Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 5, 1995 TAG: 9502080007
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CODY LOWE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It was a state-imposed execution, the taking of a life for a life - retribution for the 1983 murder of John Elliott, a 62-year-old Danville grocer.
Because I have a long-held conviction that the death penalty is not only wrong but ineffective, I try every time there is an execution to remind myself first that somebody else has already died.
On the night of Jan. 24, waiting inside the witness room in the death chamber at Greensville Correctional Center, I remembered John Elliott.
In July 1983, Elliott was brutally slain - bludgeoned, gagged, a knife stuck into his throat so he bled to death in a matter of minutes.
The violence of his death stood in stark contrast to the way Dana Ray Edmonds would be executed - put to sleep without physical pain, then poisoned with chemicals to stop his breathing and heartbeat.
There was no denying Edmonds killed Elliott. He deserved severe punishment for his crime. But did his death serve the ends of justice that - theoretically, at least - are at the heart of our system of laws?
I believe not.
Let's start with a consideration of some of the legal specifics of his case:
Edmonds' only real attempt at a defense was his statement that he acted to save his own life when Elliott threatened him with a gun. The judge didn't believe that story, though a couple of weeks before his execution a lie-detector test reportedly backed it up.
Even granting that defense would have failed anyway, there is a strong possibility - nearing a certainty in my own mind - that with another lawyer Edmonds would never have received the death penalty.
At least one key witness against Edmonds would have been interrogated differently on the stand, a different judge likely would have imposed the sentence, psychiatric evaluations likely would have been presented differently.
The system would have concluded, I believe, that justice could have been served with a long prison sentence.
Now about moral conclusions of his case:
By all accounts, the Dana Ray Edmonds who died on the night of Jan. 24 was a different man from the one one who killed John Elliott. That fact might mean little or nothing to Elliott's family, but it should make a difference to society as a whole.
Sometime about four years ago, chaplains and friends say, Edmonds experienced a profound religious experience that changed his life. Alone in his cell, he found God, he said, and was transformed into a new creature.
Such transfiguration was once, at least, the aim of incarceration.
In the last century, our justice system was influenced by a movement that even changed the names of "prisons." They were thereafter to be called penitentiaries - places where prisoners were to do penance for their crimes in the full expectation that the discipline of their punishment would lead to their reformation.
It was a hopeful approach, one I cling to - that even the most wretched, reprehensible human beings are potentially redeemable. It might take their entire life to reach that state. They might never be able to be turned loose among their fellow human beings again. Though the early penitentiary movement embraced executions, too, the effort to change people, the hope, was worth nurturing for as long as they lived.
Edmonds seems to have been one of those for whom the penitentiary made the change that was intended. He did seem to be rehabilitated. In the dozen years between his crime and his execution, he was changed.
We know that even in the days before his execution, Edmonds was still trying to do the things he believed were necessary to get his life right with God. One of those included being baptized again.
Edmonds contended that while he had been baptized before, after his 1991 religious experience, he didn't truly understand the significance of the rite. He wanted to be immersed in one of the three available pools on the prison grounds.
In an extraordinary entanglement of church and state, the prison administrator said no. As far as I can tell, allowing the baptism would not have involved any extraordinary security risks, didn't involve leaving the prison, wouldn't have delayed the execution.
In denying the baptism, in fact, the prison administrators didn't make those arguments. What they said was that "the Bible says one baptism is enough." Whether that is true or not, it was not the place of the state - in the person of the administrator - to decide that.
Neither could he - nor we - answer the question of whether Edmonds' conversion was real? Was it permanent? Was it only the result of his fear of death? Was it a sham, a ploy to get away with murder without being punished?
We can never know that now with certainty. We can only hear the witnesses to it, who, admittedly, were opposed to Edmonds' execution in any case.
What we also can never know is whether allowing Edmonds to live out his natural life in the penitentiary might have made a difference in the lives of some others there who desperately need positive influences.
We do know that there is little or no evidence that the imposition of the death penalty deters others from committing murder. On the contrary, some would argue that the statistics say the most violent places in America are in states where the penalty is imposed most often.
I have to admit there are some murderers who are so dangerous that even the possibility of their escape from prison seems an unreasonable risk for the society around them. Execution sometimes seems like the only acceptable way to ensure that they will not kill other innocents again.
But I believe when we do that, we must admit we are not exacting justice, but simple retribution.
And that comes at a cost to our own souls as well.
Memo: ***CORRECTION***