Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Tom Gorman comments on the execution last week of Daryl Mack at the Nevada State Prison and why death by lethal injection is not punishment enough for someone who takes another’s life

Up at the state prison in Carson City last week, we killed Daryl Mack with a lethal drug injection.

Man, that was a waste of a perfectly good I.V. line.

What kind of an execution is it when the murderer volunteers to go to sleep for one last time? He was so relaxed, the last thing he ate sounded like a Happy Meal.

I don't know why we bothered. If we want to punish the worst criminals in the worst possible way, we should keep them alive.

Put them in a cell with a big round guy named Bubba whose denims look like high waders and who reveals missing teeth when he checks you out and smiles. Bubba will make you sweat, squirm and cry. He'll make you wish you were dead.

But the way Mack died, for killing a Reno woman in her boarding room 18 years ago, wasn't punishment, it was a reward. There are people with painful, fatal diseases who wish they could be as lucky.

So if it sounds like I'm opposed to the death penalty, I am. These days, at least.

I've waffled on the issue. The Old Testament side of me is OK with barbaric executions. An eye for an eye and all that. But the New Testament side of me says that the death penalty is morally wrong. Love one another, do onto others, let he who is without sin, judge not lest you be judged.

The death penalty sounded good when you could drag a sniveling, weak-kneed bastard past a big switch on the wall and strap him to an old wooden chair nicknamed Sparky. Now that's an execution.

Or you support the guy under his arms and lead him up to a wooden platform with a trap door where justice is delivered by a couple of guys wearing black hoods.

You have to make them sweat. Make 'em squirm and cry and beg. That's part of the punishment.

But if one of the last things a murderer sees is a couple of paramedics wearing latex gloves and slapping the inside of his arm, looking for a place to slip in a needle, where's the satisfaction of vengeance for the rest of us?

If the guy is so bad he's got to be killed, we should hear the bolt action of a marksman's rifle, not him reciting, "Now I lay me down to sleep."

I've never witnessed an execution. Never wanted to. I have friends who have watched lethal injections, and they'd just as soon not watch twice. It was harder on them, I think, than the condemned man.

The closest I've come to it was in 1992, when California reinstituted the death penalty, and the first guy to break the ice, a soulless San Diego murderer named Robert Alton Harris, was escorted into the gas chamber at San Quentin.

His last meal was fried chicken, pizza, jelly beans and Pepsi. He knew he was going to die and he figured he might as well bring on the gas and heartburn ahead of time.

I was sent by the Los Angeles Times to report his execution from inside the prison. We gathered for the big night in a large conference room alongside San Francisco Bay.

It was quite a spectacle. Just before a particularly dashing L.A. television anchor man stood before the camera for his live updates every 15 minutes for the audience back home, he'd loosen the knot of his tie to project that hard-workin' look. As soon as they turned off the camera lights, he'd tighten his tie again. He and everyone understood the gravity of the evening.

A Times colleague, Dan Morain, was one of a handful of witnesses to the actual execution, and it was a dandy. Harris was strapped onto his death throne and listened as sulfuric acid filled two vats beneath his seat.

"He peered down, between his knees, into his personal abyss," Morain wrote. "In seconds, he knew, cyanide pellets would drop, react with the acid and the gas would rise. This was it - he was a dead man."

But then the phone rang. The execution had been stayed for the fourth time that night. Such was the roller coaster of the night's drama. "A sad smile came over his face," Morain wrote. "He was back from the dead."

I could only wonder how hard Harris swallowed that night. He eventually was killed. Based on the witnesses' accounts, he enjoyed no part of it.

But if we're just going to put a fellow like Daryl Mack to sleep, just as the gentle veterinarian put my gray-whiskered golden retriever Nugget to sleep, what's the point?

I say, keep the bastard alive in prison. Give him a cellmate named Bubba and throw away the key.

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