Herbert Richardson's execution

Herbert Richardson's execution is presented not as an abstraction or a procedural endpoint but as a sequence of intimate farewells and state preparations ending in the electric chair. After the Supreme Court of the United States denied a stay and review of his case, Herbert was separated from his new wife and family, prayed with Bryan Stevenson, and was led away to the strains of a hymn he had chosen. The account makes the mechanics of execution impossible to detach from the people required to carry it out, the people made to leave, and the life being taken.

The final appeal and the last hours

Shortly before seven in the evening, after Stevenson had spent hours waiting for word, a clerk of the Supreme Court of the United States called to report that the court had denied both the motion for a stay of execution and the petition for a writ of certiorari. The clerk said copies of the order would be faxed. Stevenson was arrested by the procedural detail: within hours Herbert would be dead, and there would be no further appeals or records for which a copy was needed. He had promised to be present at the execution, but first had to make the two-hour drive to the prison in Atmore, Alabama.

Herbert had married a woman from Mobile a week before the scheduled execution. With no money or possessions to leave her, he had arranged for her to receive the American flag due to him as a military veteran. In the days before his death, he repeatedly asked Stevenson to confirm how the government would deliver it and to obtain a written commitment. This practical concern remained vivid beside the imminent execution: the flag was a tangible remnant of the life and service he wanted his wife to have after he was gone.

The prison permitted the family to remain with Herbert until about ten o'clock, when preparations for the execution were to begin. Stevenson met the bride and her family and spent about forty-five minutes with them, watching the clock. Herbert tried to keep the gathering light, telling his family how he had persuaded Stevenson to take his case and boasting that Stevenson represented only people who were smart and charming. He joked that Stevenson was too young to have represented him at trial, but that, had he done so, Herbert would not be on death row. The smile and humor did not relieve the strain; Herbert's wife grew increasingly tearful as the deadline approached.

The family farewell

Shortly before ten, the commissioner of the Alabama Department of Corrections, the warden, and other officials signaled that the visit had to end. The visitation officer told the family it was time to say goodbye. Herbert's wife held him around the neck and refused to let go; her crying deepened into groans, and other relatives began to cry too. The officials waited impatiently in the hallway, one pointing to his watch, while the officer returned to insist that the family leave. The scene turns the scheduled transition to execution into a physical separation that the family could not perform calmly or on command.

When the visitation officer asked Stevenson to help get the family out, Herbert's wife loudly said she would not leave him. The prison had agreed to Herbert's request that a recording of “The Old Rugged Cross” be played as he walked to the electric chair. Stevenson began humming the hymn as more uniformed officers gathered outside the room. He whispered to Herbert's wife that they had to let him go. Herbert saw the officers lining up, slowly pulled away from his wife, and told Stevenson to take her out. Her separation from him was thus made possible, finally, by Herbert's own decision to release her from his embrace.

Prayer and the walk to the chair

Stevenson had never before attended an execution. Although he had represented other condemned clients, stays had been granted in those cases. He dreaded witnessing a man electrocuted, yet could not bring himself to leave Herbert alone with the people who would kill him. Less than thirty minutes before the execution, officials took Stevenson to a cell beside the execution chamber. Herbert's body had been shaved to facilitate what the state regarded as a clean execution. The electric chair had not been modified after John Evans's execution, and Stevenson was also thinking about Horace Dunkins's botched execution a month earlier. He had read about execution procedures, harboring the misguided hope that he might intervene if something went wrong.

In the cell, Herbert was more emotional than he had been with his family. He looked shaken and worried; the shaving that prepared his body for death seemed humiliating. He took Stevenson's hands and asked to pray. After they prayed, Herbert thanked Stevenson for standing with him, acknowledging that the experience was not easy for his lawyer either. Stevenson hugged him and saw his face sag with sadness.

Herbert reflected that more people had asked what they could do for him during the last fourteen hours of his life than had asked during the years when he was growing up. Stevenson thought of the childhood and later suffering the courts had never reviewed: Herbert's mother died when he was three; he endured physical abuse at seven, struggled with drugs and alcohol as a young teenager, and returned from Vietnam traumatized and disabled. The belated attention surrounding his execution sharpened the question of where help had been when it could have mattered, rather than when death was already imminent.

A tape recorder had been set up in the hallway. An officer brought over a tape, and “The Old Rugged Cross” began to play as Herbert was pulled away from Stevenson. The hymn did not alter the outcome; it accompanied the state's final action and gave the farewell a sound Herbert himself had requested. The narrative does not dwell on a technical description of the electrocution. Instead, it follows the human and institutional details around it: the prayer, the tape, the officials, and the body prepared for execution.

Aftermath and significance

Stevenson left the prison with a sense of shame he could not shake. He believed that those he had seen there—including officials who had worked themselves up to proceed with resolve—seemed uncomfortable and remorseful. He wondered whether they too recognized that what was happening was wrong. For him, the abstraction of capital punishment could not withstand the concrete sight of a state systematically killing someone who posed no threat at that moment.

On the drive home, he thought about Herbert's wish for the flag earned through military service in Vietnam; about Herbert's family and the victim's family, both left with the tragedy the crime had created; and about the people who shaved and strapped Herbert into the chair. The following day, some officials expressed happiness and excitement that an execution had taken place. Stevenson contrasted those public reactions with the discomfort of people who had encountered the details directly. He argued that society recoiled from the idea of raping or assaulting people convicted of those crimes, yet accepted killing those convicted of killing when the violence could be presented as orderly and removed from ordinary moral feeling. Herbert's execution therefore becomes an argument about what procedure and distance conceal: a death sentence is carried out by people, upon a person, and its apparent cleanliness does not make the killing humane.