It was three hours before the state of Alabama was due to execute Darrell Grayson after 25 years on death row at Holman Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison about two hours south of the state capital, Montgomery, writes Denis Staunton.
"It seems a little quieter on the exercise yard," the guard said. "This guy is more popular than most." I was sipping coffee and nibbling a cookie from the prison bakery with two local reporters and a couple of prison guards as we waited in a low, brick building across the road.
The guards expressed no pity for the condemned man but they showed no disrespect either as they spoke about him and the punishment he was about to receive.
Grayson was 19 years old when he confessed to one of the most brutal crimes committed in his home town of Montevallo, a few miles south of Birmingham. In the early morning hours of Christmas Eve 1980, two men broke into the home of Annie Laura Orr, an 86-year-old widow who stood just five feet and three inches. "They entered Mrs Orr's bedroom, where she was apparently sleeping. They subdued and beat her, striking her in the head with a blunt instrument and breaking several of her ribs," the court record said. "Grayson then placed a pillowcase over her head and wrapped two relatively long lengths of masking tape very tightly around her head so that when they were finished her head appeared to be that of a mummy. They then proceeded to look for money and other valuables.
"During their assault, they raped Mrs Orr repeatedly. She lived through the assault of being raped, beaten, threatened, unable to see or adequately breathe, and begging her assailants not to hurt her but to take her money, for a considerable period of time. She then died."
Police found a trail of playing cards leading from the crime scene to the home of 18-year-old Victor Kennedy, a petty criminal who had been drinking and playing cards with Grayson and two other men the previous evening. Grayson remembered nothing at first, because he had been so drunk after a drinking session that started at 5pm. He waived his right to have a lawyer present and, under questioning, admitted that he and Kennedy had decided to burgle Orr's house, where he had done odd jobs in the past. He said he put the pillowcase over Orr's face to prevent her from recognising him and admitted that he and Kennedy had raped her repeatedly. Kennedy tried to blame Grayson for both the rape and the murder, but both men were found guilty of murder during a burglary and sentenced to death at Holman Prison.
Grayson, an African-American, was tried before an all-white jury. His court-appointed attorney, who was given $500 to investigate the case, was a divorce lawyer who had never tried a capital case before. In the witness stand, Grayson again confessed to the crime but repeatedly said he was drunk at the time and couldn't independently recall the events. He also testified that he gave officers details of the crime that he didn't actually remember, based on what they said Kennedy had told them.
Passing sentence, the judge acknowledged mitigating circumstances, including the fact that Grayson had no prior history of violence or criminal activity, that he came from a poor, single-parent family with 11 siblings, left school in the 10th grade, "and had given his mother little trouble in growing up". These factors were outweighed, however, by the aggravating factors of the rape and the brutality of the crime, which the court described as "more characteristic of the actions of wild ravaging dogs of hell rather than even the lowest and most depraved level of humanity".
ALMOST HALF OF Alabama's 200 death row inmates are black, even though African-Americans make up only a quarter of the state's population. Although two out of three murder victims in the state are black, 80 per cent of the inmates on death row are there for killing whites. Death row inmates are overwhelmingly poor - 95 per cent of those at Holman are officially described as indigent. Alabama is almost alone among US states in having no state-wide public-defender system and does not guarantee appointed counsel for post-conviction appeals.
At Holman, death row inmates usually spend 23 hours a day in their cells, with an hour's exercise each day and a shower every other day. They can also leave their cells to attend church services and, on certain days, to visit the law library, which has mostly out-of-date books but functions as a day room where inmates play chess or draughts. Death row prisoners don't work, but friends and relatives outside can lodge money to PMOD (Prisoner Money on Deposit) accounts to pay for commissary items such as food and toiletries. They are allowed to own a TV if they can afford one.
When he arrived at Holman in 1982, Grayson "wallowed for years in self-pity and ignorance until my mother's death became the catalyst for positive changes in my life", as he put it in an account of his case earlier this year in Wings of Hope, a journal written and edited by death row prisoners in Alabama.
He started to write poetry, which was published in magazines and chapbooks and took educational courses that were then still available to Alabama death row inmates, receiving a GED (the US school-leaving certificate) and an associate science degree.
