THE EXECUTION OF A SERIAL KILLER

ONE MAN’S EXPERIENCE WITNESSING THE DEATH PENALTY, JOSEPH D DIAZ. A SHORT REVIEW OF AN OLD BOOK

Here’s the big picture: On 28th October 1986, a man named Edward Castro tied a virtual stranger to a bed and stabbed him to death with a kitchen knife. Fleeing the scene, he ducked straight into a rehabilitation centre for alcoholics. He did not leave much before Christmas. On New Year’s Day, Castro was arrested for public drunkenness. On the very night he was released, he tied up and murdered a second man, one Robert Edwards. Within 24 hours, he was planning yet another murder. His intended victim was one Richard Williams, who he had already tied up and threatened when the interruption came. Williams’ doomed guardian angel was a man named Steve Carter, who was blundering about in a nearby parking lot. Castro set Williams free and went outside to invite Carter in for a beer. While they cracked open their cans, Williams, bizarrely enough, moseyed off to grab a shower. Castro meanwhile stabbed Carter to death. He used such force, the knife went at least three times right through his arm. Castro and Williams drove off in Carter’s car. A number of police officers spotted them apparently trying to sell crack to some kids on the street. When they approached, Castro made a complete - and completely-unnecessary - confession. As they locked him up, Castro asked his jailer, ‘Uh…hey, does Florida have the death penalty?’ The jailer replied, ‘Yes sir, it does’.

Meanwhile in Minnesota… A sociology professor was struck by the fact that Florida (Texas, too) was having difficulty finding citizens to act as official witnesses to executions. Although a substantial majority of the population in both states were in favour of the death penalty, it seemed few people actually wanted to see it enacted in front of their own eyes. The lecturer was Joseph D Diaz, an expert in criminal behaviour, and the author of this book. His laudable conviction was that someone in his position ‘had the responsibility to create and refine knowledge about the social world and the behaviors that drive us […] it was my job to play the investigator…’ (p91)

Too many academics, one cannot help but reflect, are just that – academic. Far too rarely do any of us produce the steak to match our sizzle. Diaz wrote to the Departments of Correction in Florida and Texas, offering his services. How did he react when Florida took up his offer? Well, I know how I would have reacted, and I bet you know how you would have done, too. (Perhaps you’d have been too sensible to write to them in the first place.)

For Dr Diaz, matters of life and death seem to have been a major preoccupation. His main connection with his father – ‘[t]his man who I adored and admired’ – emerged from hunting. If the two were not hunting together, young Joseph was hunting with his potential stepfathers, with a view to calling his dad breathlessly afterwards. At length, he quit for moral reasons – deciding that killing animals for fun was just plain wrong – but took up the gun one last time, in an attempt to bond with his own son. Killing an animal made him sick. ‘I knew that I didn’t have the right to take the life of something else simply for my pleasure. While I would not become a vegetarian, I would never again kill for sport or to satisfy my own insecurity. I realised that day that life, in all its countless forms, deserves to live’.

Somewhere right in there is the bit that keeps me awake at night.

This book – The Execution of a Serial Killer – tells about Dr Diaz’ solo, doubtless-agonising, trip from Minnesota to Florida to see Edward Castro killed.

So much for the big picture. Now here are the details. There are quite a lot of them. Some would make your auntie shudder.  We learn, for instance, exactly why no one is ever going to make a television show called When Executions Go Wrong. When they go wrong, they really go wrong: horrifyingly, mind-wipingly wrong. Dr Diaz provides hideous tales of electric-chair malfunction. We learn about a man named John Evans who took all of 14 agonising minutes to die. We learn about another, named Edward Medina, whose head and face actually caught fire. In 2001, a prisoner named John W Byrd insisted on being executed by electric chair, rather than the relatively-less-horrible lethal injection. His reasoning was that ‘if the state of Ohio was going to execute an innocent man, he was going to make it as difficult […] as possible’. While Byrd was waiting for the bureaucrats to finish debating, Ohio took the decision out of his hands. The state banned the electric chair altogether.

Photo by Maria Oswalt on Unsplash

We learn plenty about those lethal injections, too. We learn how many syringes are used, in what order, and what is in each. We learn that even a procedure that appears as clinical as this can go badly wrong. We learn, finally, just what steps a person has to take in order to wind up as a witness to an execution. You will not be surprised to find out that it involves a lot of form-filling, not to mention that distinctively-American brand of bureaucratic solemnity that is too easily mistaken for seriousness. It involves an informal buffet lunch before the main event – who would have suspected that?  Sandwiches and juice before the execution. ‘Professional dress’ is required, although what that might consist of, we never learn: A Megadeth T-shirt, perhaps? Hood and axe?

Dr Diaz, it is very clear, deserves our respect. Unlike most academics, he was willing to get his feet wet (he was willing to get his hands dirty, too). Far too few of us are willing even to think about big questions, let alone research and write about them half as extensively as this. Dr Diaz went where few of us would care to follow. Then he came back to tell us what he found.

While it is easy to respect the man, it’s a little less easy to respect his argument. Don’t get me wrong: it is wonderful to see a book that is unafraid to ask what an intelligent person should think about capital punishment. And yet…it’s not clear that it ought to be this.

