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Will the 1,000 modern day execution happen in Columbia?
Govenor Sanford has the opportunity to save a life but will he take it?
On Friday, Dec. 2 at 6 p.m. in Columbia, the people of South Carolina will kill a man. By the time you pick up this paper they may have already have done it. The minute this publication starts rolling off the press, Shawn Paul Humphries will have only one more night to live. By the time you read this, he may only have one hour, one minute, one more breath. There is, however, one person with the ability to stop this state-sanctioned killing.
Gov. Mark Sanford.
Shawn Humphries was 21-years-old when he attempted to rob a convenience store. During the attempted robbery, store clerk Mendal Alton “Dickie” Smith reached for a gun in his waistband, at which point Humphries shot him once and ran. Smith died. It was a murder. It was a terrible and morally reprehensible act. And Friday, Dec. 2 at 6 p.m., there could or has been another, the murder of Shawn Paul Humphries as sentenced by the people of South Carolina.
Yeah, you and me. But what do you and I really know about the death penalty? Do we even talk about it? It’s not the favorite Thanksgiving or holiday topic of conversation while hanging Christmas lights or during a game of charades with the family. No way.
But Thanksgiving dinner might have been a little different for Mr. Sanford this year. It would be hard for anyone who knew that within a week he would be in the position to make sure the life of another human being was either going to be ended or saved.
Especially if it’s going to be the 1000th one in history since the Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to recommence in 1977. But it wasn’t supposed to come down like this for the wayward governor of South Carolina whose been recently doggy-paddling in the opinion polls and is still reeling from the headshot by Time magazine just this month.
Governor Mark R. Warner of Virginia was supposed to be the golden ticket-holder of this thousand-mark record. But Tuesday, 24 hours before the execution was scheduled, Warner called it off.
But really who could blame him? No one would really want to be judged in public spotlight like that. Would anybody really want to be the one to drop the hammer on the thousandth person to play Rock/Paper/Scissor-Zap/injection/gas? Apparently not.
Citing inconclusive DNA evidence at the time, and illegal handling of evidence, Warner picked up the telephone and said Not here, not now.
So now, the 1000th person to be put to death by capital punishment will go to Gov. Michael Easley of North Carolina. The death is scheduled for 2 a.m., Friday Dec 2, only 16 hours before Sanford will clear away the tickertape to execute the 1001st.
But what if Easley balks and passes the ball down court? Our own governor has already killed six people in his three years in office, so this may not seem like such a big deal this time around. “Pass the sentence,” for Sanford might just be as easy as “Pass the salt.
Prognostications aside, if Gov. Easley takes one for the team and kills off number 1000 no balloons will be dropping from the sky or bottle rockets exploding over the Raleigh skyline, but it will let Gov. Sanford breath a little easier. In effect, by not pardoning Kenneth Lee Boyd from his execution, Easley will be pardoning Sanford of the fast approaching blade of a media guillotine.
“Don’t wait to abolish the death penalty,” SueZann Bosler said during a November 28 presentation at USC’s Russell House. Bosler, a self-described preacher’s kid, or “PK,” said her father was murdered in front of her when she was a girl. Stabbed 24 times, her father was left for dead and Bosler herself was stabbed half a dozen times and nearly killed as well. Crawling through her own blood she was able to call 911 and the attacker was caught. “I forgive him,” Bosler said of the man who killed her father and punctured her brain with a knife. If alive, Bosler said, her father would echo those same sentiments. And had. Only months before his murder, Bosler said her father had uttered the chilling words during a conversation about the death penalty, which would prove to be prophetic; if he were ever killed he would not want his murderer to be put to death.
Bosler said she tried her hardest to express her avid aversion to the death penalty as unfair, barbaric and morally unethical, but the prosecution and the judge did all they could to keep her views unheard by the jurors in the courtroom.
She said she understands that people oppose her views and believe the death penalty is necessary in America - she only wants people to listen to the other side, and at least be educated on what goes on in the gory bloody political mess that is the criminal justice system and the issue of the fate and sanctity of human life. Only 17 people actually attended the event at the Russell House coordinated by Abe Bonowitz, director of Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (CUADP), the night Bosler spoke. Sadly, the amount of undisclosed and under-the-rug action involving South Carolina and the death penalty goes grossly underreported, somehow flying below the radar of a fickle media culture that goes into rabid bloodlust every time a white blonde teenager ends up missing from a ritzy suburban neighborhood or Michael Jackson gets indicted for playing roll the bat with a member of the Child Actor’s Guild.
But this Friday, Dec. 2 at 6 p.m., the execution in Columbia could top the 1000th in the United States and the seventh state-sanctioned killing by Sanford alone. That’s one person for each mortal sin if Governor Mark Sanford, whose name and title is an anagram for “a mark of god’s error,” is counting.
