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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Though Lieutenant Vernell Crittendon had been reading Michael Morales's mail and listening to his telephone calls for four months, he hadn't formed much of an opinion of him by the evening of Morales's scheduled execution. Crittendon, who had for sixteen years served as San Quentin State Prison's spokesman--though his role at the prison was actually far more complicated--felt confident only of what he had set out to learn: that Morales had no wish to escape, assault his guards, or kill himself. After twenty-two quiet years on death row, the inmate with the startled brown eyes bore little apparent relation to the twenty-one-year-old thug, high on PCP, who had taken a car ride with a seventeen-year-old named Terri Winchell, bludgeoned her head twenty-three times with a claw hammer, raped her, stabbed her four times in the chest, and then took eleven dollars from her purse to buy beer and cigarettes.
At 10 P.M. on February 20, 2006, two hours before Morales was to receive a lethal injection, Crittendon, who has been the prison's public face for all thirteen executions since capital punishment resumed in California, in 1992, made an unexpected appearance at the deathwatch cell. As Crittendon remembers it, the condemned man sat slumped on his mattress, awaiting what must come: the moment when he'd be told to put on fresh denims and a Chux incontinence pad, then marched into the death chamber and strapped to the gurneylike green chair. The spokesman, wearing a Livestrong bracelet and the black suit that he changed into for executions, gazed down at him without expression.
Ordinarily, Crittendon, an athletic man of fifty-three, is a model of affability. When he lopes through the prison, he teasingly greets passing guards and inmates--"Look out, now!" and "He ain't playin'!"--then, when they stop him to register what are sometimes esoteric grievances, he responds with vigorous nods and says "Sheez!" and "Oh, my!" and usually promises a fix, proud of his ability to bend the most rigid of bureaucracies. As a frequent guest on talk shows like "Larry King Live," Crittendon holds forth with relish on such topics as the crimes of death-row residents whose company the wife-killer Scott Peterson, recently arrived at San Quentin, might enjoy.
During an execution, though, his demeanor turns profoundly neutral. "Vernell has the hardest role," the veteran guard John Gladson says. "He has to keep the victims' families from being pissed off by not appearing too sympathetic to the condemned, but he also has to go back the next day and deal with the inmates on death row, who've all had their TVs tuned to Channel 5"--San Francisco's CBS affiliate--"watching him like they're reviewing a play."
As Morales knew, his attorneys had convinced a U.S. District Court judge, Jeremy Fogel, that two of the three poisons he would receive could cause excruciating pain if the first one to enter his bloodstream, the barbiturate sodium thiopental, didn't put him under. San Quentin's execution logs indicate that, during six of the prison's eleven lethal injections, the condemned may have been partly conscious; similar findings have led eight states to suspend use of the chemical mixture--sometimes called Texas Tea--employed in most of the death-penalty states, including California. To meet Judge Fogel's concerns, the prison had brought in two anesthesiologists to monitor the procedure. But that night, when the anesthesiologists realized that if Morales regained consciousness they were expected to sedate him again, they told the warden that it would be medically unethical to do so.
Crittendon had just informed Terri Winchell's family, who were in seclusion two hundred yards away, that the warden had postponed the execution for a few hours. He tried to radiate what he called "a veil of confidence: 'Everything is moving forward, justice will be served.' " Then, projecting an attitude he terms "professional but sympathetic," he says he told Morales of the delay, without explaining further. Morales dropped his face into his hands and said, "Oh, this is going to kill her family. They were prepared for it."
"I was speechless," Crittendon recalls. "I was just moved, for once. I'd never heard a statement of caring about the victim's survivors from a death-row inmate." After a slight pause, he told Morales, "I will make sure I keep you informed as this develops."
At least, that's how Crittendon related the event in conversations with me. But the execution team's log shows that Crittendon never made a 10 P.M. visit, and that Morales didn't learn of the delay until just after midnight. Crittendon acknowledged that his timetable must be off, but could provide no evidence to support his memory of the vivid exchange.
When Crittendon went to brief the press on the delay, he shifted his demeanor to appear "professional but indifferent to the eventual outcome." Believing that the press would try to blame the Judge or the anesthesiologists for the setback, he blandly announced that the warden was going over "some additional training with some of the newer members that have just been added to our team." Later, he returned to explain that "the warden has reached that level of comfort with all of the members on the execution team," and they were just awaiting a ruling from the district court on a motion for a stay. Still later, he read a statement of withdrawal from the anesthesiologists, adding--rather at variance with the facts--that "this is a new problem." Crittendon eventually announced that the prison would carry out the execution the following evening, using only sodium thiopental.
A single-drug injection had never been attempted, but Crittendon made the improvisation appear fitting and seemly, just as he had done with "citizens that were involved with civil disobedience" who had been arrested outside the East Gate; inmates "restricted to their assigned sleeping areas"--that is, locked down; and the condemned man expecting to partake of "the lethal cocktail." (In the early nineties, when California used hydrocyanic gas, Crittendon spoke of a "team approach" that would "eventually end in a lethal environment.") He excels at dispensing just enough information to satisfy reporters, and his sonorous locutions and forbearing gravity discourage further inquiry. Earlier, he had declared that Morales "was interacting with our staff in a very positive way," and that the condemned man was suggesting that "this is not necessarily a sad affair."
"To hear it from Vernell," Kevin Fagan, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter who has covered seven executions, says, "everyone goes to his maker the same way: 'calm, happily fed, and at peace with his fate.' "
Crittendon, who retired in December, always sought to navigate a clean line through the acrimonious confusion surrounding the death penalty. The public broadly endorses the penalty--by about sixty-five per cent in most polls--but many capital cases are beset by doubt, mitigating circumstances, or evidence of the condemned's remorse or redemption. California has a particularly thorough appellate process, and the result, on death row at San Quentin, is agonizing stasis: six hundred and twenty-nine men, the nation's largest assembly of the condemned, now sit for an average of more than twenty-two years before their sentence is carried out.
Vernell Crittendon would seem to have been the ideal proxy for a citizenry that wished to see justice done but did not want to look too closely at its slow, and then suddenly swift, final workings. Yet Crittendon's studied professionalism about executions that occur (or, mysteriously, don't) behind...
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