The Executioner's Song (94 page)

                Still the fellow disliked him so intensely, Schiller had to ask about him. It took several newsmen before one could say, "That's Earl Dorius. Attorney General's office." Later, Schiller saw him talking to Sam Smith, and that was another sight. Sam Smith was ten inches taller.

Schiller was finding the prison difficult to understand. They kept saying they wanted no publicity, but were holding the Board of Pardons Hearing in a conference room off the main hallway of the Administration Building. The press had been invited. That was like throwing a little meat to a lot of lions. There were TV cameras, microphones, still cameramen, flashbulbs, lights on tripods, overhead lights on stands. The perfect definition of a circus. The hottest room he had been in for a long tame.

Everybody was standing on chairs to get a better look as they brought Gilmore through the door in leg shackles. It was like a movie Schiller saw once about the Middle Ages where a fellow in a white smock trudged in to be burned at the stake. Here, it was loose white pants and a long white shirt, but the effect was similar. Made the prisoner look like an actor playing a saint.

Schiller was changing his mind about Gilmore's looks again.

                It was as if he could take off one mask, hang it on the wall, pick up another. Today Gary did not look like a janitor, a door-to-door salesman, or an ice-cold killer. The hunger strike was ten days old and it had left him pale. The pits in his face showed, and the scars. He appeared good looking, but frail. Eaten away at. Didn't look like Bob Mitchum or Gary Cooper, but Robert DeNiro. Same deadness coming off. Same strength in back of the deadness.

All around, CBS and NBC crews were talking, and Schiller was not comfortable with how much they despised Gilmore. They spoke as if he were some low jailhouse lawyer who had enough tricks to get this far. One fellow from the local press muttered: "Can you believe the attention this cheap punk is getting?"

Schiller remembered that the Head of the Pardons Board, George Latimer, was once the defense attorney when Lieutenant Calley went to trial for machine-gunning Vietnamese villagers at My Lai. To Schiller, Latimer was one more red-faced Mormon with a big bulldog head and eyeglasses. A pompous self-satisfied look. Fever and bilious emotions. What a room. The only pleasant face he could see was Stanger. Schiller didn't know if they were going to get along, for Ron Stanger impressed him as too lippy on one side, and too casual about important details on the other, but right now Ron's boyish middle-aged fraternity man's face was loaded with expression. He was acting very solicitous toward Gary.

Stanger was, in fact, enjoying it. Up to that point, Gary had always been highly suspicious of him. That was fine with Stanger.

                He didn't believe in the death penalty, and wasn't convinced Gilmore was serious either. The action interested Stanger more than the merits of Gilmore's position. The action was beautiful. Something new every day. That was fun. Since Gilmore could—although Stanger didn't believe it—end up dead one day, he didn't want to get too close to his client.

Everybody in that crowded, steaming, incandescent room fixed on him. He drew all eyes, all lenses. Schiller was now twice impressed with Gilmore as an actor. He did not rise to this occasion like a great ham actor, but chose to be oblivious to it. Merely there to express his idea. Gilmore spoke in the absolute confidence of the idea, spoke in the same quiet tone he might have employed if talking to only one man. So it became the kind of acting that makes you forget you are in a theatre.

                What a screen star this fellow would have made, thought Schiller, and was filled with elation at the thought that he had the rights to his life, and in the next instant swallowed the misery that the right to talk personally to Gary had been cut off. From now on, he might always have to ask his questions through intermediaries.

                All the same, it was natural to work on improving your relations with any human being you had to see all the time. When Stanger, therefore, made a promise to Gilmore over some small thing, he tried to carry it out. If he said he would bring pencils, he brought them, if drawing paper, drawing paper. Today in Court, however, was the first time Ron felt proud of working for the man. He hadn't known until now how Gilmore would prove under pressure. From Stanger's point of view, however, he was terrific this day, just as intelligent as hell.

Behind the dais was a blue flag and four men at a long conference table who all looked to be Mormons to Schiller, all wearing glasses and blue suits. Schiller was taking in as many details as he could remember, it was history he kept saying to himself, but he was bored until the chairman told Gilmore he had the floor. That was when Gary Gilmore began to impress Larry Schiller, too. If it weren't for the white uniform of Maximum Security, Gilmore could have been a graduate student going for his orals before a faculty of whom he was slightly contemptuous.

"I am wondering," he began by saying. "Your Board dispenses privilege, and I have always thought that privileges were sought, desired, earned and deserved, and I seek nothing from you, don't desire anything from you, haven't earned anything and I don't deserve anything either."

GILMORE            I had come to the conclusion that because of Utah's Governor Rampton, I was here, because he bowed to whatever pressures were on him.

                I had personally decided he was a moral coward for doing it. I simply accepted the sentence that was given to me. I have accepted sentences all my life. I didn't know I had a choice in the matter.

                When I did accept it, everybody jumped up and wanted to argue with me. It seems that the people, especially the people of Utah, want the death penalty but they don't want executions and when it became a reality they might have to carry one out, well, they started backing off on it.

                Well, I took them literal and serious when they sentenced me to death just as if they had sentenced me to ten years or thirty days in the county jail or something. I thought you were supposed to take them serious. I didn't know it was a joke.

                Ms. Shirley Pedler of the ACLU wants to get in on the act but they always want to get in on the act, the ACLU. I don't think they have really ever done anything effective in their lives. I would like them all, including that group of reverends and rabbis from Salt Lake City to just butt out—this is my life and my death. It's by Courts that I die and I accept that . . .

CHAIRMAN        Now, in spite of what you may think about us, you can rest assured that we are not cowards, and you can rest assured that we are going to decide this case on the statutes of the State of Utah and not on your desires . . . Is Richard Giauque out there?

