Yes, signs and wonders are still happening, for the great kitschier Stefan Zweig it would have been a great moment. On Friday noon local time, not quite at the last minute, but four hours before the appointment, Kevin Stitt, the governor of Oklahoma, let himself be softened and pardoned Julius Jones to life imprisonment. Civil rights activists, law students, church officials and part-time benefactor Kim Kardashian stood up for Jones and stormed the governor to kill the man. Four hours later he would have been executed with lethal injection.
Nowhere in the western world is execution so enthusiastic as in the United States. Only three weeks ago a delinquent was taken from a neighboring cell and led to the execution. John Marion Grant received the injection but was not easy to kill. Before he actually died, he twitched and vomited for several minutes, but that was justice for the state.
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to speak of a judicial lust for murder. There have been several attempts to abolish the death penalty – it had just been reintroduced in Oklahoma after a six-year hiatus – but it was politically too lucrative. Arnold Schwarzenegger, born in Europe and a comparatively liberal Republican, did not hesitate to wave through death sentences during his tenure as governor of California. The Democrat Bill Clinton knew exactly what votes would bring when he stopped the election campaign in 1992 to approve the execution of the brain-damaged Ricky Ray Rector in the state of Arkansas, which he ruled. People shouldn’t tear their mouths up over the just leaked affair with Gennifer Flowers. “Clinton made a conscious choice to die as a distraction from sex,” as columnist Christopher Hitchens wrote. Ten months later, Clinton was elected president.
Nobody showed as much understanding for murderers as Dostoevsky
It is unpopular for criminals to stand up for murderers, to feel pity for them and not just for their victims is considered barbaric. Nobody showed as much understanding for murderers as Dostoevsky. That may also have something to do with the fact that he himself stood before the firing squad before he was pardoned. The revolutionary writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 27 at the time, was arrested in 1849 and convicted of “participating in criminal schemes and distributing a letter full of cheeky expressions against the Orthodox Church and the supreme power”. The highest power, that was the tsar.
Tsar Nikolaus saw himself as a soldier, he loved order, and every detail was important to him. He had personally drawn up the floor plan for the scaffold, also determined how the soldiers’ escort should be positioned, everything down to the roll of the drum. Only the fact that the graves were already being dug, that one had been able to talk the chief judge Nikolaus out of it.
In a letter to his brother, Dostoevsky described what his end would look like: “Today, December 22nd, we were all taken to Semjónov Square. There the death sentence was read to us, we were given a kiss on the cross over our heads a sword was broken and we were dressed (white shirts) for the funeral. Then three of us were placed in front of the stakes where the execution was to take place. It was my sixth turn, we were called in groups of three, and so I was in the second group and had no more than a minute to live. I had just enough time to hug Pleschtschéjew and Dúrov, who were standing next to me, and say goodbye to them. “
The sentence “condemned to death by fusilizing” hit him completely unexpectedly, in modern terms he was in shock, but at the same time was able to register abundantly how the bailiff who had pronounced the verdict folded the sheet on which it was written and put it in pocketed and descended from the scaffold. And then all of a sudden it was over, the order to shoot did not come. “Those who had already been tied to the stakes were brought back and it was read to us that His Majesty the Emperor had given us life.”
Jones has become a celebrity
Julius Jones was also given life. It is certain that he is a convicted murderer. According to the court, he killed a man in 1999 when he was nineteen. Three years later he was sentenced to death despite pleading innocence and claiming that he was not the culprit but was tricked. So Jones spent nineteen years on death row, has probably closed with his life several times and regained hope, has seen how people who did not know him stand up for him, has also seen the family of Powell Hunter whom he allegedly killed, has no understanding of mitigation. Three years ago, ABC ran a documentary about him and his case, “The Last Defense”. Jones has become a celebrity.
The Tsar of Oklahoma is called Kevin Stitt, he has pardoned a convicted murderer to life imprisonment with no prospect of a reduction in the sentence. He did not make it easy for himself with his decision, as he explained: Until the penultimate minute he hesitated whether he should follow the recommendation of the pardon committee. Stitt let the public know that he had “weighed up reverently”. Julius Jones was lucky: he won’t be fusilized, no lethal injection for him. But the next execution is sure to come.