Anatomy of an Execution (Review)

ANATOMY OF AN EXECUTION

The Life and Death of Douglas Christopher Thomas

By Todd C. Peppers and Laura Trevvett Anderson

Northeastern University Press

By Colman McCarthy

In a March 1, 2005 5-4 opinion delivered by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Supreme Court ruled that executing minors convicted of capital murder was “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. In Roper v. Simmons, Kennedy argued that citizens under 18 are less culpable than adult murderers: “Their own vulnerability and comparative lack of control over their immediate surroundings means juveniles have a greater claim than adults to be forgiven for failing to escape negative influences in their whole environment.” (p. 247)

Translation from legalese to lingo: screwing up, messing up and getting mixed up happens when you are under 18.

Roper v. Simmons came too late for the 22 juvenile offenders killed in the mostly southern death-belt states since the court’s reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976. Among them was Douglas Christopher Thomas, drugged to death on January 10, 2000 in Virginia’s Greensville Correctional Center for the November 10, 1990 homicide of his 14-year-old girl friend’s parents in their Middlesex County, Va., bedroom.

If anyone epitomized Justice Kennedy’s belief in mercy for those “failing to escape negative influences” in his life it was Thomas. Abandoned at separate times by both an ineffectual mother and a no-account father, he was legally adopted in early childhood by loving grandparents. Eleven years old when they died months apart, Thomas, unmoored, was described by a school psychologist as “seriously emotionally disturbed.” (p. 13)

Among those attempting to rescue the boy--in 9th grade and soon after he was drinking alcohol, smoking pot, pilfering, breaking into houses, skipping school and earning dismal grades--was Laura Trevvet Anderson. She was Thomas’s special education teacher at Clover Hill High School, Midlothian, Va. Through thick and thick--forget about the thin--Anderson’s friendship would last until Thomas’s final moments of life in the Greensville death chamber. What she has co-authored with Todd C. Peppers, a professor at Roanoke College and a lecturer at the Washington and Lee University School of Law, is an encompassing and often soulful account of a brief life of a person who was both victimizer and victim, a person both friendless and befriended.

No sentimentalizing is to be found in these pages of well-documented and carefully crafted prose. “We do not argue,” the authors write, “that Chris Thomas was so overcome with forces beyond his control that he was not morally responsible for the terrible criminal acts in which he participated. At a basic level, Chris’s choice to partake in a plot to kill Jessica Wiseman’s parents was the product of free will and self-interest.” (p. 21) His decision to kill “was the product of rational choice.” (p. 21).

Convicted of capital murder--a jury verdict that surprised the prosecutor--Thomas would be entombed eight years in the world of mental illness, cruelty and subdued chaos that is death row. In chapter 5, “Life on the Row,” the authors describe the work of Marie Deans, a prisoners’ rights advocate who founded the Virginia Coalition on Jails and Prisons in 1981 and later the Virginia Mitigation Project. For nearly three decades, she has been the firewall between prosecutors hellbent for executions and impoverished inmates whose death sentences she saw as arbitrary, baseless and inhumane. Deans, who deserves a biography of her own, brings to both the pre-conviction and post-conviction parts of a murder trial evidence in the defendant’s background that would mitigate against a death sentence. Her success rate is astonishing: in the first 20 years of mitigation work in more than 200 capital trials, only two defendants received death.

Thomas might be alive today had his trial lawyers accepted Deans’ pro-bono offer to be a mitigation expert. They declined. Recalling her many prison interviews with Thomas--appeals lawyers brought her in--Deans told the authors: “I did feel motherly toward Chris. People think I feel motherly toward all the men [on the row] and that’s not true. Some of those men I didn’t really like, much less be their mother. I did feel motherly to him. I couldn’t help that with Chris. He was my son’s age. He was just a kid.” (p. 169).

As a major addition to death penalty literature, what Peppers and Anderson tell about one inmate in one state in one cell block could easily be the story of any of the 3,000 people now stashed on the nation’s death rows. The story of Chris Thomas is unique only because two educators chose not to let it be forgotten that he was a human being.

They saw him as more than his crime.

Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace.