He Calls Me by Lightning

by S Jonathan Bass

  By the 1930s and 1940s, electrocutions in Alabama soon became so routine, as one Kilby warden recalled, that it was just part of a “good day’s work” to pull the switch and send a lightning strike into a prisoner’s body. With “neatness and dispatch,” a trained crew of prison officials administered Alabama justice with quick efficiency. “A five-year-old child could pull the switch,” a Kilby official believed. The switch started a generator, which built up power until it sent the two shocks—ninety seconds apart—into the condemned man. “Unconsciousness comes in the flicker of an eye,” warden Frank Boswell said, “and death in a flash.”

  State law mandated that the Kilby warden (or his appointed representative) turn on the electrical current at exactly 12:01 a.m. on Fridays. On February 9, 1934, Boswell and his crew electrocuted five black men—Bennie Foster, John Thompson, Harie White, Ernest Waller, and Solomon Roper—all within thirty minutes. In 1936, the chair saw its most yearly activity, with seventeen individuals meeting death. Kilby’s warden, wrote one newspaper reporter, “has known sorrow, pity, regret, horror, spent wakeful nights over his job, but through it all has felt that it was a good job well done and that justice has been carried out for the good of humanity.”

  Year after year, men, and a few women, took the final thirteen steps from the holding cell (what prison officials called the Bible Room), through a small green door, and into a cramped gray room where the electric chair waited. The tiny death parade—the “ghostly train,” as one writer described it—moved slowly along the narrow corridor with the prisoner flanked by the prison chaplain and often a Salvation Army captain. Arm in arm, the three repeated the Twenty-third Psalm (“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil”) as they inched closer to the green door. When the door to the “room of no return” opened, most prisoners closed their eyes to avoid gazing upon the instrument of their death. “I’ve never seen one who didn’t,” remembered a Kilby guard. The guards inside the chamber led the prisoner into the arms of the death chair.

  Most accepted the inevitability of the end and remained calm and composed. “It’s amazing how well the majority of the condemned people take it,” one warden said. “Most of them want to go braver than the one before him.” When the guards stepped clear, the room grew quiet. The chaplain often repeated Psalm 23. Many times, the prisoner repeated the words or moved his lips in silent recitation. As the guards began attaching the electrodes, sometimes either the prisoner, the chaplain, or both, said a brief prayer.

  During the 1930s and 1940s, warden Frank Boswell trusted no one but himself to handle the sponges—if they were too dry, then not enough current passed through the body; too wet, and the current burned the muscles. “So I stay in front, dampen my own sponges, and carefully superintend the strapping of the condemned in the chair,” Boswell once said.

  With the sponge work and the wiring completed, the warden then asked if the condemned prisoner had any last words. Most did not. A few gave final statements. “I believe the Lord hath forgiven all of my sins,” declared Clarence Hardy before his death in 1942. “I ask all the people to forgive me. I am satisfied of going to heaven and hope that all of you people will meet me there.” Some condemned men were never repentant. Elbert J. Burns, who was strapped in the chair four years after Hardy, told all present that he hoped “everyone who had anything to do with executing me goes to hell.” With his last words, a black hood was draped over his head. One newspaper reporter remembered that, when the guards covered the prisoner’s face, he seemed to no longer be a human being: “He looked like an animal with that thing over his head.” With everything connected, a prison official then picked up a wooden paddle with “Ready” carved on one side and held it up to the small glass window between the death chamber and the control room. Unless a last-second reprieve from the governor or a higher court arrived to spare the prisoner’s life, all options had run out. Someone threw the switch.

