A few weeks ago, 19-year-old KaSheena Hooks drove to Huntsville from the small town of Fred, Texas, with her husband, her sister and brother-in-law, and her aunt and uncle, to witness the end of a 16-year ordeal. They’d driven to Huntsville before. On a cool night in early December, KaSheena endured the distressing experience of waiting in the red brick building across from the Huntsville Unit’s death house for the execution of Kevin Lee Zimmerman. He’s the man who stabbed to death her father, Leslie Gilbert Hooks, in a drunken brawl in a motel room in Beaumont. Zimmerman was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1987 murder.
But about 15 minutes before the Dec. 10 execution would have occurred, Zimmerman received a stay from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
So, in late January, KaSheena made the trek again, and this time she was pretty certain the execution would happen – as it indeed did on the evening of Jan. 21. The Supreme Court had withdrawn the stay, and no court had agreed to hear the merits of the claim by Zimmerman’s attorneys that the chemicals used in the lethal injection process could cause excruciating pain that would be masked by the fact that one of them would paralyze all the inmate’s exterior muscles so that he would be unable to move, cry out, or exhibit any sign of pain.
Texas uses a combination of three chemicals for lethal injections: sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride. The first is a short-acting barbiturate that induces a brief loss of consciousness but, according to physicians, may wear off before the other chemicals take effect. The second, pancuronium bromide, paralyzes all exterior muscles, but without any decrease in sensation. It paralyzes the lungs, and the person may feel that paralysis. The third stops the heart.
Less is certain about executing human beings than about euthanizing animals, because the latter is more closely monitored by physicians. Veterinarians don’t use the combination of sodium thiopental and pancuronium bromide on animals because it is considered too cruel. In fact, in 2000 the American Veterinary Medical Association banned the use of pancuronium bromide. Their guidelines state that a “combination of pentobarbital with a neuromuscular blocking agent [such as pancuronium bromide] is not an acceptable euthanasia agent.” Last spring, the Legislature followed the veterinarians’ lead and changed the provisions of the Health and Safety Code relating to the methods of euthanasia for cats and dogs, to specifically preclude the use of pancuronium bromide by animal shelters.
Why does Texas continue to use pancuronium bromide for lethal injections on people? According to Dr. Gary Reisfield, an anesthesiologist and director of Palliative Medicine at the University of Florida Health Science Center in Jacksonville, the use of pancuronium bromide is not necessary – or even appropriate – during the execution process. The combination of sodium thiopental and potassium chloride, Reisfield states, will ensure that the heart is stopped and the person will die very quickly. “The only purpose [for using pancuronium bromide] might be to make the procedure less gruesome [for observers] and therefore easier for the witnesses to watch.” Reisfield and other physicians agree that the use of pancuronium bromide does nothing to ensure that the inmate doesn’t suffer during the execution, and it creates a possibility of tremendous pain – rendered invisible to the witnesses.
Kevin Zimmerman Credit: Photo By Jana Birchum
Anguish in Common The suffering that surrounds a capital criminal case is hardly limited to the person being executed. The anguish of Gilbert Hooks’ family is evident in the statement that they released shortly before Zimmerman’s execution. Hooks’ brother-in-law, Steven Shaver, spoke on behalf of the family: “Why is it that heartless criminals can commit such heinous crimes against humanity … yet the victim’s families are the ones who suffer the most injustice at the hands of a spineless legal system? … It’s a gross miscarriage of justice when death row killers get more sympathy and compassion than the murdered victims and the grieving families they are forced to leave behind.”
Zimmerman himself acknowledged the suffering of Hooks’ family in his final statement, delivered on the gurney before the lethal injection was administered. “In the name of Jesus, I am so sorry for the pain I caused y’all. I am sorry. Gilbert didn’t deserve to die, and I want y’all to know I am sorry.” This apology surprised Hooks’ oldest daughter, KaSheena. “I wasn’t expecting no apologies. I wasn’t expecting him to apologize, but I am glad that he did.” KaSheena went on to say, “I forgave him. When he said that, I shook my head, ‘Yes.'” KaSheena was also a little surprised when the chaplain gave the family a letter from Zimmerman’s ex-wife, Connie Guidry.