In 1994, he joined Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty (PHADP), a group run by death row inmates with the help of a handful of outside volunteers, becoming its chairman in 2000.
"During one of my quiet, lucid moments, I was shocked to realise the depth of loss and deprivation that is endured here on death row," he wrote. "I understood that each of us in our own way chooses to open the doors our own way, that can limit or increase the possibilities in our lives. Some doors open only onto the miseries of the world, overwhelm us and make us lose our focus . . . But there are other doors which we can choose that lead to spiritual growth and positive action."
For 20 years, Grayson didn't question his own guilt, and Kennedy refused to talk to him about what happened the night of the murder. But on the night of Kennedy's execution in 1999, Grayson was taken from his cell to the captain's office. "Victor had asked his personal preacher to tell me that he, Victor, asked for my forgiveness. I asked the preacher, 'for what does he want my forgiveness?' The preacher told me, 'that is not important'," Grayson said later.
In 2001, Esther Brown, a veteran Alabama activist against the death penalty, started to investigate the case and a witness came forward to say that Grayson could not have killed Orr because he was passed out elsewhere at the time of the crime.
Brown persuaded the Innocence Project, which has used DNA testing, to exonerate more than 200 people convicted of serious crimes, to take up the case, calling for sperm taken from Orr's clothing to be matched against Grayson's DNA.
If Grayson didn't rape Orr, the strongest plank in the prosecution's case linking him to the murder would collapse, leaving his own confession as the most compelling evidence against him.
False confessions are not uncommon, even without evidence of police brutality, and DNA testing has cleared a number of people who claimed responsibility for high-profile murders they didn't commit.
In the weeks before Grayson's execution date, numerous groups and individuals including former taoiseach John Bruton, now EU ambassador to Washington, appealed to Alabama governor Bob Riley to stay the execution and order DNA testing.
The Innocence Project offered to pay for a test at a nationally accredited DNA laboratory, which could be completed within 30 days, but, with two hours to go before the execution hour, Riley said no, declaring that DNA testing would make no difference. "DNA testing would neither prove nor disprove this killer's guilt. He was convicted of burglary and murder, not rape and murder, so legally DNA testing would not exonerate him even if there is no DNA evidence that he raped Mrs Orr," the governor said. A few minutes later, the US Supreme Court rejected Grayson's appeal for a stay of execution with a two-line statement, closing off his last chance of avoiding death.
A guard came in with news of how Grayson had spent the day meeting friends and relatives, including his sister Betty, two nephews and a niece, as well as Brown and his attorney, Charlotte Norton. For his last meal, Grayson asked for a cheese omelette with fresh sliced tomatoes, and during the afternoon he wrote his will: "Inmate Mark Jenkins W/Z 527: 1 Sony radio, $100 from PMOD account. Inmate Jeffery Rieber W/Z 540: Assorted store items, $133 remaining money from PMOD account. Inmate Corey Grayson W/Z 598: 1 head phone set, 1 pair of shoes. Inmate Ronald Smith W/Z 586: 1 TV Sanyo. Esther Brown: 1 ring, assorted letters and books."
At about 5.30pm, an officer patted me down, allowing me to keep a notebook and pen. Another told me that, if I changed my mind about witnessing the execution, I could back out. "If you want to leave when you get in there because it's too much, or if you decide you don't want to see it, there's a small bathroom off the witness room and you can sit in there until it's over," he said.
We piled into a white prison van and drove across the road to Holman, past the four-metre-high double-fencing topped with razor wire and through two gates to join a small procession of cars. In the exercise yard, a few prisoners stood in silence, watching us pass a row of individual exercise cages on our way to the death house.
A heavy-set man in a short-sleeved shirt with a mobile phone strapped to his belt was chatting and joking with guards outside. The ears of a stethoscope stuck out of his back pocket - this was the county medical examiner, a qualified doctor who would pronounce Grayson dead.
We moved down a narrow corridor into a tiny room lit by a pink fluorescent bulb, with white, brick walls on three sides and a rectangular window taking up almost all the fourth wall. Sitting in the front row, our knees touching the ledge, were the three reporters, and Esther Brown, Grayson's sole witness.