  IN NOVEMBER 1959, Caliph Washington and the rest of Alabama’s black, circuit-riding death row inmates returned to Kilby Prison for the December 4 execution of one of their little group, Ernest Cornell Walker. Walker, convicted of raping a white woman in Homewood, Alabama, pleaded for his life in front of Governor John Patterson on December 2. “I know now that I did wrong and I’m sorry,” he told the governor. Patterson showed no mercy, even though attorneys contended that Walker was mentally incompetent and had the intelligence of a child. Throughout much of the next day, he sat on the edge of the bed in the Bible Room and wept inconsolably. That evening he refused his last supper and spent his last few hours reading a Bible and visiting with Kilby chaplain R. S. Watson—he soon professed his faith in Jesus Christ to the soft-spoken minister. Just before the solemn hour of midnight, Walker showed no emotion as he walked the final steps to the death chamber to “ride the lightning.” As guards strapped him in the chair, he told Watson, “Thanks, Reverend.” He then spoke his last words: “Jesus has saved me.” For a moment, the entire prison seemed quiet. Nearby, Caliph Washington and the other death row inmates watched, listened, and waited.

  When the executioner threw the switch, the dull sound of the generator began building, and the horrific noise of death echoed throughout the cellblock. The generator was separate from the prison’s main power system, so when the current built to its climax, the lights in the building continued to burn bright. The dimming of the lights during an execution was what was on “television and in the movies,” one guard said, and it was not the reality in Kilby. Nonetheless, at 12:14 a.m., two physicians pronounced Walker dead.

  One week later, a white inmate, Edwin Ray Dockery, went to the chair still proclaiming his innocence. “Look, I never for one minute denied that I killed a man,” Dockery explained. “I got a bum rap on this deal. I claim it was self-defense, but the jury convicted me of murder. There was nobody there but the two of us. I’m alive and he is dead. Nobody believes me.” But unlike Caliph Washington, who also pleaded self-defense, Dockery had a long record of crime and violent behavior before his conviction in the murder of Willie T. Heatherly in 1958. “I’ve been in trouble since I was fourteen and I guess this more or less evens things up. I lived as a burglar. I have robbed people. Twice I escaped from prison. Sooner or later things catch up with you, and that’s why I’m here in Kilby now.”

  Kilby prison officials allowed condemned inmates an opportunity to order a final meal of their choosing. Most refused. Dockery, however, ordered a dozen oysters, a dozen shrimp, two veal cutlets, a salad, six buttered rolls, half a banana pie, ice cream, and expensive cigars. Once he finished his last supper, he lit a cigar and visited with Father William Wiggins, a Roman Catholic priest, and Reverend Tilford Junkins, one of Alabama’s most prominent Southern Baptist evangelists. After listening to the salvation plan from both theological perspectives, the inmate converted to Catholicism—most likely to the chagrin of the Baptist preacher. Just before midnight, Dockery walked to the death chamber, flanked by Wiggins and Junkins. He smiled as he sat in the chair and told the onlookers “I am not guilty of first degree murder.” By 12:10 a.m., he was dead. As the warden removed the black hood, Dockery still wore a smile.

  Columbus Boggs was on Alabama’s death row for murder. During the summer of 1957, Boggs escaped the Etowah County Jail in east Alabama, where he was being held on charges of assault and attempted robbery. He stole a truck and went on a statewide crime spree—heisting cars, robbing businesses, and stealing weapons. While crisscrossing Alabama, Boggs stopped in Uniontown, near Selma, and robbed a small grocery store and murdered the elderly owner for $80. An all-white jury in Dallas County deliberated sixty minutes before declaring him guilty, and the judge sentenced him to death. Four months after Dockery’s electrocution on April 29, 1961, Columbus Boggs died in the electric chair.

  UNLESS THE ALABAMA Supreme Court overturned his conviction, Caliph Washington would someday meet the same fate. He waited for the high court’s decision as days turned into weeks, weeks into months, a
nd months into years. No word came. He passed his time like many other death row inmates: sleeping, reading, praying, thinking, and fighting. By the early 1960s, Alabama prison officials stopped moving the black inmates back and forth from Atmore and packed in as many as four prisoners per cell on Kilby’s death row.

