The Long Goodbye 
Death Letters
In 1990, Charles Dean Hood was convicted of murder and sentenced to die. Twelve years later he began writing to senior editor Michael Hall. Here, in three of his letters, he describes in extraordinary detail his two decades spent awaiting execution and reveals what it’s like to be taken to Huntsville for the lethal injection only to receive a stay at the last possible minute—not once, but twice.
Yvette Holden says: I think it is disgusting officers stood round celebrating the fact they are about to kill someone! What because they dress it up and call it justice its ok to act in this manner. When you read in court trials the murder took great pleasure he’s a sadistic killer I don’t see why these people in uniforms are any different. This man claims to be innocent so why would he say sorry if he is innocent he’s another victim and if he’s proved innocent how many ’sorry’ will he get? (August 24th, 2009 at 10:35am)
Related Stories
(Page 6 of 6)
26 Hood’s numbers are incorrect. Between 1977 and 1999 there were five death row suicides at the Ellis Unit. At Polunsky, there have been five more, including two this year. Since the beginning of 2000, there have been 216 suicides in the entire Texas prison system, which currently holds 157,000 inmates at 109 units.
27 The ingenuity of doomed, isolated men is pretty much unlimited. To send messages or packages, they pull threads from their sheets or clothes and weave them together to create a fishing line. They weight one end with a paper clip or some other object and throw it down the run.
28 In September 2007 the Supreme Court put a de facto moratorium on executions while it considered the constitutionality of lethal injections. For eight months, there were no executions anywhere in the United States. Then, this past April, the court approved the lethal injection protocol used in Kentucky. Subsequently, the Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) ruled that the Texas protocol did not differ significantly from the Kentucky method, and the state began rescheduling executions. Hood’s was to be the third.
29 KDOL is a radio station in Livingston that airs a special program from seven to nine p.m. on the eve of an inmate’s execution, during which the host, Pastor Sylvia Joplin, plays the inmate’s song requests and reads messages from his family and friends. The weak signal does not travel far, but prisoners at Polunsky with transistor radios have no trouble picking it up. In 2005 and again this past June, Hood submitted the following playlist: Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band (“Against the Wind,” “Main Street,” “Beautiful Loser,” “Old Time Rock & Roll,” “You’ll Accomp’ny Me,” “Still the Same,” “The Fire Inside,” “Hollywood Nights,” “Night Moves”), .38 Special (“Rockin’ Into the Night,” “Hold on Loosely,” “Fantasy Girl,” “Caught Up in You”), Meat Loaf (“Bat Out of Hell”), Foreigner (“Dirty White Boy”), Guns N’ Roses (“November Rain”), Bruce Springsteen (“Born in the USA,” “Hungry Heart”), Eddie Money (“I Wanna Go Back”), and MercyMe (“I Can Only Imagine”).
30 Hood’s hopes were pinned to the petition filed on June 12 containing the Goeller affidavit. But two days after this letter was sent, on June 16, the CCA turned this petition down, saying the new information didn’t meet the filing requirements.
31 Hood has one brother, James; one sister, Cheryll; and six stepsisters and stepbrothers. He and his siblings grew up in Indiana, South Carolina, and Florida. His parents, Charles and Sandra, came to Texas for his previous execution date, in 2005, but are ailing and could not make the trip on June 17.
32 Until they were transferred to the Ellis Unit in 1965, death row inmates were housed at the Huntsville Unit, known to most people as “the Walls,” for the 32-foot-high redbrick walls that surround the prison. Even after death row moved away, however, executions continued to be carried out in Huntsville, meaning that every condemned inmate has to take a final trip to the Walls. It is a scenic drive. Starting in Livingston, the van goes through Onalaska, over Lake Livingston, past Point Blank, and through the piney woods of the Sam Houston National Forest before arriving at the death house.
33 Prisoners awaiting execution are held in a small cell within a larger room that is adjacent to the chamber in which the lethal injection is administered. The door to this chamber is fifteen feet away from the cell. According to Hood, whenever the door was opened, a “big blue light” spilled into the room. While waiting, prisoners are allowed to make collect calls.
34 The Hospitality House is a privately funded guesthouse in Huntsville built to host convicts’ families. Victims’ families usually congregate in a room inside the Walls Unit. There to witness Hood’s execution were Ron Williamson’s son, Roger, who is in a wheelchair because of cerebral palsy; Roger’s nurse and assistant, Debbie Locke; Williamson’s ex-wife, Eva Williamson; a friend of Eva’s named William Thomas Riley; and Julie Anne Wallace, Tracie Lynn Wallace’s sister. James Hood was the only member of Hood’s family on his witness list.
