Napoleon's Last Stand

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That evening, Napoleon would become the 270th person to die by lethal injection since that became the preferred method of execution twenty years ago. At the Texas Prison Museum, on the town square, Old Sparky—the fearsome, polished-oak electric chair in which 361 inmates previously perished—still gleams under a spotlight. Back when the executioner used to flip its switch, sending two thousand volts of electricity through a condemned man's body, the town's lights, according to lore, would dim. (The executioner would then reduce the current to five hundred volts, lest the inmate catch on fire.) By comparison, lethal injection is more of an abstraction—a method of killing to which it is easier to become inured. So routine have executions become that the men slated to die on Monday nights in the fall would find their final hours punctuated, incongruously, by the exuberant cheers of inmates during Monday night football. If any of this gives residents pause, they keep it to themselves; Huntsville is a company town, where dissenting opinions about the death penalty are uttered only in confidence. On the day of Napoleon's execution, a Texas Monthly photographer stopped to shoot pictures of a Baptist church sign that read "Thou Shalt Not Kill"; he told the church secretary that he would come back that evening to shoot more. When he returned a few hours later, the sign had been changed to "Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery."

Just after noon Napoleon was put in restraints and taken to the Death House. An hour earlier, the Board of Pardons and Paroles had declined to commute his sentence to life in prison by 10-7, one of the board's closest votes in the past one hundred death penalty cases it had reviewed. By mid-afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court had rejected Napoleon's final appeal, and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had denied his motion for another stay. ("A Texas killer's hopes wane . . ." announced one AM radio news station.) At two-thirty, his attorney, Walter Long, was en route to Huntsville when he received a call that made him return to Austin: A Missouri death row inmate named Christopher Simmons, who had committed murder when he was seventeen and who had filed a petition with the courts that was identical to Napoleon's, arguing that executing youthful offenders violated the Eighth Amendment's provision against cruel and unusual punishment, had received a stay from the Missouri Supreme Court, pending the outcome of a related U.S. Supreme Court case to be decided in June. Back in Austin, Long pointed to the Simmons stay and pleaded with Governor Rick Perry's staff for a thirty-day reprieve, but the governor was unmoved. "To delay his punishment is to delay justice," Perry told reporters.

At 4:36 that afternoon, John Luttig's daughter, Suzanne, strode past reporters and into the Walls, her face pale and drawn. She was flanked by Smith County criminal district attorney Jack Skeen, an assistant DA, and an FBI agent, all wearing dark suits and a grim sense of purpose as they walked together in silence. Suzanne Luttig's brief appearance outside the Walls caused a hush to fall over the assembled reporters, who stopped talking as she passed by in a show of respect. Suzanne was the only member of the Luttig family to attend Napoleon's execution, and she would have no comments for the press afterward. As she waited for six o'clock to arrive, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's spokesman, Larry Fitzgerald, was visiting Napoleon. "I'll remember his demeanor for a long time," says Fitzgerald, who has witnessed more than 170 executions. "Napoleon was nervous but extremely collected. And as always, he was very cooperative and polite." According to tradition, Fitzgerald had to size up the condemned man's mood, then describe it to reporters waiting outside. He told Napoleon that he appeared calm.

"Look again," Napoleon replied with a jittery laugh.

"How about 'pensive'?" Fitzgerald offered.

Napoleon nodded and smiled weakly. "That's good," he said.

At 6:02, five guards came for him. Napoleon walked the ten paces from his cell to the execution chamber, where a "tie-down team" asked him to lie on the gurney. He complied, and they bound him with six thick leather straps. A two-man "IV team" then entered, sliding catheters into both of his forearms. Only then were the witnesses (I was not one) ushered into an adjacent room. Napoleon lay supine, his body rigid. At his head stood the warden, at his feet the chaplain, who rested his hand reassuringly on Napoleon's right leg. "Do you have any final words?" the warden asked. Napoleon turned to his right, where Suzanne Luttig stood behind a sheet of glass, and stared at her for a long time before finally turning away and saying wearily, "No." With that, he closed his eyes. The warden nodded at the executioner behind the two-way mirror, and the lethal $86.08 cocktail was released into Napoleon's veins: sodium thiopental for sedation; pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant that collapses the diaphragm and lungs; and potassium chloride to stop the heart. Napoleon coughed four times and gasped. Then he stirred no more. Several minutes later, after a doctor confirmed that he had no heartbeat, the chaplain pulled a white sheet over his face. The time was 6:17 p.m.

Outside, prison spokesperson Michelle Lyons announced the time of death and answered questions. With tight deadlines to meet, there was little time for the reporters to reflect. "Boy, that's the highest audio I've had in a long time," said one cameraman after the press conference ended. "Basically you don't want the package—you want the quick update?" a reporter said into her cell phone. "Okay, but I think you should cut at least thirty seconds of tape so we can see the guy we're talking about." Another reporter applied lipstick, then laughed at a private joke with her cameraman. Few stopped to read the sheet of paper we had been handed.

"The act I committed to put me here was not just heinous, it was senseless," Napoleon's final statement began. "But the person that committed that act is no longer here—I am. I'm not going to struggle physically against any restraints. I'm not going to shout, use profanity, or make idle threats. Understand, though, that I'm not only upset, but I'm saddened by what is happening here tonight . . . Tonight, we tell our children that in some instances, in some cases, killing is right." The statement continued, "I'm sorry that I am here. I'm sorry that you all are here. I'm sorry that John Luttig died. And I'm sorry that it was something in me that caused all of this to happen." In closing, he wrote, "No one wins tonight. No one gets closure. No one walks away victorious."

AS JOURNALISTS, we are supposed to remain detached from the stories we cover, no matter how difficult the subject. And so I went through the motions that Tuesday evening in May after Napoleon was pronounced dead, asking prison officials questions and jotting down notes, then meeting with the magazine's photographer for dinner. We both avoided talking about the execution, an absurd attempt to pretend this was just another story. It was only early the next morning, after waking from an awful dream I could not remember, that I let myself cry. I wondered what Suzanne Luttig had felt the night before—fury, terror, or an emotion that has no easy label—as her father's killer stared at her, wordlessly, from the gurney. I hoped the execution had brought her and her family some measure of solace, but I doubted it had, for John Luttig was still dead. The execution had succeeded in leaving behind another grieving family. The Beazleys, who had come to death row every Saturday for seven years to see their eldest son—to look at him through the plastic partition that divided them, to weep and talk and pray with him, and to wonder again and again where they, as parents, had erred—now had to pick out the suit and casket in which he would be buried.

That morning, I went to the Café Texan to get a cup of coffee. A cheerful waitress greeted me, then turned to one of the cafe's regulars, a weathered old man in blue jeans with a creased face, who settled onto one of the red Naugahyde stools.

"Morning, Cooter," the waitress said, pouring his coffee. "How you doing?"

"Good, good," the old man said. "Got a case of the sniffles, that's all."