Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, December 16, 1993 TAG: 9312160124
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JUNE ARNEY LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The Rev. Fred R. Skaggs saw people die almost every way possible during his years working in a Fort Worth, Texas, emergency room.
But the Mechanicsville minister had never seen a state execution until he watched Derick Peterson die in Virginia's electric chair Aug. 22, 1991.
"I wanted to see whether I thought it was cruel or not," Skaggs said. "I am not a cruel person, and I am not a vengeful person.
"I came out of there convinced that it is not cruel, that it's decidedly less cruel than the things they did to their victims."
Skaggs, 60, is one of about 25 Virginians who volunteer each year to serve as official witnesses to executions at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt. The Department of Corrections does not have to solicit applications.
These days, witnesses are being called more often as Virginia accelerates the pace of executions.
If double murderer David Mark Pruett is executed as scheduled tonight, it will be the fifth this year - the most in any year since Virginia resumed electrocutions in 1982. Virginia will have put 22 inmates to death since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed states to resume executions in 1976. Only Texas and Florida have had more executions since then.
Witnesses' reasons for wanting to see death up close are as varied as their backgrounds - ranging from a feeling of civic duty to a quest for material for a novel. One commonwealth's attorney said he wanted to attend because he might have to ask for the death penalty and wanted to see the consequences.
Some are surprised by what they see; others are not. One came away believing executions should be televised. Another left convinced for the first time that they really happen. Another gained a notebook full of details for a novel. Always, they are changed.
Witnesses sit in a room with two glass walls. The inmate's final words are piped in by speakers. The electric chair sits about 10 feet in front of the witnesses on the other side of the glass. The walls of the execution chamber are gray cinderblock, the floors gray linoleum. A clock ticks on the wall.
Once a doctor pronounces the inmate dead, officials pull a blue curtain between the witnesses and the electric chair. The witnesses' responsibilities are over. But the images they have seen may replay for a lifetime.
The question of whether the electric chair is cruel and unusual punishment has been hotly debated, but no court has heard the argument in 100 years. The glimpse Skaggs had of the death chamber, however, told him everything he needed to know.
"It was perfectly obvious to everyone in the room that you're talking about a split second," he said of Peterson's execution. "The organs may continue to function rhythmically, but he was out."
Peterson was sentenced to death for the 1982 robbery and shooting of Howard Kauffman, the manager of a Hampton grocery store.
Nevertheless, Skaggs is troubled that rich men never die in the electric chair. For that reason, the system may not be fair, he said.
When Tom Lineberry, 28, from Manakin-Sabot, asked to be a witness, he was looking for fodder for a novel he's writing about a drifter who goes to prison for rape and armed robbery.
He came away from the June 17 execution of Andrew Chabrol with more than he expected.
The taunts and obscenities inmates yelled at him and the other witnesses was one of the first surprises.
"One of them yelled, `You're next,' " he said. "I wasn't prepared that they had access to yell at us. That blew me away."
Then he saw Chabrol, sentenced to die for the brutal rape and killing of Melissa Harrington in Chesapeake.
"He was so cold," he said. "I didn't see any remorse. I almost saw relief. . . . It looked like a very painless way to go."
Lineberry took in all the details: the witness who looked like she would get sick, the anticipation on the faces of officials, the quiet.
"The smell was unlike anything I've ever smelled before," Lineberry said. "Almost like rubber burning, but a thousand times more powerful. That smell will live with me."
For several nights after he watched Chabrol die, Lineberry, a mortgage loan officer, said he dreamed about the electric chair with a varied cast of characters. They were not nightmares - just evidence of the power of what he saw in that room.
When his son was born two weeks later, Lineberry flashed back to his death-row experience. He was struck by the methodical ritual of both events.
"One life left, and another came in," he said. "I thought back to [Chabrol's] last 10 seconds. There's a clock there, and it ticks. I felt the first 10 seconds of my son's life, and I felt the last instants of that fellow's life."
For Donnell Lassiter, a 38-year-old computer operator from Hampton, attending an execution was the chance to prove to himself that they actually happen.
"I didn't think they were really being executed," he said. "I thought they maybe were being used as guinea pigs for drug experiments."
He watched sparks leap from Roger Coleman's head and leg and saw the veins in his arms expand May 20, 1992. Lassiter said he would have liked to see the autopsy as final proof, but he is now convinced that executions actually are carried out.
Lassiter thinks executions should be televised.
"If some people would watch it, it would cut down a great deal on crime," he said. "Some people don't have a conscience. But it might make some people stop and think before they commit a crime."
Martin Harrell Sr., 50, worked in corrections for 15 years and is now a magistrate. What he saw in the death chamber when he watched Derick Peterson die made him more supportive than ever of the death penalty.
"It's like cutting out a light switch," he said. "Until we do more of it, crime is going to be increasing . . . . You've got to feel sorry for them in a way, but if I could have stopped it, I wouldn't have. To me, it's nothing, compared to what they've put the victim through."
Harrell said he thinks much of the torture comes in knowing the precise moment they will die.
"They die slowly, by degrees, knowing right down to the minute," he said. "Most of them have never seen the chair and the room until they walk in there. The torture of that is punishment, I'm sure, for months or days before."
Those who serve as witnesses feel some of it, too, he said.
"When he walks in and faces that chair, your heart beats a little faster - it has to, knowing that he has only a minute or two to live.
"Someone has got to witness it. That's the law. But it's not for everybody."
by CNB