However if Easley picks up the phone and screams for a Time Out, Sanford may be faced with the choice he didn’t expect. But either way it is just a number, one or 1001, the principles still remain the same. On Friday night we get to think about the thousand people we’ve taken the lives of - and if it has all been worth it. But forget those people, those names; because it’s not about them, it’s about the principle. Some will say, “of course they were worth it.” They’ll say “An eye for an eye. It’s justice, it’s fairness. It’s a deterrent to crime. It’s necessary. And you’d say so too if it happened to someone you love. A tooth for a tooth.” But it’s not all about that either.
Capital punishment has been proven to do nothing to deter crime at all, we know this, but the most poignant and unavoidable fact of the issue remains the same: if capital punishment teaches us anything, it teaches us that killing is okay, and the only condition is who is doing the killing. It teaches us that in order to teach someone that killing is wrong, we will kill those who we think have done something wrong. And who gets to decide if the one to be killed has been in the wrong? You do. And I do.
And the 12 people deliberating in a jury do. And that’s a hell of a responsibility that believe it or not you may have to face someday, especially with 70 inmates currently on death row in this state alone. “There is a moral burden of taking responsibility for ending someone’s life. But that is a part of the burden of public office - putting the greater good of society above one’s personal qualms and preferences,” wrote William Tucker, a proponent for capital Punishment in an article called “Why The Death Penalty Works.” And now it’s come to that time for our elected governor of the state of South Carolina to decide what he thinks is the greatest good for all of us by giving Shawn P. Humphries his choice: Electric chair or lethal injection.
Friday, Dec. 2, while Humphries chooses between the possibility of a missed vein river of blood or a flesh searing, eye bursting, electric slow-fry, Sanford must decide whether he will go on with his day as usual or pick up the phone and make the one call he has to make to grant clemency, a reprieve.
That’s the same call the governor of Virginia made 24 hours before showdown because he was not 100 percent sure that death was the answer. In the case of Shawn Humphries, a panel of the Circuit Court of Appeals has concluded that the prosecutor’s closing argument was improper according to a news release by CUADP.
But who knows what gods speak to Sanford in his sleep? Perhaps the same ones that sang into George W. Bush’s ear while he executed a 130 people under his own state governance in Texas. Or if Sanford will chalk this next killing up as only a fraction of the amount needed to compete with his demagogue and reach the necessary number to fill just one more monument on the State House grounds.
“The governor’s office has received the request for clemency. The governor’s legal staff is reviewing the request, but since this case has already gone through an exhaustive legal process, the governor’s office is not inclined to grant clemency,” Joel Sawyer, a spokesman for the governor said in a telephone interview shortly before midnight, Monday, November 28.
So we’ll kill this guy. Human sacrifice is nothing new. The Aztecs threw piles of their people on the alter for slaughter in the name of their gods. And Friday we get to do the same, though a blood rotten wooden chair or sterilized cold-steel gurney doesn’t seem as romantic or significant. But our country is only 200 years old - give us some time.
Right now, the Unites States is one of only 74 of the 316 countries in the world to not already abolish the death penalty because of its hypocritical and barbaric visceral core. But then again we can’t truly be blamed. We’re a young country that only recently ended segregation and allows torture to exist as long as it follows between the lines of the Patriot Act and the Geneva Convention. Forget about the denial of due process of law, the violation of the constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the laws, failure to deter crime, wasting of the public’s resources and the epiphany that a decent and humane society does not deliberately kill human beings.
Forget about all of it.
So when will the 1000th person in the United States be put to death? “I expect probably by Thursday afternoon, midday Friday, I will know the answer,” said Teresa Norris, director for the Center of Capital Punishment. “From that point on it’s just, it’s unimaginable to me, because at that point, once all of those answers come in and there’s no hope left, basically Shawn Humphries gets to sit and watch the clock.”
So as the clock counts down for this guy on death row to be killed in Columbia, or maybe if it’s already happened, think about where you stand on the issue. Read a book. Listen to the stories of the many exonerated death row survivors who were proven innocent of their crime at the last minute. Think if personal emotions are enough to go on in order to decide the death of a human being when those exact emotions were used in the decision by the one who committed the crime in the first place. Think about someone being put to death for the crime of premeditated murder being killed by exactly the same crime - premeditated murder, with the only difference being who uses the knife or flips the switch.
As the call for who gets to ring the winner’s bell of the 1000th state-sanctioned public killing counts down to the very last minute it seems to be creeping slowly south in that slightly familiar backward mocking tick of a reverse metronome.
Already deflected in Virginia, the burden is now on Gov. Michael Easley of North Carolina. Will he let his boy Kenneth Lee Boyd be killed Friday, December 2, at 2 a.m., or will he kick the pass over to Sanford in order bump his name back a thousand pages in the history books?
As of 6:02 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 30, spokesperson for the governor of North Carolina, Sherri Johnson, said the governor was still unsure of his decision on whether he would commute the sentence of the 1000th person to be killed.
On Friday we’ll know.
Call your governor and make sure he’ doing his job, the job of representing you.
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