The Best American Crime Reporting 2008

by Jonathan Kellerman

  I SPOKE TO CRITTENDON over a number of months. Whenever I joined him at one of the Denny’s or Chevy’s restaurants where he suggested we meet, he always sat in the back, facing the door. Before venturing an observation, he invariably paused, making rapid calculations about message, diction, tone of voice, and the likelihood of being misinterpreted. It was of a piece with how he never attended guards’ barbecues, never let anyone get in back of him or see him off duty. “I can’t be effective with each camp in the prison if they know everything about me,” he said. “Vernell’s world is a lot neater and more controlled that way.”

  Crittendon’s ability to shift among lingoes and affects is a common prison adaptation. But his speed is astonishing: he’s like an actor who glides offstage in a tuxedo, pops his head out in an Indian headdress, and then shambles from the wings in a bear suit. When he was accompanying two clergymen out of the prison last year, Crittendon mentioned that a middle-aged lifer they’d met had been the first juvenile in San Francisco to be sentenced as an adult. “He has not even had the luxury of—the privilege of—knowing a woman,” Crittendon told them. While amending his word choice, he deepened his timbre, so that what began as a salacious aside sounded, by “knowing a woman,” almost Biblical. Yet Crittendon’s ingratiating reserve helped prevent him from becoming just another guard. “Our training is not designed to broaden an officer’s mind,” Mike Jimenez, the president of the state’s correctional officers’ union, says, with regret. “Everyone wants to be seen as the meanest, craziest officer, because then no one screws with you. It’s dog psychology.”

  One of Crittendon’s many duties was conducting on-the-job training on such topics as “Gangs,” “Drugs,” and “Application of Restraint Gear.” One morning last summer, Crittendon was giving a “Use of Force” class for twenty officers in a trailer behind the prison. “O.K., you’re in reception and an arriving criminal refuses to give you a DNA sample,” he said. He hopped to the side and played the inmate, strutting and pimp-rolling: “You ain’t stickin’ nothin’ in this mouth, nohow.” Then he shifted back. “You say, ‘O.K., Jack, you can either give us a DNA sample from your mouth or we’ll collect it as it leaks out of your nose.’” There were appreciative chuckles. “What gives you the right to say that? Because you are gaining compliance with a lawful order. But if some knucklehead says”—side step—“‘I ain’t gettin’ out the shower yet, dawg, I gots soap on me,’ can you use force? No, because you do not have a lawful order requiring you to effect the removal.” He smiled, slowly. “When I came here, in the seventies, that inmate would have been touching every fixed position, every wall, post, and floor, all the way to Ad Seg”—Administrative Segregation, more commonly known as the Hole.

  Crittendon arrived at San Quentin in 1977, at age twenty-three, having worked previously as a police cadet and a security guard in San Francisco. San Quentin at the time was a maximum-security prison, housing the most violent criminals. (It’s now a medium-security facility.) In the early eighties, the prison reported three felonies a day, bloody incidents with spears and match bombs and blow darts and zip guns, not to mention routine “gassings”—cups of fermented urine and feces hurled in a guard’s face. San Quentin recruited Crittendon as part of a belated effort to integrate a heavily white officer corps that gave the prison the feel of a plantation. Crittendon saw a prison run by “the Europeans”—“white guys who were not going to give the others a piece of the pie.” Though his own father had deserted his family when Crittendon was twelve, and though he would eventually come to see himself as a role model for black inmates who had grown up in similar circumstances, he soon found himself reluctantly beating up black prisoners—and only black prisoners—on white lieutenants’ orders. Even today, the prison both reflects and accentuates the broader racial divide: blacks are six times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, and once at San Quentin (and most prisons) they are housed with other blacks, on the theory that segregation reduces racial tension. The golden rule at the prison, according to an officer named Jeff Evans, is “You hang with your own.”

  In his class, Crittendon, who while on duty shot more than twenty men, none fatally, began explaining the complex algorithm that permits the use of deadly force: essentially, an imminent threat of death or severe injury. “Now, this is the scary part—God willing it doesn’t happen,” he said. “Say this C.O.”—correctional officer—“comes back on the block and his son just got killed by some criminal and he pulls out a nine-millimetre and starts firing into the cells—boom! boom! boom!—taking the inmates out.” Crittendon was pointing an imaginary pistol at the officers, mowing them down. “What do you do?”

