The State of Texas dutifully recorded the last 11 minutes of Marcus Cotton’s life on a simple one-page, fill-in-the-blanks form.
“Taken from holding cell: 6:02,” the form began.
“Strapped to gurney: 6:03. Solution flowing: 6:04. Last statement: 6:06. Lethal dose began: 6:07. Lethal dose completed: 6:10. Pronounced dead: 6:13.”
The last half of the form left space for “unusual occurrences.” But there were none. In fact, the state-mandated execution of Cotton on the evening of March 3–the eighth lethal injection in Texas so far this year–was entirely regimented, ritualized and routine.
From his last meal–chicken-fried steak and macaroni and cheese–to his last breath–a quick, sputtering gasp–the 29-year-old Cotton left the world uneventfully, like most of the 320 other Death Row prisoners Texas has executed since 1976, when capital punishment resumed in the U.S. after a court-mandated hiatus.
Texas has performed more than one-third of all the executions carried out in the United States in the last 28 years, and the state’s execution chamber, a small, brick-walled room painted hospital green, is by far the nation’s busiest. Last year, an average of two condemned inmates each month were strapped onto the stainless steel gurney, covered with a white sheet and briskly injected with three lethal drugs. So far this year, the pace is even faster.
They may not agree on much else, but prosecutors and defense attorneys, death penalty supporters and opponents and even the inmates and their guards concur on this: Texas has evolved an exceedingly efficient bureaucracy for putting people to death.
The process is so meticulous that, two weeks before they are scheduled to die, condemned prisoners fill out forms that ask what they want for their last meal, how they wish to have their remains disposed of and whether they intend to resist on their way into the death chamber.
“Yes, it does get automated, because we do it so much,” said Jim Willett, the former warden at the 19th Century Walls prison–where the execution chamber is located–who oversaw nearly 90 executions before his retirement in 2001. “But I don’t know that I don’t feel sorry for the guy working some other place that does three a year. Because if I do one here and I feel really bad about it–something about the guy or his crime, he’s young or whatever–it ain’t gonna be long till another one comes along.
“It’s kinda like baseball,” Willett concluded. “You have a bad game today, another day or two you’re gonna be playing another game.”
Nevertheless, Texas prison authorities bristle at any analogy likening Death Row to an assembly line.
System defended
“I’ve often heard people refer to our system as an execution machine, but that’s not the way it is,” said Michelle Lyons, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. “Texans are not bloodthirsty people. We don’t look forward to executing anyone. But it’s the law in Texas.”
Perhaps because the executions occur so frequently, many Texans seem to have grown inured to the process. Just two Houston television stations covered Cotton’s execution, while the Houston Chronicle ran a short story the next day inside the local section on Page 19. Outside the Walls prison, fewer than a dozen death-penalty protesters showed up for a candlelight vigil.
But that dwindling interest can scarcely be blamed on Texas prison officials, who have made much of the execution process fully transparent, down to the most arcane detail.
While the death chamber remains off limits to the general public, citizens can access the justice department’s exhaustive Death Row Web site, at www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/deathrow.htm. There, visitors can find details about each of the 450 Death Row inmates, data about every execution, the text of inmates’ last statements and assorted trivia, such as the cost of the drugs used per execution ($86.08) and the fact that Texas has executed six pairs
of brothers.
The site used to feature a list of last-meal requests, but that was removed in December.
“We had complaints from people who thought it was in poor taste,” said Lyons. “But that was the No. 1 inquiry we had. People are fascinated to know what a man would request knowing it’s the last thing he’ll ever eat.”
There is a Death Row Media Day each Wednesday, when reporters can interview condemned prisoners at the Polunsky Unit, 43 miles east of Huntsville, where the state’s male Death Row inmates are housed (“Shorts/cutoffs, open-toed shoes, tank tops…see-through fabrics and shirts or blouses with an open midriff are prohibited”).
Everything related to an execution is rigorously standardized, categorized and recorded. Five days before a scheduled execution, prison guards begin keeping detailed “death watch” logs of a condemned inmate’s every move. When the countdown reaches 36 hours, the observations are made every 15 minutes. Banality is no obstacle. “21:27 Sitting on bunk reading magazine,” read one of the entries for Cotton.
