Seven weeks later, on July 8, 1987, Mississippi executed another black man after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to block the event. Connie Ray Evans, twenty-seven, the self-confessed killer of a convenience store clerk, had admitted the killing, saying, “I wasn’t thinking; I wasn’t feeling…. I was there. I did it. But it wasn’t me.”19 He appeared to have become a changed man in prison. Before Evans died, Warden Donald Cabana asked the condemned man if he had any final words. Evans requested to tell him something privately. He then told the warden, “From one Christian to another, I love you,” to which Cabana replied, shortly before releasing the gas into the chamber, “I love you too.”20 A prison spokesman said Evans would probably be dead within a minute or two, but a healthy young male like him could live for several minutes before becoming brain dead, and in fact it took thirteen painful minutes for him to die. Five years later his lawyer, who had witnessed the execution, was still haunted by recurring images and nightmares.21 Shortly afterward, the warden had a heart attack.
On June 21, 1989, it was time for another Mississippi gassing under the old death penalty law. Leo Edwards Jr. was a thirty-six-year-old black man who stood convicted of murdering three people during a five-day robbery spree, although he claimed to have been unjustly convicted by the all-white jury. He and his alleged accomplice had escaped from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, but now he had reached the end of the line. When it came time for Edwards to go to the gas chamber he was groggy from the Valium he had received at his own request. The guards had to drag and carry him to the chamber. As the cyanide gas swirled around him, he gasped for breath and shrugged his shoulders several times. Five minutes into the gassing he opened his eyes and began crying out before going into involuntary spasms. The doctors had to wait a full fourteen minutes before pronouncing death. Edwards became the fourth person executed at Parchman, and the 113th prisoner put to death in the nation since the United States resumed executions.22
At the end of the 1980s, since Gregg, about 120 persons had been executed in the United States, eighty-six of them in four southern states: Texas, Florida, Louisiana, and Georgia. Blacks continued to be disproportionately represented on death row, and serious questions remained about the death penalty, especially who received it and who did not.23
In 1987 the abolitionist cause received another blow when the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice William Rehnquist, in McCleskey v. Kemp, rejected by a 5–4 vote that the death penalty in Georgia discriminated against individual black defendants in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth amendments.24 Using state execution records, David C. Baldus of the University of Iowa had produced the most exhaustive statistical analysis of racial discrimination in capital sentencing ever conducted. The study showed that the odds that the killer of a white victim would receive the death penalty was 4.3 times greater than the odds that the killer of a black victim would receive that penalty.25 But the majority of justices held that establishing a statistical likelihood of that nature was not sufficient to establish a violation of equal protection. In order to prevail, they said, the defendant would have to demonstrate that “the decisionmakers in his case acted with discriminatory purpose.” In the end, the Court acknowledged that McCleskey was challenging “decisions at the heart of the State’s criminal justice system,” but the justices were reluctant to infer that the state had abused its discretion.26
By 1992, the center of the legal action over the gas chamber had moved to Arizona, California, and Maryland. In California, the state’s mandatory death penalty statute was judicially abolished in 1991. In 1992 a new law provided for lethal gas or lethal injection at the condemned’s election, and lethal gas if the condemned person failed to choose a method. In Arizona, a defendant who was sentenced to death for an offense committed before November 23, 1992, had to choose either lethal gas or lethal injection; those convicted for an offense after that date as well as those convicted before who failed to choose got lethal injection. Maryland still retained lethal gas as its official method, but it seldom resorted to execution.27
On April 6, 1992, just three weeks before California was scheduled to reactivate its gas chamber, Arizona prepared to use its apparatus for the first time in twenty-nine years. Donald Harding, forty-three, was convicted of killing three businessmen in 1980. As the end approached, the condemned man had thoroughly studied all he could about death by gas and done everything in his power to prepare himself for it. News media and lawyers from around the country followed every step in Arizona with keen interest, seeing it as a possible preview of what might follow in high-profile California. The suspense reached its peak as Arizona’s execution ritual began to unfold. The warden stood with his left hand raised and looked Harding, barely six feet away, straight in the face. Then he glanced at his watch for a long moment, dropped his left arm, and said, “Now!” There was a loud clunking sound, followed by a hiss and the sight of white gas rising under the black chair.
As was the state’s requirement, Harding was dressed only in white undershorts that resembled a diaper. When strapped to the chair, Harding saw in the witness gallery Attorney General Grant Woods, the official most responsible for bringing back the death penalty, and he gave Woods the finger as his final gesture. He breathed deeply. There were groans and gasps, heaves and shudders, followed by convulsions.28 As Harding was thrashing against the restraints in obvious agony, his spiritual advisor glanced around at the other witnesses and saw “disbelief and shock in their faces.” The expression of a normally composed TV reporter turned beet red and his face contorted with emotion. One witness, a woman, rushed over and grabbed the minister’s hand, shaking and shivering. “It was extraordinarily difficult,” the clergyman later declared, “the most testing situation my commitment to God and humanity has ever asked of me… how macabre and barbaric it all was. I could feel evil and humanity like a wet mist encircling all of us who witnessed it and all those monitoring his demise.”29
Harding wasn’t pronounced dead until eleven agonizing minutes later. At first his body had been red, but now it had turned ashen gray and beige, the color of the gas chamber itself.30 Afterward, a shaken newsman who had witnessed the event said, “We put animals to death more humanely than this guy.”31
The messy execution increased the pressure on other states to substitute lethal injection for the gas chamber.32 It also lent more credence to the statements of lawyers who contended that execution by lethal gas was neither quick nor painless, and that it was a form of cruel and unusual punishment.
The drama increased as California was poised to conduct its first legal execution in twenty-five years. For more than a decade, its corrections officials had engaged in technology transfer with other deathpenalty states to try to prepare for the likely resumption of executions. California staff communicated with their counterparts in North Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, Texas, Arizona, and Mississippi.33 In an era of growing awareness about the impact of post-traumatic stress, one of their biggest concerns was how killings would affect the prison’s personnel. In 1989 California started stress-management sessions for managers and staff who were likely to participate in executions. Their purpose, as described by San Quentin warden Daniel B. Vasquez, was to “achieve a sort of ‘stress inoculation.’” San Quentin’s “execution team” also underwent special training. Extensive post-trauma procedures were put into effect to ease the psychological burden on the executioners.34