  “Wait till he runs out of bullets,” someone said, and everyone cracked up.

  Crittendon threw his head back to guffaw, but instantly stopped. “That was a joke,” he said. “You do have to shoot him, because otherwise the inmates’ families will sue you. You have that responsibility.”

  ONE AFTERNOON, a female San Quentin employee approached Crittendon as he was guiding some visitors around the prison museum and asked him to show her the execution chamber. In 1967, the chamber was shut down at the beginning of a series of constitutional challenges to the death penalty; since 1992, when it reopened, it has been in regular use, starting with the death by gas of Robert Alton Harris, who had shot and killed two teenage boys and then eaten their Jack in the Box hamburgers.

  “Sure,” Crittendon said to the woman. “Let’s go.”

  “Oh, neato! What’s it like?”

  “It’s a gas!” Cackling, he led her just south of the prison’s main entrance and unlocked an iron gateway to a narrow courtyard. It was here, early on April 21, 1992, that witnesses assembled to observe the Harris execution. Crittendon, who had been placed in charge of the prison’s programs by Warden Daniel Vasquez four years earlier, was by then the prison’s spokesman, and Vasquez had told him how to publicize the event: “Don’t personalize it, don’t dramatize it, don’t embarrass the Department of Corrections, don’t embarrass me, don’t embarrass yourself.”

  Crittendon also had significant responsibility for discharging the execution, and he recalls having “a whole sense of anticipation as the plan I had helped to create was unfolding.” That final evening, he oversaw Harris’s last meal: “He’d asked for pizza, and I directed that it be Tombstone Pizza—”

  Tombstone? “I have a sick side of me, I guess—my own little personality thing,” Crittendon said. “He put a whole piece in his mouth and he says, ‘Critter, you want some?’ But it wouldn’t have been appropriate.”

  Crittendon had created a meticulous timetable, but it fell apart as the courts issued four separate stays, the last called in when Harris was already strapped in the chair. As the Supreme Court was preparing to vacate the final stay, Vasquez, under heavy pressure from the attorney general’s office, told Crittendon to get the witnesses back as soon as he gave the word. “He gave the word at 6 A.M., and by 6:05 all the witnesses were entering the chamber,” Crittendon says. Vasquez recalls, “There was a haste, an urgency to get it all done that to this day is a source of shame to me.”

  As the final witnesses passed through the courtyard Crittendon made a gesture that two witnesses remember as an excited fist pump. One describes Crittendon’s gesture as “distinctly celebratory”; another, Michael Kroll, says, “Crittendon raised his fist in the air three times, as if his team had just scored a touchdown. To win, for him, was to get this done.”

  Crittendon said he doesn’t recall making any gesture of overt triumph and that he could have been giving a “move ’em on up” signal to a driver who had witnesses waiting in a van. When I reminded him that the witnesses had already assembled in the courtyard, he said that he might have been beckoning to the “extraction team” to stand ready to remove Harris’s brother if he caused a disturbance, as Crittendon had heard he might. In the event, Harris’s brother watched in silence as the condemned man gasped and convulsed and turned blue before being pronou
nced dead, ten minutes later. (In 1994, U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Patel banned gas as the state’s preferred method of capital punishment, declaring it cruel and unusual. After some notorious executions, including two in Florida in the nineteen-nineties in which the electrocuted man’s head burst into flames, thirty-seven of the thirty-eight death-penalty states use lethal injection as the primary method; only Nebraska still relies on electrocution.)

  Now, after unlocking a door in the prison wall, Crittendon gave a ringmaster’s flourish: “The execution chamber.” We stepped into an airless room dominated by a squat green apparatus that resembled a bathysphere. The woman employee circled it, peering at the iron doors, the thick windows, and the flat green chair within. As Crittendon watched her, his face took on a stoical, almost sorrowful cast. “The inmate who did that welding, in 1937, Alfred Wells,” he remarked, “was back inside six years later for three murders, and he died right here in the chamber he built. ‘I fought the law and the law won’—bada bing, bada bam.”

