How does a woman from Texas live who has 300 people executed

In the US, people are most often executed in Texas. One former civil servant from this state, by virtue of his official duties, observed in detail the execution of hundreds of death sentences. She shared with the reporter Bi-bi-si With her experiences and told by Ben Durs, how much she saw influenced her.

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It's been 18 years since Michelle Lyons watched Ricky McGinn's last moments. But, remembering this, she still can not refrain from tears.

She did not expect that she would have to see his mother pressed against the glass, which separated her from the death chamber, dressed with needles in order to look at her son’s execution. A sort of farewell party for Ricky.

For 12 years, Lyons' job duties included attending every execution in her state, first as a local newspaper reporter and then as a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

From 2000 to 2012, she watched as nearly three hundred people died strapped to medical gurneys—men and women, criminals whose turbulent lives found a peaceful end when two needles containing a lethal compound carried out retribution for the crimes they had committed.

Lyons first saw an execution when she was 22 years old. After following the death of Javier Cruz, she wrote in her diary: “I am completely fine. Should this have upset me?

She believed that compassion was better reserved for more worthy reasons: for example, for those two old people whom Cruz had coldly hammered to death with a hammer.

“Watching executions was just my job,” Lyons says. Her memoir, Death Row: The Final Minutes, was recently published.

“I was in favor of the death penalty with both hands. I believed that this was the most appropriate form of punishment for certain crimes. I was young and daring, the world for me was colored only in white and black.”

“If I dug into myself and tried to figure out how all this reflected on myself, how would I then return to death row month after month, year after year?”

Since 1924, all executions in Texas have taken place in the small town of Huntsville in the east of the state. There are seven prisons there, including the Huntsville Unit, housed in an impressive Victorian-style building. This is where the death chamber is located.

In 1972, the Supreme Court temporarily banned the death penalty on the grounds that it is too cruel, an extraordinary punishment. However, over the next few months, some states revised their laws to restore it.

Texas brought back the death penalty two years later and soon introduced a new form of it: lethal injections. In 1982, Charlie Brooks became the first criminal to be killed under the new law - with needles.

Huntsville has earned a reputation as the "execution capital of the world." Journalists of a certain type, usually coming from Europe, write that the whole city is imbued with a feeling of death, but they clearly came here already charged with their own prejudices.

Huntsville is a small and neat place located in the heart of the charming Piney Woods region, "buckle" the Bible Belt, as it is called. Here churches are found at every turn, and the locals are so polite that you could spend several wonderful days here without even realizing that this is where all sorts of villains regularly go to the next world.

If you already have a certain image of a person whose job is to be a witness at executions, feel free to throw it out of your head. Lyons is not like that. Sitting over a beer in a sports bar Time out which literally immerses you in a world typical of documentaries about shooting in the American backwoods, Lyons can chat tirelessly on any topic, whatever you suggest.

Educated, cultured, with a keen and quick sense of humor, she is a living mockery of the popular condescending British belief that Americans have no sense of irony. With her, you either give it your all, or she will simply leave you.

However, when it comes to what she saw in the “death chamber”, her insolence gives way to vulnerability, and it is not difficult to see what all this cost her.

There were 2000 executions in Texas in 40, a record number for most individual states and nearly as many as were carried out in one year in the rest of America.

Working as a prison chronicler for publication Huntsville Item, Lyons was present at the 38 of them. However, the apparent insensitivity to what he saw, which is felt in her diary entries from that period, was only the short-term result of the coping mechanism.

“Re-reading my “prison” notes of that time, I see what exactly touched me to the depths of my soul. But those fears that I had then, I shoved them away and locked them in my head. It was insensibility that saved me and gave me strength to continue working.”

When you read those records, some ordinary details first of all strike your eyes. Karl Heyzelbets Jr., who killed the woman and her daughter, still had glasses when he lay, strapped to the gurney.

Betty Lou Beats, who buried her husbands in her garden like dead pets, had tiny feet.

Thomas Mason, who had dealt with his mother-in-law and her mother, looked like Grandfather Lyons.

“Watching the last moments of someone's life, as a person's soul leaves their body, will never become routine or ordinary. But people are executed so frequently in Texas that the process has been fine-tuned to perfection, and any theatricality has been completely eliminated from it.”

However, this does not mean that Lyons has become easier to perceive their work. When she transferred to the public relations department of the Department of Criminal Justice in 2001, her responsibilities became even more burdensome. Now she talked about what is happening in the death chamber, not only to the residents of Huntsville, but to the whole of America and the whole world.

Photo from the archive of the heroine

Lyons described the whole procedure as if someone just fell asleep on the couch, which left a great deal of frustration with the relatives of some of the victims of convicts who believed that the execution on the good old electric chair, with which 361 was executed, the death sentence from 1924 to 1964 year, was more impressive show, than the deprivation of life of the offender through an injection.

But she also had to retell and desperate pleas for forgiveness, filled with suffering and death anguish prayers for pardon, sometimes quite absurd statements about his innocence, as well as Bible passages, quotes from rock songs, sometimes even jokes.