In the midst of her own anguish about the execution of her son’s father, a man she had loved for many years, Connie Guidry felt the need to reach out to Hooks’ family. “We, the family of Kevin,” Guidry wrote, “pray that this will bring closure to the Hooks family. The man executed today was a different man from who he was sixteen years ago. Through God’s love and forgiveness he found spiritual peace and solace. It is through this same peace that we find comfort.”
After delivering her letter to the chaplain, Guidry witnessed Zimmerman’s execution and then rushed home hoping her son would still be awake. She couldn’t wait to hug 18-year-old Kyle, who was just a toddler in diapers when he last hugged his father.
KaSheena was also a toddler when she last saw her father and had never properly mourned for him. Only recently had she learned the details of his death. “It was all kept from me,” she said. The publicity preceding the execution was a catalyst for her to want to find out more about her father and how he died. She wants to be able to pass on his story to her daughter, to be able to tell her daughter why her granddaddy isn’t around. Witnessing the execution, she says, was an extremely emotional and difficult experience – the day afterward, she was “still in shock.”
KaSheena said she believes that “justice has been served. It’s up to God now.” But she remains interested in finding out more about the case and reading what the newspapers have said about her father.
Multiplying the Pain
The news reports about Zimmerman’s execution also served as a catalyst for his son, Kyle Guidry. Worried about how they would react, Kyle had never really told his friends that his dad was on death row. After the story broke, he began to talk about it more. “When it hits the national news, it sort of forces you to talk about it,” Kyle said. Some of his friends were shocked, but most were supportive.
KaSheena Hooks and her family have received support from their church and community. It has helped them deal with the anguish that the execution – and the anticipation of the execution – caused. There was a service at their church in December, and two of the church members went to Huntsville then, and again in January, in support.
Kyle Guidry Credit: Photo By Jana Birchum
The Guidry family also has received support – but only from close friends and family. Connie recently explained: “You have to grieve in shame. You can’t grieve in public because you know how people are and the views that they have [about capital punishment]. You can’t be as open with your feelings and thoughts because they have no compassion.”
Any physical pain that Kevin Zimmerman felt at the time of his execution may have been concealed by the pancuronium bromide. But the psychological anguish of anticipating it was suggested in a comment that Zimmerman made a couple of weeks before the execution. “I’m not afraid to die,” he said, “but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t afraid to die with them using those chemicals.”
In his statement on behalf of the Hooks family, Steven Shaver said: “The family cannot comprehend why the murderer is not expected to suffer any pain, when he himself inflicted such immeasurable and unimaginable pain on the man they called husband and dad.” And yet, as the French writer Albert Camus observed in his essay “Reflections on the Guillotine” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: “An execution is not simply death. … Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated, can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months.”
The Banality of TDCJ
Austin capital defense attorney Keith Hampton would add that we don’t avoid a purposefully painful method of execution for the sake of the criminal, but for our own. “I saw this quote … from centuries ago in England, in which the writer noted: ‘We didn’t stop drawing and quartering because we felt sorry for the person we were drawing and quartering, but because we didn’t want it to taint us.'”
If the citizens of Texas, acting through the Legislature, have concluded that it is unacceptable to kill animals using a chemical that may cause significant suffering, why is that chemical still being used to execute people? “This whole controversy,” says UT law professor Jordan Steiker, “reflects the banality of the evil surrounding the death penalty. It is not a deliberate state decision to inflict gratuitous pain – but an unwieldy bureaucracy’s inability to remedy an obvious defect.”
There is no statute requiring that any particular chemicals be used in lethal injection, and the state agency overseeing executions – the Texas Department of Criminal Justice – could simply change the chemicals used by eliminating the pancuronium bromide. That change, however, is unlikely. The TDCJ maintains that the chemicals used ensure that the inmate doesn’t feel any pain. And yet, the Zimmerman case amply illustrates the reverberating psychological pain caused by the system’s official failure even to address the chemical issue.
KaSheena Hooks had to drive to Huntsville twice, prepare to witness the execution twice, because of the challenge to the chemicals. Kyle Guidry had to say goodbye to his father on two separate occasions, because TDCJ wouldn’t simply change the chemicals used for the lethal injection to those acceptable for euthanizing animals.
If it is cruel to use the trio of chemicals that are used in lethal injections – and it is difficult to determine that for certain, because TDCJ ceased conducting autopsies back in 1989 – perhaps, like drawing and quartering, it should be banned. Not for the sake of the person being executed, but for the sake of citizens of Texas.
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