  “When’s the next one?” the woman asked. Crittendon explained the stay, and when she asked his opinion of the death penalty he parried coolly, “There are those who raise the argument—as is their absolute right—that you should not have state-sanctioned killing, even though the public supports it. One will see how it all plays out.”

  Executioners seek to maintain their detachment, but they often begin to feel empathy or depression. John Robert Radclive said that visions of the prisoners he hanged between 1892 and 1910 “haunt me and taunt me until I am nearly crazy,” and Amos Squire, the doctor at Sing Sing who between 1914 and 1925 sat beside the condemned during a hundred and thirty-eight electrocutions, wrote that he finally quit when, after signalling for the procedure to commence, he began to feel “a sudden, terrifying urge to rush forward and take hold of the man in the chair, while the current was on.”

  Crittendon’s mother, Louise, always scrutinized him after an execution; she felt that each killing hardened her son a bit, but, she told me, “it didn’t take root in him.” Yet Crittendon told me that he has come to believe that lethal injection is inhumane—to the executioner. “You are eye to eye with the inmate as you have skin-to-skin touch, smelling his body odor, feeling his breath, and this is someone who has been in your care at the institution, usually without being violent, for at least fifteen years,” he said. “So transference occurs. I’m the only person who was there for all eleven of the lethal injections, and every single one of them I cannot forget—I close my eyes and I can see and hear it.”

  ON DECEMBER 12, 2005, the night of Stanley Tookie Williams’s scheduled execution, a crowd began gathering early outside San Quentin’s East Gate and soon numbered about a thousand. Williams, widely known for building one of the country’s most notorious street gangs, had become even more famous for his prison transformation: he was the most prominent cause célèbre for death-penalty abolitionists since Caryl Chessman, the charming serial rapist and author who, after twelve years in San Quentin, went to the gas chamber in 1960. Williams had been visited by such celebrities as Snoop Dogg and Jamie Foxx (who played Williams in a television movie, “Redemption”), and the crowd outside that night included Jesse Jackson and Joan Baez, who sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

  At 7:20 P.M., Vernell Crittendon approached the deathwatch cell with mail and a pitcher of water. Williams, a barrel-chested man with gray cornrows, was seated on his mattress as if it were a throne. He had declined a last meal, a sedative, and the chance to vouchsafe his last words to the warden. The two men, born just days apart to absconding fathers and stern, religious mothers, stared at each other through the bars. Even then, Williams believed that the courts or the governor would intervene. “I brought the mail,” Crittendon said at last.

  “Fine. Send it to Barbara,” Williams said, referring to Barbara Becnel, a community-services activist and his most loyal supporter. He would not take the water or speak again. A week earlier, Williams had told Crittendon, “I don’t even want to talk to you—you’re one of the people trying to get me executed.” He had asked a captain to stop Crittendon from bringing his mail, and told the warden that he didn’t want the spokesman present during discussions about the schedule.

  In the years after Williams came to San Quentin, in 1981, convicted of four murders, Crittendon said that he would chat with him about black pride. “I’d play the race card,” he recalls, “saying, ‘How come that white officer can go down to talk to that skinhead, and you see me as an enemy—and yet we’re brothers, and your whole thing is black pride?’” The talks can’t have been very convivial, as Williams not only hated cops, whites, and almost everyone—as he demonstrated by repeatedly attacking other prisoners—but had no use for Crittendon, whom he referred to as an “Uncle Tom” and “Mr. Lickspittle.”

  But beginning in 1993, after what he described as a gradual spiritual awakening, Williams stopped fighting and began to apologize for his past. An autodidact with a fondness for words such as “braggadocio” and “anent,” he went on to co-write, with Barbara Becnel, nine children’s books decrying the gangster life style. Becnel says, “Vernell was very helpful at first. Stan was in the Hole and couldn’t get phone calls, and Vernell would maneuver and break the rules and allow us to speak on the phone.”