There are even assigned places for every participant in the execution process. The warden stands near the inmate’s right shoulder, a prison chaplain next to his right leg. Family members and witnesses for the victim stand in one viewing booth a few feet from the gurney; relatives and witnesses for the inmate stand next door in another. Outside the prison walls, the handful of death penalty protesters remains on one street corner and the occasional group of death penalty supporters stands a block away.
All of the choreography serves to heighten the aura of inevitability on Death Row, where the average prisoner spends 10 1/2years pursuing appeals before being executed.
“I don’t have much hope,” Cotton said in an interview two weeks before his execution date. “This is Texas, you know.”
As capital murder cases go, Cotton’s was grimly straightforward. He was convicted for the September 1996 robbery and murder of Gil Epstein, a Ft. Bend County assistant district attorney, in the parking lot of the Houston Jewish Community Center.
Epstein was returning to his car after a basketball game when Cotton and an accomplice confronted him. Witnesses testified that Cotton forced Epstein into his car and shot him twice in the head; Cotton’s accomplice testified that Cotton decided to kill Epstein when he spotted his gold prosecutor’s badge. Other witnesses said Cotton boasted afterward about “shooting the law.”
At the time of the murder, Cotton had been on parole for an attempted murder conviction, and his record was studded with arrests and convictions for theft and drug dealing.
Although he insisted he was innocent, Cotton readily acknowledged that he had no alibi.
“I’m an innocent man, but that’s up to interpretation,” Cotton said. “I’m not going to hold it against you if you think otherwise. There’s nothing glaring that you could look at in my case and say, `There, he’s innocent.'”
Cotton’s state and federal appeals, asserting that he had received inadequate legal counsel, were curtly denied, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to consider the case. Cotton had no expectation of clemency from the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, whose members do not hold meetings or hearings and have only recommended commutation of a death sentence once in the last five years (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
So he spent his last day with no hope of an 11th-hour reprieve. After eating his last meal, making some final phone calls and meeting with a prison chaplain, Cotton was led into the death chamber and quickly strapped onto the cross-shaped gurney by prison guards known as the “tie-down team.” Technicians inserted an IV into his arm, the clear plastic tubing trailing back through a small door, behind which sat the anonymous executioner.
Killer unremorseful
As the official witnesses crowded into the viewing rooms–among them Cotton’s mother on one side, and Epstein’s mother on the other–Cotton was seen to be smiling. Speaking into a microphone lowered to just above his mouth, he recited his last statement, a farewell to his mother and the two children he had scarcely ever seen. He offered not a word of remorse for Epstein’s murder.
Within a moment, the first lethal chemical, a fatal dose of sodium thiopental, an anesthetic, began flowing into Cotton’s arm. He closed his eyes, exhaled deeply and made a sound described by Willett, the former warden, as “almost like you hear an old horse, almost like a snoring last breath coming out.” It looked as if he was dead before the other two chemicals ever reached him.
Afterward, Epstein’s father, Baruch, a 70-year-old Holocaust survivor, said he felt justice had been done.
“I am 100 percent supporting death sentences and executions,” Epstein said. “That is exactly what it says in the Bible. I urge you to look at it in the Book of Exodus. It says, somebody kills somebody, he must be put to death.”
The state of Texas says so too. But no matter how practiced the routine has become, the sheer volume of executions eventually takes a toll on prison officials.
For Lyons, who estimates she has witnessed more than 100 executions, first as a reporter and then as a state employee, the stress surfaces in a heightened sense of personal fear.
“Doing this job makes you paranoid,” she said. “You see what these men are capable of. I am always locking the door and looking in the back seat.”
Willett fell silent when asked if he felt he has suffered any lasting psychological impact.
“It’s a strange thing to see a fellow die that you know is in perfectly good health–just like looking at me and you right now–but that in a few minutes he’s going to be dead,” Willett said. “You’d rather have went through life without messing with [executions], I’ll just say that.”
