Can convicted killers be rehabilitated? Will they kill again inside or outside prison? In a new book, US lawyer Joan Cheever follows up the 589 prisoners reprieved from death row in the 1970s. Anna Mundow hears her story
In the summer of 1972, the unthinkable happened in the United States. The death penalty was abolished. Voting five to four in a case called Furman v Georgia, the US Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment was unconstitutional because it was, among other things, "racist, arbitrary, unfairly applied, wanton and freakish, cruel and unusual". Four years later the death penalty was reinstated, but during that interval the killing chambers across America remained empty and 589 inmates awaiting execution were given a second chance to live. 322 members of that group were released when they completed their sentences or became eligible for parole.
The teenage Joan Cheever was oblivious to this legal and human drama. She spent the summer of 1972 working as a lifeguard (and mostly working on her tan) at an exclusive country club in her hometown in Texas. Years later, in law school, Cheever studied the landmark Furman decision. But the death penalty only became real to her on October 5th, 1994, when she watched Walter Key Williams being killed by lethal injection at midnight in Huntsville, Texas.
Walter had been convicted of murdering Daniel Liepold, an 18-year-old store clerk, during a robbery in 1981. He had been Cheever's client for nine years and she never doubted that the appeal to reverse his conviction would succeed. (Among other things, no defence evidence had been presented at his trial.)
"I was the optimistic cheerleader," she recalls. "I always believed Walter would walk out." Cheever never imagined that instead she would witness his execution. In his last hours, however, Walter asked Cheever to be present and she agreed. Standing five feet from her strapped-down client, clutching the handrail in the observation booth and speaking through a prison microphone, she said, "God bless and Godspeed, Walter. You're almost home." He thanked her and "six minutes after the poison began to flow, Walter was dead". Cheever kept her eyes open.
"I had to see what this country does in the dark of night when it commits the most premeditated kind of murder that exists," she explains. "When I talk about the death penalty it's not theoretical." Walter's execution prompted Cheever to track down the 589 prisoners who "represent the largest unexamined social experiment in US criminal justice history." They, she believed, had "the answer to one of the most troubling and controversial questions in the debate on the death penalty. Can convicted killers be rehabilitated? Will they kill again?"
Back From the Dead: One Woman's Search for the Men who Walked Off America's Death Row answers those questions not with rhetoric but with facts. Cheever interviewed more than 125 of the approximately 250 "lottery winners" who are still alive and out of prison, and she kept track of all 589 for eight years (164 Furman prisoners were never released either because their crimes were too heinous or because they re-offended in prison).
The search took the diminutive mother of two from her suburban home to the toughest streets in the country. Along the way she learned to tell a gunshot from a backfire, to dial 911 by touch on her cellphone, and "which pieces of furniture you can put up against the motel room door". Her best protection, however, was a telephone call from Leroy Johnson, a convicted murderer who has never re-offended and whom Cheever had interviewed in his remote cabin in the rural South.
"Write down these names," Johnson instructed her. "If they want to meet you, just say no. Make up an excuse. Anything. I know about them. I lived with them on death row. They're bad. They're dangerous. They are crazy. Don't you dare go see them."
Having spent 18 years in prison, two on death row, for killing a police officer, Johnson understood how protection worked. He and four other prisoners formed the Death Row Five to support each other unconditionally inside and outside prison. Cheever's request to meet Johnson, for example, had to go to "the board - the other four . . . They gave Leroy permission to talk, but only if I agreed to their rules. No names. No state."
Cheever herself prefers not to reveal where she lives or her husband's last name. "Just pick anything that sounds Irish," she laughs from her home in Texas, though Cheever and her husband moved to Ireland for two years recently.
"Dennis happened to be across the street from the World Trade Centre on September 11th," Cheever recalls. "A couple of days later, still in shock, he said it was a good time for them to take a year out. 'The motherland is calling me,' he said, and we went to live in Howth for two years."
