The following day, a newspaper headline read, "Chaplain Holds Inmate Down While He Dies." Word of this spread quickly along death row. What went unmentioned was that the chaplain involved was not Carroll Pickett but a fellow minister substituting for him.
"While I was asked by almost every prisoner I met, I never shared my thoughts on the death penalty. My response was always that how I felt had nothing to do with why I was there or what was about to happen.
Mark Graham
The Reverend Carroll Pickett at the headstone of James David Autry, one of 95 inmates whose last moments were spent with Pickett.
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"My feeling about capital punishment had absolutely nothing to do with the person I was there to help. I'd tell them that I wasn't the judge or jury, that I didn't make the law. Nor was I there to enforce the law. That was not my business. I wanted them to know that it made no difference how I felt about capital punishment or the court system or death by lethal injection, because I had absolutely no control over those things."
And so, none of the 95 men the chaplain walked to their death ever knew that he embraced the definition of their fate fashioned by Nightline host Ted Koppel. "He came down and did one of his shows on an execution," Pickett remembers, "and at some point referred to what we were doing as "sterilized killing.' It's the best description I've ever heard."
Yet for years he made the most of a situation with which he spiritually struggled. "I came away from the experience," he admits, "with far more questions than answers."
The executions of men whose crimes had been committed years earlier when they were only teenagers, he admits, troubled him most. "I would find myself thinking back to my own teenage years and saying to myself, "There but for the grace of God' I've talked with men who were as gentle as anyone I've ever met, people who knew they had done a terrible wrong and were genuinely remorseful, people I'd have been comfortable with if they visited in my home. Yet for one terrible mistake" With that his voice trails off. The law as written, he concedes, offers no possibility of redemption for such men, no differentiation between them and the hardened career criminal.
And there were those he viewed as too intellectually challenged to grasp the severity of their situation as they faced death. "For [Governor George] Bush to say that the state of Texas has never executed a mentally retarded person is just not true," he says. "I've been there; I've talked with them."
During the course of his work for the prison, did he meet and counsel any prisoners whom he felt had been wrongfully convicted? "Yes, I was convinced that some of them did not commit the crimes for which they died." To be more specific, he says, would uselessly reopen old wounds suffered by family members.
In retirement, Pickett has distanced himself from the prison and the death house. These days he sleeps better, smiles more often and enjoys life with his wife, Jane, whom he married ten years ago. But he has the memories and the answerless questions about a legal system bent on demanding a life for a life. And one promise he continues to keep to the man who first persuaded him into the job.
"When Estelle retired and moved out to California," he says, "he asked that I do something for him."
In honor of that favor, Carroll Pickett dutifully visits the local cemetery on the anniversary of the 1974 deaths of prison librarians Elizabeth Beseda and Julia Standley.
There, at Estelle's request, he places a single red rose on each of their graves.