  In September 1961, Caliph Washington was sharing cell space with three black men, Willie Seals, Jr., Drewey Aaron, and Charles Hamilton. Seals and Aaron earned spots on Alabama’s death row for raping white women, and Hamilton for burglary with the “intent to ravish.” One afternoon, as guard B. G. Weldon walked along the corridor just outside the death row cells, he noticed blood covering Hamilton’s shirt. Following an investigation, Lieutenant W. L. Trawick learned that Seals and Aaron beat Hamilton over the head repeatedly with their fists, while Washington cheered them on. “The subject was shouting,” Trawick wrote in a report to the disciplinary board, “and encouraging other inmates to attack Hamilton.” Caliph Washington, he added, “was one of the main instigators of the fracas,” although he never hit anyone. The Kilby disciplinary board, which included warden Martin J. Wiman, assistant warden William C. Holman, and classification officer Marlin C. Barton, reviewed the report and ordered Washington and the others to spend twenty-one days in one of the airless solitary confinement cells. Guards ordered Washington to strip down to his shorts and nothing more for his stay in the hole.

  On September 9, 1961, they led the inmate down the stairs to cell number five, opened the door, handed him a slop bucket, and pushed him inside. For days, Caliph Washington sat on the stone cold floor with no mattress, cot, or blanket. The only time he left the cell was to empty his slop bucket in a nearby toilet. “His is a life without sunrise or sunset,” one reporter noted, “and things like rain or blue sky matter not at all because it is always black in his four walls of steel; and chilly and uncomfortable, too, because there’s nothing in there with him but a small container for a latrine.” His only visitor was the guard who stopped by three times a day to feed him a “non-palatable” diet of bread and water and listen to his complaints. Caliph liked to talk, and this was his chance each day to communicate with another human being. Otherwise he sat in the silent darkness. After only a week, prison officials let Caliph out of the hole and returned him to his cell on death row.

  A few weeks later, on November 24, 1961—the day after Thanksgiving—another black death row inmate, Joe Henry Johnson, became the first person executed in the state’s electric chair since Boggs’s death some seventeen months before. In January 1960, an all-white jury in northern Alabama convicted Johnson of the savage beating deaths of two women in Atmore, near the Tennessee border. According to trial testimony, Dicie Boyd caught seventeen-year-old Joe Henry in her barn engaged in sexual activity with her milking cow. To hide his bestial sin, Johnson raped and murdered the sixty-two-year-old Miss Dicie, and then bludgeoned to death her eighty-nine-year-old mother, Rowena Boyd. “May God have mercy on me and be with me” were Johnson’s last words.

  By Christmas 1961, Caliph had waited two full years for some word from the Alabama Supreme Court. None came. He slipped deeper into a dark, quiet despair. In February 1962 he earned a fresh trip to the hole for “exchanging personal possessions and papers” with other inmates and “publicly criticizing rules and regulations of the holding unit.” The disciplinary board also punished Thomas Stain, Roosevelt Howard, Drewey Aaron, Willie Seals, William Bowen, and Wilmon Gosa. In August of that year, Gosa, who was convicted of murdering his five-year-old daughter with a butcher’s knife, made no final statement before he was strapped in the chair and put to death.

  As 1962 was nearing an end, Caliph Washington awaited word on his appeal. The case was being heard by the Simpson division of the Alabama Supreme Court, led by the fifty-nine-year-old associate justice, Robert Tennent Simpson. A native of the northern Alabama hamlet of Florence, Simpson earned his law degree from the University of Alabama in 1917—just as America was entering the Great War. Simpson soon joined the army and saw action in France during the Meuse-Argonne offensive, where he earned a Silver Star for bravery. After the war, he practiced law, served as a circuit solicitor, and sat on the bench of the court of appeals. Alabama voters elected him to the state supreme court in 1944.