                We are going ahead with people who have asked to speak.

                Richard, we have received from you a brief, and by the way, I commend you for it, it's a nicely written brief. I may disagree with some of your concepts but anyway, it was nice the way it was presented.

At this point, Schiller watched a slim, blond man with a prominent nose, rather small chin, and a look of considerable elegance, stand up. Schiller assumed the man had to be a lawyer for the ACLU or some such group, and made a mental note to interview him when the time came, for he looked interesting. Giauque carried himself with the superiority of knowing he was probably more intelligent than nearly anyone he talked to. Perhaps, for this reason, he never once looked at Gilmore. Gary, in turn, stared at him with considerable intensity, and Schiller could feel the basis of Gilmore's rancor—a man from the other side of the tracks was talking about him.

GIAUQUE           Mr. Chairman, I would like to make a very brief comment here that goes to the power of the Board. We are asking that the Board continue the present Stay of Execution, until such time as the questions that we do not believe you can decide, have been decided by a Court.

                Society has an interest in this wholly apart from Mr. Gilmore's wishes. I do think that there are some facts here that ought to be looked into. One of them is whether or not he has voluntarily waived his legal rights, or whether or not he is asking the State merely to become an accomplice . . . It is not Mr. Gilmore's desire that is paramount here and I would merely ask, Mr. Chairman, . . . that the decision to utilize the death sentence not be made by Mr. Gilmore and not be made by this Board, but . . . be resolved by the Courts.

CHAIRMAN        Well, I am going to answer you . . . We are not going to continue this case to wait for somebody else to decide what the law may and may not be . . . We are here to see that the case does not continue forever, and back up everybody, and the State of Utah, on the capital punishment laws. From my personal standpoint, I would not favor a continuance.

A little while later came the first break in the hearing. Gilmore was led out, and the members of the Board of Pardons quit the room.

                Few among the media gave up their positions. In fact, they looked to better them.

By now, Earl Dorius was close to rage, as close as he ever got.

                He still hadn't prepared his Writ of Mandamus to the Tenth Circuit Court, yet here he was losing an entire morning at this hearing that was being conducted in the worst possible fashion. He couldn't understand how Sam Smith had ever allowed it. What did he see in the intermission—you had to call it an "intermission" rather than a recess, they were creating such TV theatre—but this fellow Schiller sitting in one of the chairs that belonged to the Attorney General's staff. Like a director's chair, it had been carefully marked with Bill Evans's name on masking tape. Dorius kept whispering to Evans, "Just pull that chair out from under him," which was about as uncharacteristic for Earl as anything he could remember. He didn't usually go around suggesting people lay their physical hands on other people, but the state of this place, the disregard of the media for the premises, was truly disgusting.

Dorius was amazed at the lack of security. There were no electric scanners at the door, and nobody had been patted down by hand search. One strange cameraman after another came in with huge equipment bags. My God! Anybody could bring in a Magnum and blast a hole through Gary. The Warden should have had the ultimate authority to tell the press to stay out, but somebody higher than him didn't seem to mind the publicity. Dorius was disgusted with his own client. If they had to televise it, why didn't the prison, for heaven's sake, ask for a pool arrangement, one camera, one member of the radio medium, one writer? It was crazy the way everybody had jammed in. Still, Earl was impressed with one thing. It was actually possible this fellow Gilmore was not for show.

At the County Jail, they let Gibbs out to the front office to watch the hearing with some cops and jailers. They were all glued to the TV set. Gibbs thought it was one hell of a soap opera. When Gary told the Court they were cowards, Gibbs started laughing so loud the cops gave him a funny look.

Gary won by a vote of 3-2. On TV they said the likelihood was that his execution would be set for December 6th, in order to come in under the sixty-day rule from his sentencing on October 7th. Gibbs thought, Gary Gilmore may only be on earth another week.

DESERET NEWS

Salt Lake, Nov. 30—The National Coalition Against the Death Penalty, an association of more than 40 national, religious, legal, minority, political and professional organizations, issued a strong statement late Tuesday over the action of the Utah Pardon Board.

                "This makes possible the first court-sanctioned homicide in the U.S. in 10 years" the statement noted . . .

                Organizations participating in the coalition include the ACLU, the American Ethical Union, The American Friends Service Committee, The American Ortho-Psychiatric Association, The Central Conference of American Rabbis, and others.

Chapter 12

THE GOVERNMENT SERVANT

Earl knew he wouldn't call it admiration, but during the Board of Pardons Hearing, he did get to feel good about the way Gilmore was conducting himself. The man was on a hunger strike, yet his intellect was keen. Dorius was glad to feel something positive. He had lost a great deal of respect when Gilmore tried to commit suicide. All that big dramatic talk about justice, and then the chicken way out. In Dorius's eyes, Gilmore was redeeming himself.

                Earl realized how ironic it was. The only thing he and Gilmore had in common was looking to expedite the execution, each for his own reasons. Hardly what you would call a bond. Still, there he was rooting for the man at this hearing as if they were members of the same team. But then, you had to applaud the other guy when he made a really fine play. Of course, Earl supposed his feeling had self-interest. The Gilmore business would probably be the only thing he'd worked on that they might still write about fifty years from now. After Gilmore, sob, sob, my life will be downhill. Truly, it was doubtful he would ever again be so active on a case of national and international concern. People he had met years ago in England on his LDS mission were even beginning to correspond with him again, people he had actually brought into the Church seven and eight years ago. So it had to please Earl that he was the first man in the office to recognize the importance of it all.