Ronnie Was Put To Death For A Crime He Committed As A Minor

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July 26, 2010 | 06:04 PM

Hiding From the Death Penalty
Craig Haney

Last month, Utah prison officials took a death row prisoner named Ronnie
Gardner to a specially designed room, strapped him tightly into a chair, and
draped a black hood over his head. By a prearranged signal, a group of five
volunteer executioners aimed their Winchester rifles at a target placed over
his heart, and opened fire.

I met Ronnie Gardner more than 10 years ago, when his appellate attorneys
asked me to analyze his background or "social history" to see whether the
early trauma and abuse that he had suffered helped explain the tumultuous path
his life had taken, and to form an opinion about whether that kind of analysis
should have been presented in his capital trial. This past June, I testified
during a clemency hearing on his behalf. Our efforts were rebuffed, and
Ronnie's request for clemency was denied. A few days later, the state of Utah
killed him.

Twenty-eight people were put to death in the United States this year, before
Ronnie Gardner's execution. Aside from the method by which it was carried out,
his was unlikely to have drawn much public or media interest. But Ronnie's
case garnered international attention when his words -- "the firing squad,
please" -- spoken at a court proceeding in April, brought the true nature of
capital punishment back into clear focus. For a short time, those words and
the event they foreshadowed forced death penalty supporters and opponents
alike to reflect on what it truly means for the state to take the life of one
of its citizens.

Ronnie Gardner's choice to die by firing squad pierced what Albert Camus
called the "padded words" with which we have smothered and hidden capital
punishment in our society, preventing us from seeing clearly what it "really
is" and honestly debating its legitimacy. "The firing squad, please," came as
close as humanly possible to showing the nation, and the world, what Camus
described as "the machine" of the death penalty, making us "touch the wood and
steel" of it.

The truth is that many of the ugly realities of capital punishment are still
covered up in our society, described with euphemisms that make the death
penalty seem deceptively palatable. We understandably focus on the terrible
crimes that capital defendants have committed, but we refuse to examine the
origins of their violence. Thus, we are still a nation that largely ignores
the plight of desperately poor children, does little to alleviate the
suffering of those who are traumatized by neglect and abuse, and turns a blind
eye toward underfunded, incompetent, and sometimes callously cruel juvenile
institutions that frequently do more harm than good to troubled and vulnerable
young people. Instead, we rise up in indignation when one of these profoundly
poor, chronically ignored, and badly mistreated children grow up to become, as
Ronnie Gardner described himself, a "nasty little bugger," only then paying
much attention, with many clamoring for the death penalty to be imposed.

Although this part of his story got comparatively little media attention,
Ronnie Gardner lived exactly the same kind of life that many capital
defendants have, one filled with precisely the sort of turmoil, trauma, and
tragedy that we now know leads to extreme forms of violence. He was exposed to
virtually every form of child maltreatment there is -- including abject
poverty, profound neglect, and emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. The
state of Utah did little or nothing to prevent this maltreatment, and mostly
exacerbated its mounting effects. When the cruelty, criminality, and
institutional mistreatment to which he was subjected finally took their toll,
Ronnie began to express his anger and pain outwardly, using aggression to keep
a hostile world at bay.

By then, Utah authorities had thrown up their hands, claiming they had no
alternative. They put Ronnie in adult prison, although he was still a
teenager. With no help forthcoming from correctional staff and facing dangers
from much older and stronger prisoners, Ronnie's problems only worsened. He
was eventually sentenced to death for the 1985 murder of attorney Michael
Burdell, whom Ronnie shot and killed during a courthouse escape attempt.

In theory, the jury that decided Ronnie Gardner's fate in his capital trial
was supposed to hear the story of his life, presented as comprehensively as
possible, and to take it into account in choosing between life and death.
After all, as we are often told, our legal system goes to great lengths and
spares no expense to insure that only the truly deserving are condemned to
death. Our courts use padded words -- terms like "super due process" and
"death is different jurisprudence" -- to describe these procedures, ones that
death penalty proponents claim are so elaborate, careful, and time consuming
that, if anything, they provide these worst criminals with "too much justice."

In fact, however, as is still true in far too many capital trials, Ronnie
Gardner's legal defense was shockingly inadequate. His original lawyers badly
botched the only part of his 1985 capital trial that really mattered -- the
portion where they were supposed to explain the meaning and significance of
their client's troubled life in order to mitigate his punishment. They
proceeded haphazardly and incompetently, with no coherent strategy to save him
from the death penalty. They called only a handful of ill-prepared witnesses
and never bothered to place his criminal behavior in the larger context of the
trauma he had suffered earlier. Ronnie Gardner's jury was never given a
meaningful chance to weigh the horrible details of his life against the awful
things he had done. The scales of justice, in this case and many others like
it, were never remotely balanced. Indeed, just a few weeks before Ronnie was
executed, several of his original jurors came forward to say that if they had
known about the horrible upbringing that his trial lawyers' incompetence had
kept hidden from them, or if they had been given the option of sentencing him
to life without parole, they would never have voted in favor of the death
penalty. But it was far too late to make any difference.

Ronnie Gardner's case was painfully instructive about another aspect of the
death penalty that our society labors mightily to keep hidden. The term
"lethal injection" describes the execution process now in widespread use in
most parts of the United States, a method we have been reassured allows
state-sanctioned killings to be carried out "humanely." It is a bland,
denatured term, one that conjures the image of an antiseptic, medical
procedure more than anything else. In this way, of course, the padded words
with which we cloak the process -- "lethal injection" -- brilliantly belie the
violent outcome it is designed to bring about. This seems to explain why the
Gardner execution drew so much media attention and pubic interest. After all,
why would someone reject an obviously more humane procedure in favor of one
that seemed so brutal, even barbaric?

In fact, Ronnie had carefully read the Utah "lethal injection" procedure, one
very similar to those in use in many other states, and it terrified him. He
did not trust the procedure and feared it could not be carried out correctly.
He worried that he would be left lying motionless on a prison gurney --
literally paralyzed -- and publicly put on display for a prolonged, perhaps
unbearably long period of time, possibly in excruciating pain, but unable to
move or express any feeling, as a group of strangers watched him slowly but
imperceptibly die. For him, the firing squad seemed far less inhumane,
degrading, and cruel. For those who witnessed the event, of course, and for
others who stopped to contemplate what actually happened, it was another
matter entirely.

And this seems to underscore the primary -- perhaps only -- advantage that
lethal injections have over more seemingly primitive ways for the state to
kill: their ability to hide the ugly truth of what we are actually doing. Yet,
for a brief moment last month, the spectacle of a firing squad shooting to
death a strapped down, hooded man in Utah reminded us of what the death
penalty is really about.
- - - - -
Craig Haney, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa
Cruz, is a leading expert on capital punishment and the author of Death by
Design.

/ / / / /
Steve Hall
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512.627.3011 (m
Skype: shall78711
@steve_hall
@standdown_tx
shall@standdown. org
www.StandDown. org