worth taking. Bill was too drunk to disagree. When the town marshal pulled up, Bill just stood there, waiting to be arrested. He’d never been in jail, but by that point all he really wanted was sleep. The man Bill was with felt differently. For him, the stakes were far higher.
Unbeknownst to Bill, this man had a prior for armed robbery. A decade of back up time hung in the balance as he made his next move. The marshal had been talking about what dumb asses they were, “Lookie here, I got me some real smart criminals.” As he reached back to unclip his handcuffs, the shove caught him unawares. The man started to fight with the marshal, a fight that very quickly turned ugly. As Bill watched, the two men rolled over and over each other all the way across the highway. Finally, the officer got the best of his assailant. But the marshal didn’t just put on the handcuffs and finish the arrest. The marshal drew his nightstick, cracking the stilled head into the concrete. Blood flowed from his ear. The man lost consciousness, but the beating continued. Days later, his body bore nightstick shaped bruises, his jaw hung slack, his eye purple and swollen shut.
Bill just wanted the beating to stop. As he looked up the road, yearning to glimpse someone driving their way, he saw, in the headlights from the marshal’s car, the glint of metal at the edge of the road. It was a gun. A gun that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, until Bill realized that the marshal’s weapon must have come unholstered during the rolling tussle across the highway. Bill had never held a gun before, but he picked it up, turned and yelled for the marshal to stop. The marshal kept swinging his night stick, every blow made a sickening crack. Bill cocked the gun, to show the marshal that he really meant for the beating to end. A split second later, the gun exploded in Bill’s hand. The shot wouldn’t have been lethal – Bill hadn’t aimed, but the bullet hit the edge of a rib and refracted, piercing the marshal’s heart.
The two fled – Bill to the arms of the girl he was engaged to marry, the girl whom he told, within minutes of the shooting, his voice shaking, “I shot him, but I didn’t shoot him – the gun just went off in my hand.”
Fourteen years earlier, when Bill was first sentenced to die, the jury never heard from his girlfriend. They never heard that there was something profoundly wrong with the officer’s gun and that ballistics testing confirmed its explosive hair trigger. As the forensic examiner I’d retained would later testify, this was the most hair trigger firearm he’d ever analyzed – capable of drop fire – or brush fire. One of the examiner’s lab assistants accidentally tripped the gun’s trigger while testing the trigger pull. Of course, at the lab, the gun was unloaded.
My investigator learned that the marshal had filed down the firing pin so as to reduce the trigger pull and minimize the buck-back of the weapon at the firing range. It had been the marshal’s practice to always chamber a live round. But Bill’s trial lawyers never had the gun tested. A shoddy investigation is a cancer on the search for truth. Bill’s jury voted to kill him based on the self-serving lies of his codefendant, who, in exchange for affirming the state’s belief that Bill was a calculated cop killer, received a sentence of four years.
Part of representing someone in a capital case is to research their past, for the past often bears witness to the reasons these murders take place. The past will rarely excuse the crime, but it will explain why a man who’d been law-abiding had crossed the line into crime. But for months, Bill refused to open up to me. Both his parents had died while he was on death row. What was the point of maligning their memory? As he put it, “My mama and daddy didn’t point that gun. They didn’t leave that man to die.” It wasn’t until I told him something of my own past that I got him to understand that the trial wasn’t only a question of blame. We were entitled to tell the jury the whole unvarnished truth of who we are.
To help him talk about his family, I decided to talk of mine. I figured if I risked, then he might. As the saying goes, “I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours.” I told him of one of my parents’ drunken arguments when I was nine. I’d awoken in the middle of the night to the sudden alarm of their anger. I huddled close to the heat grate on the floor of my room so that I could look down into the kitchen where they fought. As I watched, numb with horror, my father mangled my mother in his strong hands, ripping out a clump of hair as she screamed. The torn threads of her hair drifted over the linoleum in the air that rose from the heat run. The bald spot. How she would comb her hair so carefully to try and hide the raw wound.
Bill understood. He knew that I knew and that I did not blame or judge his parents. Over time, he let me see what it was like for him, just as I’d shown him what being a child had been like for me. Bill was the tenth of ten children, born in as many years. With his father either working two jobs or drunk and his mother consumed with caring for one of Bill’s older brothers who needed kidney dialysis from age three on, Bill was an also-ran. No one made sure he got to school. No one played with him or read to him or sang to him or cherished him. One of his few happy memories was of his kindergarten teacher letting him stay after school to wipe the chalk boards clean. He remembered how honored he’d felt to be noticed and to be trusted to help with a menial chore.