35 For their last meals, prisoners are allowed to request anything that could normally be prepared in the prison kitchen. Popular items include cheeseburgers, french fries, and ice cream. For her last meal, Karla Faye Tucker, who was executed in 1998, ordered a banana, a peach, and a garden salad with ranch dressing—but never ate it. Kenneth McDuff ordered two 16-ounce steaks, eggs, fries, vegetables, and coconut pie. Like Hood, he was served Salisbury steak, the only kind of steak served at Huntsville.
36 Hood has two main attorneys, Richard Ellis, who works pro bono out of his San Francisco law firm, and Greg Wiercioch, another San Francisco lawyer, who works for the nonprofit Texas Defender Service. All death row inmates get court-appointed appellate attorneys, but the lucky ones, like Hood, attract the attention of high-quality death row legal representation willing to work for little or no pay.
37 The day before, Hood’s team had filed three claims with the U.S. Supreme Court to try to stop the execution. Now, in mid-afternoon, Wiercioch filed a motion in the 296th District Court of Collin County, the court in which Hood’s case was originally prosecuted, to compel the district attorney’s office to disclose any information that would confirm the reports of a relationship between Judge Holland and DA O’Connell. However, due to a strange (and, for Hood, beneficial) set of circumstances, Wiercioch’s motion wound up in the 219th District Court. Since the current judge in the 296th, John Roach Jr., is the son of the Collin County district attorney, John Roach, all criminal cases in Collin County are now referred to other district courts as a matter of policy. Wiercioch’s motion was referred to Judge Curt Henderson, who had signed the death warrant in May. Judge Henderson set up a telephone hearing at 3:50 p.m. Two prosecutors were also present on the call. It ended at 4:05 p.m. with Henderson’s announcing he was indeed recalling the warrant—and then recusing himself from the case. Henderson gave no explanation, but he later told Wiercioch that he knew all about the rumors of an affair, since, like Matthew Goeller, he had also served under O’Connell as an assistant district attorney.
38 Prosecutors had immediately appealed to the CCA, saying Judge Henderson had overstepped his authority, but because Henderson had recused himself, there was initially nothing the court could do. In essence the judge had canceled the execution and closed up shop. The prosecutors’ next move was to ask the CCA to order John Ovard, a regional supervisory judge, to reinstate the warrant. At around 9 p.m. the CCA complied, and shortly after that Ovard signed the order. Once he had done so, the only thing keeping Hood alive were his three claims before the Supreme Court.
39 Ellis says that he attempted to keep in close touch with the warden throughout the evening, but since he did not have the warden’s cell phone number, he usually had to settle for leaving a message with his secretary. “I called the warden eight or nine times after six p.m.,” he told me, “to make sure he knew ‘this is pending, that is pending.’”
40 A few minutes after 11 p.m., the high court turned Hood down. At 11:17 p.m. Wiercioch e-filed a last-ditch motion with the CCA to reconsider the ruling on the judicial bias claim.
41 At this very moment, in a room adjoining the death chamber, James Hood sat with reporters, guards, and others, nervously waiting. Next door to that room, Roger Williamson, Debbie Locke, Eva Williamson, William Thomas Riley, and Julie Anne Wallace waited in another room. Counting prison and TDCJ officials, 33 people were on hand to see Hood die.
42 Wiercioch’s final appeal to the CCA likely saved Hood’s life. A condemned inmate can’t be taken out of the holding cell and strapped onto the gurney until all pending claims have been cleared. Wiercioch’s appeal was filed at 11:17 p.m. The CCA denied the appeal at 11:46, but by then it made no difference. In fact, the execution had been called off nearly ten minutes earlier, at 11:37 p.m. TDCJ officials had simply run out of time. It takes more than 23 minutes to take the prisoner from the holding cell, fasten him to the gurney with eight leather straps, find veins in his arms, insert the IVs, bring in the witnesses, let the prisoner say his final words, and administer the sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride, which will sedate him, collapse his lungs, and finally stop his heart. TDCJ public information officer Michelle Lyons explained, “It was determined that there was not enough time for prison officials to follow the proper protocol prior to the warrant expiring.”
My Library
