Held to answer

Hunter S. Thompson wasn’t on Death Row, so he had to take matters into his own hands.

No attorneys, no media circus. Just a gun and a suicide note entitled “Football Season Is Over.”

Thompson’s last words: “No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun – for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax – This won’t hurt.”

Gary Haugen, the Oregon Death Row inmate who has finally won the right to be executed, can now set about planning his last words. He won’t need a PR firm to publicize them. He’s got the media.

Reporters love Death Row stories. A muscle-necked bully like Haugen, who demands to be executed and screams at his attorneys, is easy entertainment. Plus, there’s always built-in conflict between the pro- and anti-death penalty sides.

Aside from all that, the person to be executed – or any convicted murderer for that matter – has a huge advantage over his dead victim: He’s alive. He has eyes that can look back at you. Spend a few minutes with a convicted murderer, and you will inevitably connect with him human-to-human. Just a simple “How’s it going?” leads to eye contact.

When I was a newspaper reporter in Southern California and had occasion to interview killers, at some point we would exchange smiles. Men behind bars have a lot of time to contemplate human nature. They know the power of making someone smile or laugh. A murderer who can make you smile or laugh can make you feel his humanity. He can make you care.

A murderer’s victims are dead. They aren’t going to look anybody in the eye or exchange small talk. And with all due respect to Alice Sebold, their bones are not lovely.

The gory details of their deaths can be so disturbing that to reveal them in court could be “prejudicial.”

Newspaper readers, NPR listeners or TV viewers might find these details  offensive: “The following material may be objectionable to some.” Even then the truth is sanitized. Reporters fall back on that tired word “horrific” as if that takes care of it. They hint at details they cannot share out of “respect” for the victim, as if that will make the truth go away.

A murder victim’s story can never be entirely known. Sometimes all that’s available are crime scene reconstruction and the clinical analysis of an autopsy protocol. When the media report the last meal of an executed man, how often do they quote from the autopsy revealing the contents of his victim’s stomach at the time of death?

Allowing the murderer to speak on behalf of the victim is a final insult, but it happens. Reporters have let Haugen claim he killed Mary Archer, his ex-girlfriend’s mother, because she wanted her daughter to have an abortion. Is that why he also raped Archer before he beat her to death with a hammer?

Haugen was doing life with the possibility of parole for her rape and murder when he and another prisoner killed a fellow inmate named David Polin, leaving him with more than 80 stab wounds and a crushed skull. (They thought Polin was snitching about their drug use.)

“OPB News reporter, Kristian Foden-Vencil, was able to talk to Haugen multiple times on the phone and in person at the Oregon State Penitentiary. Today we learn about the process he went through in order to speak with a Death Row inmate, and just what Haugen said.”

That was the eager introduction on OPB’s “Think Out Loud.” Listeners could hear Haugen’s actual voice in a taped interview! Haugen apparently bonded with Foden-Vencil over the reporter’s Nordic ancestry (Haugen’s love for the Norse god Odin has been dutifully reported before. What gets less attention is the link between Odinists and the Aryan Brotherhood.)

Archer and Polin aren’t going to be interviewed on “Think Out Loud.” No one is going to ask Archer, “When Gary was raping you, did you think he was probably going to kill you, too? … What’s it like getting beaten to death? … How long does something like that take?”

No one is going to ask Polin: “Wow. More than 80 stab wounds? What was going through your mind? How did it feel?”

Besides the media, the usual academic types have also climbed on board Haugen’s bandwagon. Emily Plec, a professor of communications studies at Western Oregon University, has visited Haugen in prison and wants Gov. John Kitzhaber to spare his life.

What Plec really wants is her goodness recognized. Instead of visiting Haugen, she could have visited any of the forgotten men and women ailing on all the various death rows for people who can’t afford a golden retirement or private insurance. Where’s the glory in that? No news photos, no quotes in the newspaper. And some of those places smell worse than a prison.

Haugen doesn’t want to die so much as he wants to return to the general prison population (“Living and Rotting on Death Row”). In the general population, there are more drugs, more freedom and better opportunities to take advantage of weaker inmates. In the general population, he can strut like a Norse god.

“I believe Gary is volunteering for execution because he cannot imagine spending the rest of his life, much less his impending 50th birthday, on death row,” Plec wrote in her letter to Kitzhaber.

Hunter Thompson could relate. He hated growing old, too.

“Suck it up,” Thompson might tell Haugen. “No more games. You’re always bitching. You are getting greedy for attention. Act your age. Relax, this won’t hurt.”

— Pamela Fitzsimmons