ON FILM: Death House Door puts penalty on trial

By Philip Martin

LITTLE ROCK — Watching At the Death House Door (Facets, $29.95), a 2008 documentary by Peter Gilbert and Steve James (best known for Hoop Dreams) released this week on DVD, I was reminded of the story of Albert Pierrepoint.

Pierrepoint - portrayed by Timothy Spall in the 2005 film The Last Hangman (also known as Pierrepoint) - served as the United Kingdom's official hangman from 1932 to 1956 and presided at the executions of more than 400 people (including some 200 Nazi war criminals hanged after World War II).

By all accounts, he was extremely precise and methodical, a true professional who dispatched his "clients" with as little ado as possible. He was a mercifully swift worker - rarely did more than 30 seconds elapse between the condemned's arrival on his gallows and execution. (Having done some work for the U.S. Army during World War II, he hated the way the Americans dithered around for six or seven minutes reading lengthy charges while the condemned waited on the trap door.)

Dealing in officially sanctioned homicide gave Pierrepoint a unique perspective on capital punishment. In the end, he became if not an abolitionist at least convinced that the policy had no deterrent effect.

"I have come to the conclusion that executions solve nothing," he wrote in his autobiography, "and are only an antiquated relic of a primitive desire for revenge which takes the easy way and hands over the responsibility for revenge to other people."

Pierrepoint's opinion is unlikely to change the minds of capital-punishment advocates - the issue is an emotional one, highly resistant to any evidence and all testimony. It may take something more dramatic than cold numbers to change anyone's mind about whether the state should have the power of life and death over its citizens.

At the Death House Door starts out as a cinematic portrait of the Rev. Carroll Pickett, a Presbyterian minister whose views on capital punishment were shaped by a "hang 'em high" father, the absence of his murdered grandfather and, years before he worked at the prison, the killing of two of his parishioners - civilian library workers - during a 1974 prison siege. Pickett, once described by a Texas newspaper as "27 degrees right of Rush Limbaugh," thought the death penalty was appropriate and effective.

During his 16 years as prison chaplain of the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville, Pickett witnessed 95 executions by lethal injection. Like Pierrepoint, he was changed by his experience from capital punishment advocate to opponent.

From the beginning, Pickett was deeply affected by his duties, which required him to provide solace and counsel while at the same time pacifying the condemned so they wouldn't struggle at the end. When Gilbert and James interviewed Pickett, they discovered he had recorded his private thoughts, impressions, doubts and misgivings (there were at least 15 instances where Pickett believed the condemned prisoner was innocent of the crime for which he died) immediately after each execution and archived them on audio cassette tapes. They naturally concluded they had uncovered a rich vein of material.

But we don't really hear much of the tapes, as the focus shifts to the possible wrongful execution of 27-year-old Carlos De Luna in 1989. Pickett was convinced that De Luna was innocent - and, in 2006, Chicago Tribune reporters Steve Mills and Maurice Possley wrote a three-part series that strongly suggested De Luna was the victim of mistaken identity and a prosecutorial rush to justice.

Gilbert and James had originally set out to document Mills' and Possley's work on De Luna and only became aware of Pickett pursuant to that thread. So the shift between the two threads - from Pickett to De Luna's family, from a psychological portrait of amoral evolution to an expose of governmental misconduct - feels a little disconcerting.

Yet if from a filmmaking standpoint the transposition is less than ideal, it makes great sense from a journalist's perspective. When he retired from the prison system in 1995, Pickett announced that capital punishment was "biblically wrong," which was the official position of the Presbyterian Church. He said he had kept his opinion to himself for fear of jeopardizing his job - and forfeiting his chance to minister to the condemned.

Since his retirement, Pickett has become a vocal capital-punishment abolitionist, and as such he is suspect in the eyes of some advocates. But he has seen up close what executions look like. He's convinced the death penalty is no deterrent and in fact, contributes to a cycle of violence: There were 58 prisoners on death row when Texas resumed executions in 1982; now there are more than 400.

E-mail:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

MovieStyle, Pages 34, 39 on 06/26/2009