December 11, 2000

Baptists won't forget sights of Death House
___By Ken Camp
___Texas Baptist Communications
___HUNTSVILLE--Twenty-five years ago, Charlie Wise would have described himself as "adamantly" in favor of the death penalty.
___But two decades of serving alongside his wife, Mary Alice, in prison ministry changed his attitude. That exposure included several years of weekly visits with women on Death Row at the Gatesville Mountainview Unit.
___"It puts a different face on capital punishment when you get to know the people," said Wise, a layman at Trinity Baptist Church in Gatesville.
___But even that exposure did not prepare him for his first trip into the death chamber. As a member of a capital punishment study committee named by the Baptist General Convention of Texas, Wise recently toured the Death House at the Huntsville Walls Unit.
___"It was chilling," he said, reflecting on his first glimpse of the padded gurney in the tiny death chamber.
___As deputy chief of the civil division for the U.S. Attorney General's district office in Fort Worth, Mattie Compton had been in prisons frequently. But this was her first visit to the Walls Unit and its Death House.
___"It was hard to separate my impressions of the death chamber itself from my overall thoughts about everything we saw and heard," said Compton, a member of Mount Zion Baptist Church in Fort Worth.
___"By the time we got to the death chamber, anyone could see I was very emotionally distraught. It was a cumulative thing for me."
___Visiting the Death House holding area with its eight narrow cells was "very comfortable" and familiar to Jim Young. Before joining the BGCT staff as coordinator of restorative justice ministries, Young served 10 years as chaplain at the Gatesville Hughes Unit and the Huntsville Wynn Unit.
___But even though it was his fourth visit to the death chamber, walking into that room was anything but comfortable and routine, he said. "Each time, it has been an oppressive feeling--an eerie feeling--walking into the death chamber itself."
___After learning about the clinical precision with which the executions are performed, and being reminded of their frequency, Wise said he was disturbed to think that Texans have grown so comfortable with the news of executions.
___Looking into the adjoining viewing rooms from the death chamber itself, Compton reflected on the family of the condemned killer and the family of his victim. "I thought about these two sets of people, divided by a wall but connected by a shared measure of grief and loss," she said.
___"I left with the impression there is an entire population of people who are broken, who have been thrown away and forgotten by society--not just the inmates, but also the staff. I had never thought about how administering the death penalty might impact the staff."
___They are the forgotten victims of each execution, Young noted. "I thought about the medical people behind the glass and wondered who ministers to them."
___The Baptists left with a renewed appreciation for those who serve on society's behalf.
___"They do it out of a sense of duty, but you get the idea they wish they didn't have to do it," Wise said.
___Young noted that the personnel working in the Death House are professionals who take pride in doing a good job. "They are surviving in the middle of what is reality now," he said. "But if that reality changed, it's not something they would miss."

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