Texas Preacher Pushes the Gospel of Mercy for Death Row Inmates

I have long since been a supporter of ending/abolishing the death penalty.   My support began as a young child while living in Texas.  Texas is the place where everything in me was born, including myself!  I was born in 1976, a time when racism was still a major issue, as it is now. 

I was born in East Texas [  Longview, Texas to be exact], a place where people of color were termed a derogatory name.  Myself, a mixed person of color [or colorless, as I often refer to myself], I found the racism and sexism to be quite problematic.  In fact, leaving St. Mary’s Catholic School, my mother asked: 

“Does anyone ever make fun of you because of your color?” 

I remember this day so clearly.  We were driving away from the school [a Catholic School which then was predominently white] in our brown Honda Hatchback [which, interestingly, they don't make anymore], and the conversation about color began.  This conversational event became for me the very event that I reference as when my consciousness was first  raised.  The rest is…a life that has been dedicated to fighting institutional injustices.

I mention this story because it is helpful to remember the epistemological ruptures that occur in one’s life.  The Alternet article that I have posted here presents a story concening a Texas minister, while ministering and providing pastoral care to death row inmates, is conversely seeking to oppose and eventually abolish the death penalty. 

I have great respect for folks who stand against cultural injustices and institutional injustices.  In this case, the context of Texas is a culture of death in so many ways:  the border, the policing system, the penitentiary system–I could go on.  But, his beginning in the prison system as a chaplain didn’t begin as one standing against the policing sytem and/or the death penalty.  The first to witness death by lethal injection and THE one who received the confessions, hopes and prayers of prisoners’ last minutes on planet earth, this Presbyterian brother is standing fast in an effort to abolish the death penalty in Texas.  Please give this article a read!

In an effort to democratize ideas and socialize knowledge, I offer you this very important article about the intersections of the cultures of religion and politics, and the intersections of the cultures of life and death.

By Michelle García, Amnesty International Magazine. Posted December 17, 2007.

Years of ministering to prisoners on death row turned Rev. Carroll Pickett into a passionate leader to end the death penalty.

The great Texas sun is rising on a cool summer morning as the Rev. Carroll Pickett, a minister who once ushered condemned men into the execution chamber and watched them die, speaks of redemption. His Sunday school students, middle-aged and elderly couples from a gated community just north of Houston, contemplate the message of repentance given by the former prison chaplain of Texas’ most notorious penitentiary, a prison whose name is synonymous with hard time: Huntsville.

Pickett, a Presbyterian minister, wears a mint-green suit and a tie dotted with gold crosses. Tucked under his arm is a hand-tooled leather case containing a Bible, a gift from the inmates who once sought his counsel and lent their voices to his prison choirs. During the course of his career, this soft-spoken man with a good-ole-boy twang has witnessed prison officials pump poison into the veins of 95 men.

Pickett reads aloud the warning delivered by an angel in the final book of the Bible, Revelation: “I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot … So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of my mouth.”

“In other words, get off the fence,” Pickett tells his class. “Every Christian has got to get off the fence.”

It took decades — nearly a lifetime — but Pickett made that jump himself. After his retirement in 1995, he spoke out against the death penalty. Since then, his unique insider’s perspective and “Texas gentleman” manner has made him a potent force within the movement to abolish the death penalty. Few men can claim to have witnessed the first execution by lethal injection in the world, as he did 25 years ago. Even fewer have sat in prayer, listened to the confessions and final requests of men on the last day of their lives, heard their final words and their last gasp.

In Pickett’s 2002 book, Within These Walls: Memoirs of a Death House Chaplain, he described in poignant detail his personal journey from death penalty supporter to ardent abolitionist. A documentary film about the possibly wrongful execution of Carlos De Luna and Pickett’s final moments with him, At the Death House Door, is slated to air on the Independent Film Channel in the spring. Pickett has testified before Texas lawmakers, taken his abolitionist message to Rotary clubs and to big-city and small-town congregations alike. On an issue that imposes absolute and final judgment, he injects nuance.

“I was for [the death penalty] because I saw the injustice,” explained Pickett after Sunday school. “I began to change because the system was so bad. I saw 17-year-old killers and the mentally retarded [executed], and the fact that nobody had any education.”

In 2002, six years after Pickett’s retirement from the Huntsville Prison, the Supreme Court ruled against executing the mentally retarded; in 2005, the Court exempted juvenile offenders from capital punishment. In September, as Texas carried out its 400th execution, the Supreme Court agreed to consider whether the mixture administered in lethal injections amounts to “cruel and unusual punishment,” thus violating the Constitution. The case will be argued in February 2008.

Steve Hall, director of the Stand-Down Texas Project, an anti-death-penalty group, says Pickett’s indisputable credibility and authenticity is compelling in a state that leads the nation in executions.

“People understand it’s not gloss, it’s not some sales job, it’s not some distillation, it’s not something he has picked up from the AI Web site,” he said. “When you hear him, you really get a vision of what he went through and the questions, the doubt and that gradual transformation that changed him, and that now really drives his activity.” Pickett grew up in Victoria, Texas, a small town east of San Antonio. “My daddy was a [death penalty] supporter, and his office was next to the jail,” Pickett says, over a breakfast of homemade biscuits at an old-fashioned restaurant in Montgomery, birthplace of the “Lone Star” Texas flag. “My father believed that anyone who was arrested was guilty, and I was raised that way.”

In Texas, the death penalty, like pickup trucks and high school football, is part of a culture steeped in the lore of frontier justice. Here, attitudes toward the death penalty are rife with emotion, shaped by religious beliefs and deeply personal. On a highway leading to Huntsville, a billboard boasts of the town’s treasures: Big Sam (Sam Houston University); Ol’ Sparky, the state’s retired electric chair; and war heroes from various conflicts. Another billboard invites tourists to the Texas Prison Museum, its sign decorated with a ball and chain.

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Michelle Garcia, a native Texan, recently completed a Knight fellowship in El Salvador with the International Center for Journalists. She is based in New York.