  In 1962, the other members of the Simpson division included John Lancaster Goodwyn, a Montgomery native who served on the bench since 1951, and James Samuel Coleman, Jr., of Eutaw, who was elected to the court in 1957. During the discussion of Washington’s appeal, the justices divided over the decision, making it necessary for the entire court to hear the case in general conference. Chief Justice Ed Livingston prepared the majority opinion. Born in 1892 in the Black Belt community of Notasulga, Alabama, Livingston earned his law degree at the University of Alabama in 1918. His homespun humor and storytelling ability served him well during his twenty years as a practicing attorney in Tuscaloosa and as a part-time law school instructor. He drove a rusty, oil-burning, ramshackle Ford around town with a host of missing parts, including the license plate. Once while rambling through Bessemer, a motorcycle policeman pulled him over for driving without an automobile tag. When the officer asked why, Livingston said, “Mr. Officer, I could tell you a cock and bull story which you probably would not believe, so I will tell you the truth. I am a teacher in the law school in Tuscaloosa, and one of my students is the license inspector, and I am riding the hell out of the situation.”

  In 1940, he rode his popularity to election as an associate justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. In 1951, Governor Gordon Persons appointed “Judge Ed” as chief justice, where he reminded young attorneys that the practice of law was a privilege and not a right. Still, his deep respect for the law and his keen legal mind never transcended his Black Belt racial views. When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the Brown decision, Livingston attacked it for attempting to take over local governments by writing opinions, not laws. “I have nothing but reverence for the Supreme Court as an institution,” he said, “but that’s as far as it goes.” By the late 1950s, like many white southerners, Livingston became more reactionary in his support of segregated schools. “I would close every school from the highest to the lowest before I would go to school with colored people,” he emphasized. “I’m for segregation in every phase of life, and I don’t care who knows.” The justice was “riding the hell” out of the racial situation.

  Still, in the Caliph Washington case, Furman Jones’s testimony, and not race, was the key issue. On October 4, 1962, Alabama’s high court handed down its decision in Caliph Washington v. State of Alabama. The focus of the appeal was based on the admissibility of Furman Jones’s testimony from the first trial. “It is a well-settled rule in Alabama,” Livingston argued, “that when a witness is a nonresident, or has removed from the state permanently or for an indefinite time, his sworn testimony taken on any previous trial for the same offense may be offered in a subsequent trial if a proper predicate is laid.” If the proper foundation (predicate) was never provided, then prior testimony of the witness was inadmissible.

  Livingston, however, argued that circuit solicitor Howard Sullinger provided the background necessary for offering Jones’s testimony. The prosecution proved, through evidence and testimony, that Furman Jones’s address was Box 465, Jonesville, South Carolina, and that a deputy sheriff sent a subpoena to the address. The chief justice added: “The sufficiency of a predicate for the introduction of testimony given by a witness on a former trial is addressed to the trial court’s sound discretion.” In conclusion, Livingston emphasized that the evidence in the Caliph Washington case was clear and sufficient to “justify the verdict reached by the jury. . . . The Court has carefully examined the record, as is our duty under the automatic appeal statute, supra, and find no error to reverse.” Justices Simpson, Goodwyn, Merrill, and Harwood concurred with Livingston’s opinion.

  Justice Coleman, however, dissented. He argued that the prosecution failed to provide a proper predicate for the admission of Furman Jo
nes’s testimony from the first trial. “I am of the opinion,” he wrote, “that the court erred in allowing his testimony to be admitted. . . . As I understand the opinion of the majority, they hold that Jones’ former testimony laid its own proper predicate. I, therefore, respectfully dissent.”

  With the conviction confirmed, Caliph Washington’s execution date was set for Friday, December 7, 1962. His attorneys, however, filed an application for rehearing on October 19, and the court once again stayed the date of execution pending the ruling. On January 17, the Alabama Supreme Court denied the application and set the execution date of Friday, March 29, 1963.

  ATTORNEYS KERMIT EDWARDS, David Hood, and Orzell Billingsley all left the case following the high court’s decision. They were replaced by two white Birmingham lawyers, Robert Morel Montgomery and Fred Blanton, Jr. Dashing, patrician, flamboyant, and supremely self-confident, Morel Montgomery was a specialist in criminal defense and one of the city’s best trial lawyers. By 1964, he had practiced law for forty years and never had a client executed. “He tried hundreds of capital cases,” his son once said, “and never lost anyone to the electric chair. That was some accomplishment.”