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'I was with both hands for': how a woman from Texas lives, in whose eyes 300 people were executed

'09.08.2020'

Source: with the BBC

For 12 years, Michelle Lyons' job function included a personal presence at every execution that took place in her state - first as a reporter for a local newspaper, then as a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. with the BBC.

Photo: Shutterstock

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.

From 2000 to 2012, Michelle watched as nearly three hundred people died, strapped to a medical gurney - men and women, criminals whose turbulent lives took on a peaceful end when two needles with a deadly composition made retribution for the damage caused by those.

Screenshot: ROSA ELEFANT PRODUKTION / YouTube

Lyons first saw the execution when she was 22 years old. After tracing the death of Javier Cruz, she wrote in her diary: “I'm fine. Was that supposed to 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 the executions was just my job,” Lyons says. Her memoir, Death Row: The Last Minutes, was recently published.

“I was with both hands for the death penalty. I thought this was the most appropriate type of punishment for certain crimes. I was young and daring, the world for me was painted only in white and black ”.

Screenshot: The Execution Project / YouTube

"If I were digging into myself and trying to figure out how this all affects me, 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 eastern town of Huntsville. There are seven prisons, including the Huntsville Unit, an imposing Victorian 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 returned the death penalty two years later and soon introduced a new form of it - lethal injection. In 1982, Charlie Brooks became the first criminal who was killed under the new law - with the help of needles.

Screenshot: ROSA ELEFANT PRODUKTION / YouTube

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 saturated with the feeling of death, but they obviously came here already charged with their own agenda.

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

If you have already drawn 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 with a beer in the Time Out sports bar, which literally plunges you into the world typical of documentaries about shooting in the American outback, Lyons can tirelessly chat about any topic that you suggest.

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Educated, cultured, with a subtle and lightning sense of humor, she is a living mockery of the condescending belief, popular among British people, that Americans do not know the sense of irony. With her, you either give all your best, or she simply will eat you.

However, when it comes to what she happened to see in the “death chamber”, her audacity gives way to vulnerability, and it is easy to see what it cost her.

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

Working as a prison chronicler for the Huntsville Item, Lyons attended 38 of them. However, the apparent lightheartedness she saw in her diary entries from that period was only a short-term result of the coping mechanism.

“Rereading my“ prison ”records of that time, I see what exactly touched me to the depths of my soul. But those fears that I had then, I shoved away and locked with a key in my head. It was the insensitivity that saved me and gave me the strength to keep working, ”says Michelle Lyons.

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.

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“Watching the last moments of someone’s life, as a person’s soul leaves his body, will never turn into a routine or something commonplace. But in Texas people are executed so often that the process is fine-tuned to perfection, and any theatricality is completely removed 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.

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.

Screenshot: ROSA ELEFANT PRODUKTION / YouTube

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 thus pay my debt to society, 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 gasps of the dying - coughs, breaths of air, wheezing - while the deadly "medicine" was doing its job, their lungs refused and the last air was pushed out of them, like shrinking bellows. And after they died, she watched the bodies turn purple.

Lyons was written by people from all over the world. Many condemned her for her involvement in "state-sponsored killings." She sometimes responded aggressively to emails, 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 have often called it “murder” rather than “execution”. They thought we were murderers. "

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Sometimes there were real "circus performances", for example, in 2000, when Gary Graham (the real name of Shack Sankoff) was executed. The entire media world was watching what was happening in Huntsville, including Jesse Jackson of The Reverends, Bianca Jagger, members of the New Black Panthers who brought their AK-47s with them, and members of the Ku Klux Klan in full "gear".

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 only the jailers and the only journalist from the Associated Press observed the last breaths of a prisoner.

When the action of the poison began, there was no one of his loved ones and relatives next to the dying person, there were no accusers or his victims - they did not see his death. Even the local newspaper didn't send its reporter. The bureaucratic machine was implementing the 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.

Screenshot: ROSA ELEFANT PRODUKTION / YouTube

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.

"I not only thought that Napoleon was no longer a danger, but I thought that he could be a useful member of society."

“I was so hoping that he would win the 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 death. 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.

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“Executions ceased to seem to me as something abstract, I began to take them to heart. I began to worry that my child could 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. Usually in the room where the prisoner's loved ones were, various emotions were raging, because although they had a lot of time to prepare for this loss, they still watched the death of a loved one. They traveled a long, hard way. "

“I myself had a child at home, for which I was ready for anything. And these women watched their children take their lives. I heard mothers screaming, crying, hitting walls, throwing glasses, ”recalls Michelle Lyons.

“I stood in the observer room and thought: 'Nobody wins, everyone loses.' The executions engendered grief. And I had to watch it over and over 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 stayed away from this whole prison system, I would disconnect from everything that I saw before. But it turned out the other way around. I thought about it constantly. It felt like I opened Pandora's box, but I can't close it. ”

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“I opened the bag of chips and smelled the death chamber. Or, on the radio, something suddenly reminded me of a conversation with one of the prisoners on the eve of his death. Or again I saw before me the flabby arms of Ricky McGrinn's mother, pressed against the glass wall of the death chamber, and began to cry.

Record of the last minutes of the life of the sentenced to death:

 

Although Lyons believes that Texas sentences people to death too often, she continues to support this type of punishment, at least for the most violent criminals. In Texas, according to Lyons, there are “the biggest and insane” crimes of any state.

Lyons stands among the rows of grave crosses in Joe Byrd's cemetery, a cute stretch of land where Texas prisoners have been buried for over 150 years, and wonders how many of these deaths she saw.

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

“Here you will not see many flowers on the graves. And what does the fact that I do not remember those who were executed before my eyes say about me? Maybe they deserve that no one remembers them. Or maybe it's my job to remember them, ”Lyons says.

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