There was soul crushing poverty. Too little food to last till the end of the month. Too little heat, too little electricity. There were times they ate popcorn or cereal and water for dinner by candlelight. Times the family of twelve rode to church in a rusting VW bug. The only thing there seemed to be enough of was alcohol. Bill’s father thought nothing of letting Bill have sips of his liquor as a child and freely shared his booze with Bill as a teenager. In the Spranger household, intoxication was manly. And intoxication was the catalyst for violence. Bill’s father beat his mother for sport, for entertainment, for something to do. Even as a teenager, Bill would try to intervene with whatever was at hand. It was a pattern that echoed across the years the night the marshal died.
GARY BURRIS
Gary was tall, rail thin, and coal black, with musing, searching eyes. As Jan’s investigation would reveal, he had been abandoned as a baby in a trash dumpster. He would never know the names or the faces, let alone the dreams or nightmares, of his parents. He was raised by the pimp who rescued him from the refuse, and by prostitutes and thieves. At six he brought clean washcloths to the girls to wipe themselves before their next tricks. At seven he helped sell liquor to the clientele of the whorehouse he called home. Even though there were several police raids at the brothel, the law never cared that a nameless little black boy was being raised in a whorehouse.
When the state finally placed him in foster care, Gary was thirteen. His foster mom described him as quiet and grateful. His only request for Christmas that first year was for a birth certificate. Gary said, “I don’t need you to get me nothin,’ I just want to know who I am.”
For a man denied the knowledge of the date he was born, Gary came to know several dates by which he was to die. His was a crime born of poverty. He’d murdered a cab driver because he couldn’t pay the fare. The murder was aggravated by political expediency – the prosecutor, up for re-election, refused a continuance. Killing black men was good for getting votes.
In the ensuing decade and a half of execution dates being set, scrubbed and rescheduled, Gary became something of a philosopher. He read constantly. He tried to write to the cabbie’s mother, only to learn that she had passed. As an orphan, he believed that robbing this mother of her son would have broken her heart just as his heart had hardened and split over being left for dead in the trash. Unable to contact the mother of his victim, Gary knew that all he could change was the day at hand. He resolved to be a better man. Over time, his gentle manner disarmed those who guarded him. He was made a trustee on the row. Each day for over a dozen years, he mopped the long hallways. When he finished, he’d clean the bucket and then sit in front of the feed holes of the men who had no visitors and ask how they were doing. When a fight broke out in the yard, Gary talked the men down from their anger. He refused to let the cruelty of condemnation corrupt him.
Two years later, when he came very close to being executed, two of the guards came to Jan, and with tears in their eyes, asked her to tell him goodbye. They didn’t dare risk bucking the pro death party line, although Jan would later learn that even the prison’s superintendent, though a strong supporter of capital punishment, did not believe Gary deserved the death penalty.
Faced with imminent execution, Gary thought mostly of others’ feelings. He tried to downplay the seriousness. When Jan explained the final protocol for his execution, he told her that he definitely wanted to make a statement before they killed him. He had decided to take his last words from the old Tutor Turtle cartoons he’d seen on television as a child. In every episode, Tutor would find himself in some awful jam and yell for help to his wise friend Mr. Wizard. Waving his magic wand, Mr. Wizard would quietly intone: “Drizzle, Drazzle, Druzzle, Drome; time for this one to come home.” Then Tutor would be spirited back to safety. “See, I’m just like old Tutor,” Gary said, as he reached for Jan’s hand. “It’s time for this one to come home.”
BILL’S RESENTENCING TRIAL
The prosecution chartered buses to ensure that the courtroom would be packed with law enforcement officers. The courtroom was a sea of uniforms, standing room only, wall to wall, an ocean of blue and brown. I hadn’t foreseen a modern day Roman coliseum, the roar of the crowd, thumbs down. The prosecutor turned the podium so that he faced both the judge and the audience. He played not to reason but revenge. He cast himself as point man for the public’s hue and cry for vengeance.
When I rose to make my closing, I turned the podium to face the judge, to signal to him that evidence and the law was what mattered. The night before, a friend had sent me Hamlet’s plea to Horatio, that centuries old orator: “If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity a while, and in this harsh world draw they breath in pain, to tell my story.” The buried truth of Bill’s story was my sword and shield. The shooting had been accidental, the result of a rogue officer’s sadism and defective weapon. Even back in 1984, a police officer’s brutality could result in the death of a lawman. Bill had never meant for him to die.
PICTURES AT AN EXECUTION: GARY’S HOMECOMING
I didn’t want Jan to suffer alone, so I made her tell me everything. What follows is her account of her client’s execution.