I included that material about hunting deliberately. It is in drawing an equivalence between hunting and capital punishment that Dr Diaz hits a snag. Remember, he does not become a vegetarian, but does decide that he’s no longer willing personally to kill animals. He is, then, presumably happy to let other people do it for him – armed with stun-guns and hammers at the abattoirs and the meat-processing plants. He just doesn’t want to do it himself.

OK, that’s a position that a person can take (millions do). But the very last pages of the book catch Dr Diaz about to board his plan back home. You have to feel sorry for his ticket agent. She’s just trying to go about her day. She tells Dr Diaz that, although she’s in favour of capital punishment herself, she wouldn’t fancy watching an execution. Dr Diaz lets her have it: ‘[I]f you support capital punishment,’ he cries, ‘don’t you think you had better be willing to sit right in there and watch someone die? […] If you can’t do that, if you can’t physically kill them yourself, you had better not say you support the death penalty, because you obviously have some reservations about the whole process’. Some might be tempted to ask Dr Diaz the exact same question, but substitute ‘meat-eating’ for ‘capital punishment’, and ‘a cow’ for ‘someone’. What would the answer be?

If the ticket agent happened also to buy meat at a supermarket without wishing to witness the animals’ own execution, one has to suspect that her position may be more tenable than that of Dr Diaz. Note, I’m not saying she’d necessarily be right, only that her position would be consistent.

Doubtless Dr Diaz was pretty upset by what he’d just witnessed (you would be), but if that was the case there was no reason to place the incident so carefully in the book. The fact that it’s there – on the very final pages, no less – indicates that this indeed the author’s final position. This, at the very least, requires some elaboration. How can one reconcile these asymmetrical beliefs? If one can why aren’t we told? The lack of explanation is a puncture in the middle of the book. All the air comes out.

Next to this gaping puncture, Dr Diaz’ own quibbles about whether a belief in capital punishment is compatible with his own Christian faith (quibbles that he mentions often in the book’s second half) seem like just that – quibbles. They may be important to him, but left me gasping something along the lines of, ‘But, but, but…’ I’m not saying the quibbles aren’t important. I am saying that there’s a large hole next to them that needs filling first.

There’s one other thing that makes the reader struggle with this book. It’s a certain lack of editing. The text is rich in clichés and phrasings which a decent editor would surely have picked up. The prose often struggles against its own limitations: ‘Robert Edwards would never live to learn that it would be days before he would be found and untied’. There are lengthy lists of rhetorical questions, something that Dr Diaz surely encouraged his own undergraduates to avoid. The first half of page 222 contains no fewer than seven. On pages 85-86, five consecutive paragraphs begin with the same word (‘I’). that never looks pretty on the page.

On page 8, we learn that Edward Castro committed one of his murders ‘with a subtle smile on his face’. How does the author know that? Did Castro tell him? Did he carry a handy mirror around to his crime-scenes, so that he could check that his expression was sufficiently ‘subtle’ as he bound up his victims and slaughtered them? Castro’s victims surely deserve a little more than that. At other times, the phrasing gave me my own subtle smile. On page 115, for instance, we are relieved to learn that Dr Diaz has ‘never died in a commercial airplane accident’.

It may seem quibbling to pick up on trivia like this when the book is about nothing less than life and death. But that’s just it – it’s life and death. The topic deserves more dignity than some of this writing can give it.

And, I’m sorry, but a professional psychologist can’t let this one go: Dr Diaz provides a long account of the differences between ‘sociopaths’ (like Edward Castro) and ‘psychopaths’. The account continues for five pages that get more puzzling as they go on, until the solution suddenly presents itself. ‘While the term “psychopath” is often used in the films, books and the media to denote the worst kind of predatory monster, a “sociopath” is actually much more frightening’, the author claims. ‘The psychopath often does not realize what he is doing. Therefore, he frequently makes no effort to avoid detection, leaving behind incriminating evidence, such as fingerprints’. Well, that’ll be news to the police.

Dr Diaz eventually tells us that a psychopath ‘may believe that God is commanding him to murder. Alternatively, a psychopath may attack another because in his delusional mind he believes that the victim is trying to kill or hurt him’. It’s that word ‘delusional’ that gives us the hint we so badly need by this point.

Later, Dr Diaz assures us that ‘a psychopath might insist he received instruction to kill other people, commands from some other planet or spirit’, and that he is ‘not viewed as directly responsible’ for his crimes. All those psychopaths in prison – they ought to appeal! They weren’t responsible! It was those planets and spirits!

It comes as no surprise to read the word ‘psychotic’ in the next paragraph. The author has confused the two. He has been writing about psychotics, not psychopaths. The confusion is all too common. Again, a decent editor really ought to have picked up on this. (All quotes taken from pp65-70.)

What to make of the book? Well, I found it illuminating in places, partly because of what I do for a living. It helped me a lot when I was writing a lecture on sentencing decisions. If you’re not doing that yourself, you still might get something out of the book, but maybe read it for the detail: go elsewhere for the big picture.

The Execution of a Serial Killer - One man’s experience witnessing the death penalty by Joseph D Diaz, PhD, Ponchon Press, Morrison, CO, 2002

Death Row photograph courtesy of WikiMedia Commons