When Cheever's mother died suddenly, it was time to come home; ironically to Texas, the state with the highest execution rate in the nation. "That's right. And I hadn't been back for 25 years. It was strange." As a legal affairs journalist, Cheever was familiar with grim statistics. Writing Back From the Dead, however, meant entering the lives behind those numbers.
Chuck Culhane, 55, convicted of murder in 1972, spent 26 years on New York's death row. He is now a published poet and political activist who teaches a college course on criminal justice.
Calvin Sellars, convicted of armed robbery in Texas, was incarcerated for 23 years and on death row for 10, most of which he spent studying law and filing lawsuits on behalf of himself and others. Sellars had such bravado that he once voluntarily sat in the electric chair. "The warden 'bout had a heart attack," Sellars told Cheever. "He was sayin: 'Calvin, boy, have you lost your mind? What if they were testing it to see if it worked and flipped the switch right now? Lord have mercy. You'd be one fried son of a bitch.' "
Freddy Pitts and Wilbert Lee were beaten by a sheriff's officers into confessing to a murder in Florida in 1963 and spent 12 years on death row before being exonerated and freed. "They say if you hear that generator crank up and your door opens, that means you're gonna be executed," Lee explained to Cheever, recalling the day when he heard the generator, saw his door opening and ran to the corner of his cell. "And the guard says: 'Boy, why you shaking? Hell, I'm just taking you up to the classification office.' And then the guards started laughing."
Moreese Bickham was incarcerated from 1958 to 1996 in Louisiana's Angola prison and spent 14 of those years in a 6ft by 8ft cell on death row. The oldest prisoner to be spared by the Furman decision while awaiting execution for shooting a police officer who had already shot him, Moreese's dream of owning a house finally materialised when he was 88. He testifies with a smile, "If I had just set down and looked at my condition . . . the weight of the world would have just pushed me down into the earth."
Finally, there was William Henry Furman, who was described at his 1968 trial as suffering from "mild to moderate mental deficiency". Furman spent 13 years on Georgia's death row for fatally shooting the man whose house he was burgling. Today he says: "I got a second chance at life and I'm trying to make it last . . . Life is short and I took me a long walk."
At 56, Furman is poor and tired. He is also black. As Cheever observes, in the US "murderers of whites are about six times more likely to be executed than are murderers of blacks. Nationally, the majority of the 4,220 prisoners executed in the US between 1930 and 1996 were black." Many never made it that far.
"In those days a black man didn't hardly get to the courthouse," Moreese recalls of his youth, "they got killed."
Two of the interviewees are white. All of them made lives outside prison thanks to what sustained them inside: faith, whether in God or the justice system; family; friendship; and education that prepared them at least for menial work.
"They've done well on the outside," Cheever stresses, "and that's not just my perception. I've kept track of them for years. It's their data that makes their case."
Cheever is neither foolish nor particularly brave. She knows that five of the "Class of 72" killed again while on parole and that nine of those who were never released have killed again inside prison. But "the scariest interview was with Lea Liepold", mother of Daniel Liepold who was murdered by Cheever's client, Walter.
Sitting with the Liepold family in their small San Antonio house, she answered their tearful questions then suddenly discovered that they had never been told that Walter had asked their forgiveness. The reporter who rang the family for comment after the execution never mentioned the last words that today mean so much to Lea Liepold.
Last year, Liepold met another bereaved mother, Marietta Jaeger-Lane, a founder of Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation, whose seven-year-old daughter was abducted and killed in 1973 during a family camping trip. Marietta had lobbied for a life term instead of the death penalty, saying "to kill somebody in my little girl's name would be to violate and profane the goodness and sweetness and beauty of who Susie was". In awe of such fortitude, Joan Cheever can only say what she learned on a far easier journey. "There are many good arguments against the death penalty. I found 589."
• Back From the Dead: One Woman's Search for the Men who Walked off America's Death Row by Joan M Cheever (Wiley, £16.99)