It is 18 years since Michelle Lyons watched Ricky McGinn
die. But it still makes her cry.
When she least expects it, she'll see McGinn's mother, in
her Sunday best, her hands pressed
against the glass of the death chamber.
Dressed to the nines to watch her son get executed. Some farewell party.
For 12 years - first as a newspaper reporter, then as a
spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) - it was part
of Lyons' job to witness every execution carried out by the state.
Between 2000 and 2012, Lyons saw almost 300 men and women
die on the gurney, violent lives being brought to a peaceful conclusion, two
needles trumping the damage done.
Lyons witnessed her first execution when she was 22.
After seeing Javier Cruz die, she wrote in her journal: "I was completely
fine with it. Am I supposed to be upset?"
She thought her sympathy was best set aside for more
worthy causes, such as the two elderly men Cruz bludgeoned to death with a
hammer.
"Witnessing executions was just part of my
job," says Lyons, whose cathartic memoir, Death Row: The Final Minutes,
has just been published.
"I was pro-death penalty, I thought it was the most
appropriate punishment for certain crimes. And because I was young and bold, everything was black and white.
"If I had started exploring how the executions made
me feel while I was seeing them, gave too much thought to the emotions that
were in play, how would I have been able to go back into that room, month after
month, year after year?"
Since 1924, every execution in the state has taken place
in the small east Texas city of Huntsville. There are seven prisons in
Huntsville, including the Walls Unit, an imposing Victorian building which
houses the death chamber.
In 1972, the Supreme Court suspended the death penalty on
the grounds that it was a cruel and unusual punishment but within months some
states were rewriting statutes to reinstate it.
Texas brought it back less than two years later and soon
adopted lethal injection as its new means of execution. In 1982, Charlie Brooks
was the first offender to be put to death
by needles.
Crime makes Huntsville honest, and has earned it a
reputation as the "capital punishment capital of the world". Certain
journalists, usually from Europe, have written of the pervasive sense of death
in the town, but they clearly arrived armed with an agenda.
Huntsville is a neat little place, set amid the beautiful
Piney Woods, on the buckle of the Bible
Belt. There are churches everywhere, the locals are polite, and you could
spend a few days in the city without ever knowing it was where bad folk met
their maker.
Whatever you imagine an execution witness to be like,
Lyons isn't it. Over beers in Time
Out Sports Bar - the sort of dive you might see on a documentary about a
shooting in small-town America - Lyons speaks 19 to the dozen about any subject
you fancy. Smart, cultured, and possessing a rapid-fire wit, she makes a
mockery of that lazy British stereotype about Americans not doing irony. With
Lyons, you bring your A game or get buried.
But when the conversation turns to the things she saw in
the death chamber, sass gives way to vulnerability and it's not difficult to
detect the toll it took.
In 2000, Texas carried out 40 executions, a record for
the most in a single year by an individual state, and almost as many as the
rest of United States combined.
Sunday Best = One's best and often most formal clothing. / the best attire you have which is worn to church on Sunday
Dressed to the nines = dressed in fancy or formal clothing / dressed beautifully
Death by needles = Euthanasia / Punishment by injection of something deadly
On the buckle of the bible belt = spot where the Christian religious influence is particularly noticeable
Over beers = drinking
