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Jolly Ranchers | Nov 03 2001

What the fuck is this doing online? Does the public really need to know the final meal requests of the last 253 death row inmates to be executed by the state of Texas?

I’ve always been one for public access to information, the more the merrier, but why is Texas putting this stuff online? To show that they’ve nothing to hide? To show that they keep accurate statistics? To show that a man murdered by the state is something less than a man and therefore undeserving of privacy.

Admittedly, as much as this disgusts me, it’s also mesmerizing, and in a way that only real things can be mesmerizing – real things, that is, which are equal parts lurid and banal. Clicking on an inmate’s name brings you to a page evidently scanned from his death row file (produced here as single, enormous image; a bad way of doing this). These pages (many of which are poorly three-hole punched, the little holes often breaking the edge of page) contain identifying information, a pair of mug shots, and a summary of the crime. As one might expect, these summaries are horrifying, to various degrees, the horror enhanced by the dry as dirt language. An example:

Convicted in connection with the deaths of sisters Grace Purnhagen, 16, and Tiffany Purnhagen, 9, in south Montgomery County. The bodies of the two girls were found along a pipeline in the Imperial Oaks subdivision on Rayford Road. Grace’s throat had been slashed and she had been sexually assaulted with an object later found to have been a beer bottle. Tiffany had been strangled with a rope found around her neck. Grace’s former boyfriend, Delton Dowthitt, then age 16, confessed to killing both girls following his arrest in Lousiana four days later. He later recanted, saying he killed Tiffany at the order of his father, who he said had actually killed and sexually assaulted Grace. Delton led police to where his father had disposed of the knife. Police also found a bloody bottle and rope at Dowthitt’s auto sales business in Humble.

Elsewhere on the site you can access gender and racial statistics, final meal requests, and other handy death row facts. I learned a lot about lethal injections, the current execution method employed by Texas (previous to 1977, the state used electrocution, and before that, from 1819 to 1923, hanging). To quote directly from the site, a lethal injection consists of the following:

“The offender is usually pronounced dead,” they report, “approximately seven minutes after the lethal injection begins. Cost per execution for drugs used: $86.08.”

$86.08 for the drugs. Thank you, Texas. Elsewhere we learn that the cost per day per offender is $53.15 and that the average time on death row prior to execution is 10.58 years.

If I remember Foucault correctly, he said that public torture served to restore the state’s sovereignty (which had been violated by the offense) by displaying infinite force on the body of the prisoner. Here we’re dealing not with force but disclosure, or rather the force of disclosure. Since we no longer witness executions (although Texas now allows a victim’s close relatives and friends to watch his or her killer die), all we’re left with is the paper work. Well, that and a strange USA Today-like affection for factoids:

And then there’s Mike Graczyk of the Associated Press, a man who has made a career out of watching people die, having witnessed 234 out of 253 Texas executions since 1982. I know what you’re wondering: “Where was Mike for the other 19?” I’m wondering this as well. We may wonder forever.

But we don’t have to wonder what Mike will be doing on November 14, because that’s when the state of Texas is scheduled to execute 41-year-old Jeffrey Tucker of Parker County, convicted in the July 1988 robbery and murder of 65-year-old Wilton B. Humphreys of Granbury. There is no indication of what Tucker has requested for his final meal, but we know that the previous inmate executed, Gerald Mitchell of Harris County, requested a bag of assorted Jolly Ranchers.

Sadly, Odell Barnes, Jr. of Wichita County, executed on March 1, 2000, never received his final meal. How do I know this? Because he requested justice, equality, and world peace.