The witnesses are confined to the chapel. Jan is joined by the others from the failed defense team. There is no one from the prosecutor’s office. The election was over. This was never a high profile case – just a black man killing a black man who drove a cab.
The wait is interminable, much longer than officials had represented. Instead of it being thirty minutes before the end of Gary’s world, it has been over an hour. Schedules adjust, but only as to the moment of his ending, not the fact of his extermination. Death – that much, is certain.
The witnesses are ushered to their seats. The curtains open. The body strapped, almost strait jacketed. The long fingers that decades ago caressed a woman’s cheek, that grasped a gun as a man was left to die, now lift slowly and flutter his goodbye. The head turns. These are the last minutes of the world for him, and for the witnesses, who will never be as innocent and free again, who will order the events of their lives by the bookmark of his execution. No one speaks. No one moves. It is so absolutely quiet that Jan is sure she can hear the heartbeat of the person beside her.
Then he vomits. Purging himself of his last supper. The witnesses, forewarned that they will be banished if they speak out, barred from honoring his last wish for their presence, struggle to silence themselves, struggle not to gag. Tears fall, knuckles tighten. Jan fights an urge to throw herself like a frightened bird into the plate glass of the execution chamber. In his mind’s eye, one of Jan’s colleagues sees himself grabbing a guard’s weapon, freeing the straps that bind Gary to the gurney, the poison poised on the brink of coursing through his veins, ripping out the IV line, running…free.
With the vomit cleaned from his face, the ship of death rights itself. This is the final act. The final curtain. All is as clinical and sanitary as the showers at Auschwitz. His eyelashes, so long they brush his ashen cheeks, flutter, then still. The moth’s wings shudder from the camphor. The specimen is pinned. That of God that existed in him is dead.
The ashes are spread at the base of a catalpa tree next to Jan’s rose beds. Those who knew him, who fought with the simple hope of knowing him still, stand in the cool shade beneath the branches. For a decade and a half he’d longed to see a tree. None ever grew in the yard on death row. By spring, he will be part of the greening.
Not all of the lawyers who knew Gary were able to carry on. Jan left the practice of law, and the state that executed him, and made a home for herself in the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico, a state with no death penalty. For over a year, I called her weekly. When I told her that I wanted to write of our two cases, her reaction brought back the words of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who lost two husbands to Stalin’s executioners:
“I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad…. Beside me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips….she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there): ‘Can you describe this?’ And I said: ‘Yes, I can’. And then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once been her face.”[1]
In time, Jan has moved on. Working as a capital sentencing investigator, she has saved over 70 men from death row since Gary was killed. He remains her only loss.
BILL’S SENTENCING:
When the judge uttered the words that meant Bill would live, Bill broke down and cried. The man who had struggled to breathe in the iron lung of a death sentence year after brutal, lonely year was reborn. There was a childlike awe in his gaze as he whispered to me, over and over, the tears falling, “I’m alive. My God, I’m alive.”
I knew then, for the first time, what he had endured. Fourteen years of held breath in what he described as “the valley of the shadow of death.” And I knew what I’d endured, not knowing for two long years whether I had been working on a cadaver, dictating an autopsy report, or whether my patient would survive. I thought of Jan. I knew it could have been me. It could have been mine.
THE KILLING FIELDS:
Over three thousand men and women await execution in America. “I should like to call you all by name….”[2] Some have no lawyers, and their fate is assured. Others are represented by hard-fighting but soul-weary teams of lawyers and investigators, some of whom I know and care for deeply. Everywhere around me, eyes I love are closing on this final horror.
I don’t know how to stop the bloodbath, the killing of our, not God’s, mistakes. I only know that we can’t hunt murderers to extinction when every day society’s indifference breeds murderers anew. Perhaps, one day the tides will turn. But for now, for every two lawyers, two clients and two victims, there are thousands waiting for salvation, or vindication; to live or to die.
Jodie English is an American death penalty defense lawyer, a capital mitigation specialist, and an adjunct professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. Jodie has taught criminal defense attorneys in 27 states and Moscow, Russia. She is an avid outdoors woman with Buddhist/Quaker leanings. She was born in Niagara Falls and has been enamored with water all her life. In 2020, Barren Magazine, published her poem, “Death Machine,” which appears in Issue 13, “In Solitary Light.” https://barrenmagazine.com/death-machine/ and her poem, “Ode to My Student Who is Starving,” was choreographed for Indiana’s annual Spirit and Place Festival.
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[1] Akhmatova Anna Selected Poems, “Requiem,” Penguin Books, p.87, (1976).
[2] Id., at p.95.