In 2000, Billy Hughes, before his death, spoke with the words “If I pay my debt to society in this way, then I am entitled to a discount and compensation.”

It was rare for Lyons to experience anger. And only once saw a condemned sob.

She heard the last breaths of the dying - coughing, gasping for air, wheezing - while the deadly “medicine” did its job, their lungs failed and the last air was pushed out of them like shrinking bellows. And after they died, she watched as the bodies turned purple.

People from all over the world wrote to Lyons. Many condemned her for participating in "state-sponsored murders." Sometimes she responded to letters aggressively, telling people it was none of their business.

“Almost the rest of the world, except America, believed that such executions were a strange practice. European journalists often called it a "murder" rather than an "execution". They thought we were murderers."

Sometimes there were real “circus shows”, for example, in 2000, when Gary Graham (real name Shaka Sankofa) was executed. The entire media world was watching what was happening in Huntsville, including Jesse Jackson from The reverends, Bianca Jagger, party members the new black panthers, who took with them AK-47, as well as members of the Ku Klux Klan in full “uniform”.

Graham robbed a 13 man in less than a week, threatening with two of them with a weapon, shot one in the neck, and knocked another down with a machine that he stole from him. He kidnapped, robbed and raped his last victim.

No one doubts this, because Graham himself admitted his guilt. However, he denied one murder that occurred at the very beginning of his criminal adventures. Lyons thought that the movement against the death penalty could have been found more suitable reason for indignation.

However, there was a case when the last breaths of a prisoner were observed only by the jailers and the only journalist from Associated Press.

When the effect of the poison began, none of his loved ones and relatives were near the dying man, there were neither accusers nor his victims - they did not see his death. Even the local newspaper didn't send a reporter. The bureaucratic machine was implementing an ultimatum, but none of the residents of Huntsville knew what was happening at that moment.

Prisoners could sit on death row for decades, so Lyons had the opportunity to get to know one of them, including serial killers, rapists and child-killers. And not all of them seemed monsters to her. Some even began to like her, and sometimes she thought that, having met in ordinary life, they could even make friends.

After the death of Napoleon Beazley, who in 17 years killed the father of a federal judge and was executed in 2002, Lyons roared all the way home.

“Not only did I think that Napoleon was no longer a danger, but I thought that he could become a useful member of society.”

“I was so hopeful that he would win his appeal, but I felt guilty for my feelings. He committed a terrible crime, and if I were a relative of his victim, I would definitely wish Napoleon dead. Did I have the right to sympathize with him if he did no harm to me?

But it was only in 2004, when Lyons became pregnant, that duality settled down and her mask was asleep.

“Executions no longer seemed abstract to me; I began to take them to heart. I began to worry that my child might absorb the last words of the prisoners, that he would hear their pitiful pleas, desperate declarations of innocence, their wheezing and screaming.”

“When my daughter was born, I became terribly afraid of executions. Typically, emotions would run high in the room where the inmate's loved ones were, because even though they had plenty of time to prepare for the loss, they were still watching a loved one die. They went through a long, difficult journey.”

“I myself had a child at home, for whom I was ready to do anything. And these women watched as their children's lives were taken away. I heard mothers screaming, sobbing, hitting walls, throwing glasses.”

“I stood in the observation room and thought: “Nobody wins, everyone loses.” Executions caused grief. And I had to look at him, again and again.”

Lyons worked for another seven years, watching one after another the prisoners dutifully meet their end. This was followed by a painful break with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, in which she won a gender discrimination court. Lyons's heart was broken, she felt lost, like a prisoner who had avoided a long detention.

“I thought that if I was away from this whole prison system, I would disconnect from everything I had seen before. But it turned out the other way around. I thought about this constantly. It felt like I had opened Pandora’s box, but I couldn’t close it.”

“I opened a bag of chips and smelled the death chamber. Or something on the radio suddenly reminded me of a conversation with one of the prisoners on the eve of his death. Or I would again see the flabby hands of Ricky McGrinn’s mother in front of me, pressed against the glass wall of the death chamber, and begin to cry.”

There are signs that Texas is losing its appetite for the death penalty. The last major state survey in 2013 showed that 74% of residents support the death penalty, so there’s no hope that the death penalty will be abolished quickly.

But there were just seven executions in Huntsville last year, the same as in 2016 and significantly fewer than the 2000 executed in 40.

Although Lyons believes Texas sentences people to death too often, she continues to support this form of punishment, at least for the most violent criminals. Texas, Lyons said, has the "biggest, craziest" crimes of any state.

Lyons stands among the rows of grave crosses in Joe Byrd Cemetery, a pleasant plot of land where Texas prisoners have been buried for more than 150 years, and wonders how many of those deaths she has witnessed.

But what worries her most is not those whose death she remembers, but those whom she has forgotten.

“You don’t see a lot of flowers on the graves here. What does the fact that I don’t remember those who were executed before my eyes say about me? Maybe they deserved not to be remembered by anyone. Or maybe it’s my job to remember them,” says Lyons.

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