By Bill Stamets
Special to The Chicago Sun-Times
‘AT THE DEATH HOUSE DOOR’
Killings in the workplace take a toll on witnesses. Shootings in offices, factories, malls and schools have necessitated a new work force: counselors to handle the shock, grief and guilt felt by survivors.
But what if you witness death for a living? From 1982 to 1995, the Rev. Carroll Pickett was paid by the State of Texas to watch 95 people die by lethal injection. He spent up to 18 hours with each one -- their very last hours -- offering company and counsel. Then the State of Texas put them to death, usually just after midnight, and Pickett drove home.
What does a death house chaplain do with what he witnesses? Pickett unburdened his shock and grief into a tape recorder. Guilt came later. That’s after he sensed that some of the deceased were innocent.
The retired Huntsville minister recently unburdened himself into the microphone and lens of Chicago filmmakers Steve James and Peter Gilbert. Their astute documentary “At the Death House Door” draws from Pickett’s archive of cassettes. We see his adult children hear of its existence for the first time.
The film maps a calling that placed Pickett in a moral line of fire. “Even to this day I don’t understand how I got where I am,” he states in a voiceover. “I never intended to do 95 [executions]. In fact, I didn’t intend to do one. But it happened.”
The first step came in 1974 when inmates took civilians hostage for 11 days. The warden asked Pickett to help families on the outside. Two members of Pickett’s church, who also were close friends, were killed by inmates. Pickett became the prison chaplain and later witnessed the execution of one of the hostage killers. That death didn’t bother him much, but another one did.
Pickett recalls 27-year-old Carlos De Luna telling him: “I never had a daddy. You are like my daddy should’ve been. Can I call you Daddy when I die?” Pickett said OK, but that execution went wrong. What usually took a few seconds took 11 minutes. Locked onto Pickett’s eyes, De Luna couldn’t talk. After he died, Pickett stayed.
“I reached over and grabbed and took him by the right hand and just held him,” Pickett says. “Just held his right hand with both hands. And I thought maybe I could make it up to him by holding onto his hand as long as possible. And I held onto it until finally I decided it was over.”
An investigation by Chicago Tribune reporters strongly implied De Luna was innocent. Pickett believed he was. Formerly in favor of capital punishment, the Presbyterian minister addresses a Death Penalty Awareness Week event at DePaul University. At another gathering, he recounts De Luna’s inhumane death and simply says: “That’s not, to me, either Christian, or American, or Texan.”
James and Gilbert are alert, caring witnesses, from “Hoop Dreams” (1994) to “Stevie” (2003). They depart, though, from recent documentaries about Death Row issues, such as “Deadline,” “The Trials of Darryl Hunt” and “After Innocence.”
“At the Death House Door” is closer to “Shake Hands With the Devil.” There, director Peter Raymont portrayed Canadian Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, who was overwhelmed by death during his United Nations mission in Rwanda. Although the scale and setting differ from Pickett’s experience, both felt a duty to bear witness.
James and Gilbert best visualize 95 deaths in Texas when the camera inventories Pickett’s neatly filed cases of 95 tapes. Another vista is a field of cement crosses, each marked with an “X” for executed. This is where most of the 95 inmates are interred. The last shot is pitiable monument to the 400th execution in Texas: three or four garbage bags of his personal effects dumped on a curb outside the death house.
Bill Stamets is a locally based free-lance writer and critic.