  Crittendon says he secretly hoped that Becnel would help him to persuade Williams to renounce the Crips and name his accomplices in the murders—crimes that Williams insisted he didn’t commit—and to do it on television. (Becnel and Crittendon agree that he never broached any of those topics with her.) As Crittendon recalls it, in the mid-nineties Williams finally responded to the last of a series of invitations Crittendon made to him to unburden himself on Larry King’s program: “A man don’t rat,” Williams said. “And I’m a man.” Crittendon says that he realized then that Williams was just a hustler who would never quit the game. “If I could have got him, that would have been great! Not for Vernell,” he quickly clarified, “but for public safety.”

  However, in notes that Williams typed before meeting one of his lawyers in 2005, he scorned the idea that he and Crittendon had once had a promising relationship, noting that in twenty-four years in San Quentin “there was never a reason for him and I to speak at length.” Becnel believes the turning point for Crittendon occurred in 2000, when Williams, who had helped broker a gang truce in Los Angeles over the telephone (and would later broker another truce in Newark), was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Peter Fleming, Jr., one of Williams’s lawyers, told me, “The clear sense I had with Vernell was ‘This convicted murderer’s getting all this attention—why am I not getting it?’”

  Certainly Crittendon took the case personally. Beginning in 2004, after Williams’s appeals had been exhausted, Crittendon waged a largely clandestine media campaign against the inmate. (He first sought and received approval for his efforts to “correct public misimpressions” from the state attorney general’s office and the C.D.C.R. spokesman in Sacramento, who himself acted as liaison to the governor’s office, which would have to rule on Williams’s petition for clemency.) Crittendon’s démarche was usually accomplished through quiet suggestion: Rita Cosby, who conducted the last television interview with Williams on her MSNBC talk show, says, “Vernell’s appraisal caused me to be more skeptical, and gave me some questions to ask Tookie: was he still involved in organizing gang activity behind bars?”

  A month before Williams’s scheduled execution, Crittendon gave an interview to the Associated Press in which he said of Williams, “I just don’t know that his heart is changed,” and suggested that Williams was still orchestrating gangland activities. This was an unprecedented attack for a prison spokesman to make. “To turn public opinion in favor of executing Tookie Williams was not just weird—Tookie simply minded his own business—it was wrong,” the former warden Daniel Vasquez told me. “Vernell may have gotten addicted to his own image of what he could do.”

  Crittendon’s observations carried weight because
he represented a government authority and because reporters liked and trusted him. But those observations seem to have derived more from the spokesman’s animus than from the inmate’s misconduct. Crittendon had told the A.P. that Williams’s prison bank account was suspiciously large, but there was only sixteen hundred and eighty-two dollars in it. Crittendon had found it troubling that Williams was not counselling his son, Stanley IV, a former gang member in prison for murder, but he acknowledged to me that he checked Williams’s mail only in the final month or so—and hadn’t read Williams’s autobiography, in which he details his extensive correspondence with and counselling of his son—“so I can’t say for sure he wasn’t writing his son.” When asked whether he now considered his campaign unusual or unwarranted, Crittendon said it “was approved through the department” and “an appropriate response to the questions that were asked by the media.” Yet he also eventually acknowledged that Williams hadn’t actually been orchestrating gangland crimes. The spokesman’s problem, then, was that Williams’s ongoing defiance of Crittendon—and the system that Crittendon had come to embody—made him a living symbol of the Crip life style.

  At eight-thirty that night, Crittendon slipped off to the staff rest room in the prison’s abandoned schoolhouse, as he always did on the eve of an execution, to change into his black suit and then sit and think about the condemned man. Crittendon often began to empathize—but not this time. “I was thinking how the gang Stanley created had destroyed the African-American community,” he recalls, “how you can shoot someone on the corner in broad daylight and no one who sees it will say anything, because they fear the Crips.”

  At midnight, Crittendon took up his customary post in the death chamber, facing the window at the foot of the green chair, “directly across from Williams’s head, so that I could look right up his nostrils. It was part of my duties to watch, because if we have a blowout and a vein starts spurting blood I have to escort the witnesses out.” As thirty-nine witnesses looked on in increasingly tense silence, a nurse repeatedly tried to establish the standard backup I.V. in the convict’s left arm as Williams seethed and finally made an impatient remark. When the nurse exited, after twelve minutes, the second I.V. still wasn’t in, but Warden Ornoski, not realizing this and having found the delay excruciating, said, “Proceed.” The chemicals began to flow into Williams’s right arm.