Through a curtain, the shape of a hospital gurney was visible, with a few figures moving around it.
Brown, a thin, grey-haired woman wearing a cotton print dress and a denim jacket, who had become Grayson's closest friend outside the prison, fidgeted and looked at her watch a couple of times.
A GUARD DREW back the curtain and Grayson was lying just a few feet away, a lean, handsome man, dressed in a white prison uniform, draped in a white sheet and strapped to the gurney, his arms stretched out on black arm rests, almost in cruciform. Two drips attached to his right arm disappeared into a small square opening in the wall behind, next to a microphone hanging on a hook.
Grayson saw Brown and smiled and winked at her, flashing the peace sign with his fingers; he smiled at the chaplain, a thin, stern-faced man who was standing in the corner of the death chamber.
Then Grayson looked through the glass on the other side of the chamber, where Lee Binion, Orr's granddaughter, was sitting. He smiled at her and she gave him a cold stare.
Holman's warden, Grantt Culliver, entered the chamber and approached the gurney. Culliver, an African-American, is obliged by Alabama law to carry out all executions at the prison himself. "I look at it as part of the job," he said in an interview two years ago. "The people of the state of Alabama, because of the ways the laws are written, are as responsible as I am. I am the pawn or tool. The responsibility lies with the people of Alabama."
As Culliver read the order of execution, Grayson's breathing quickened, his chest started to heave and, for the first time, a look of anguish crossed his face. When Culliver asked him if he wanted to make a statement, Grayson just said "peace", and again formed the peace sign with the fingers of each hand.
The warden left the chamber to start the process of execution in a small room next door, so Grayson was now alone except for the chaplain, who remained standing rigidly in his corner. Grayson was smiling again, looking over at Brown, who mouthed the words "I love you".
He exchanged a few words with the minister, lay back and waited.
It was 6.04pm and the deadly chemicals must now have been coursing through the cannula into Grayson's vein but nothing seemed to be happening.
"What the hell are they doing here?" Brown said.
A minute later, Grayson looked up, smiled one more time, turned to his right to look at Binion, and closed his eyes.
Alabama doesn't talk about the chemicals it uses in the lethal injection, but officials confirmed to me that the three drugs are similar to those used in other states. The first is sodium thiopental, a barbiturate to make the prisoner unconscious; the second is pancuronium bromide, which stops all muscle movement, except for the heart; the third, potassium chloride, stops the heart beating and causes death. A number of states have halted lethal injection executions after medical studies showed that inadequate dosing meant some prisoners may have died painful deaths by asphyxiation. Sodium thiopental is an ultra-short-acting barbiturate, the anaesthetic effect of which can wear off within minutes, so a prisoner could be conscious as the pancuronium bromide paralyses his muscles and asphyxiates him to death.
As the minutes crawled past and Grayson lay still on the gurney, I hoped he was feeling nothing now and tried to imagine his last moments of consciousness, the terror and the loneliness of dying in this empty chamber, surrounded by hostile faces.
I remembered my father's death long ago, how I held his hand and spoke to him as he drew his last breaths among those he loved. I pictured my own death and wondered if I would face it with the same grace shown by this poor convict.
I looked across at Binion, who had taken out a handkerchief and was dabbing her eyes. Suddenly, she was shaking violently as the tears rolled down her face.
It was 6.13pm and the medical officer, who had been sitting behind Binion all this time, stood up and took out his stethoscope, confident by now that it would register nothing. The curtains around the death chamber were drawn as the doctor approached Grayson and, three minutes later, declared him dead.
"Bloody murderers," Brown said as she stood up.
Outside, in the prison van, the other reporters were filing their stories over the phone. Binion had issued a statement on behalf of Orr's family welcoming the execution. "The family of Annie Laura Orr has seen the final chapter of this lengthy 27-year struggle come to an end. We are grateful that justice has finally been served," she said.
As we drove away from Holman, a guard told me that just one protester had kept vigil outside the prison during Grayson's execution.
"Hell, even that's a lot," he said.