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Helping Karl
Friends Journal
April 2008
I can never do enough to amend the wrong I have done; but I cannot go back, so I go forward and do my best. With the help of many good friends, by the grace of God, there have been miracles and changes.
How could I, or someone like me, ever be a "future danger?" I tell you the truth with all my heart: I would not lie to save my own life—to save someone else's, perhaps. But not where justice was concerned. Other than basic self-defense, I would never harm another human being, ever. At Ellis unit I was nearly raped because I didn't even want to involve myself in a mere fistfight. But I finally realized I was naïve, idealistic, and that sometimes hitting a fool in the mouth opens his eyes and ears.
How do you feel about the victim's family or survivors?
There are not enough words to say how sorry I am, and how indebted I am to them for the rest of my life, until they feel they can forgive, until they feel justice has been done.Do you think execution will change anything for the victim's family? Or just cause more hurt and more victims?
I can completely understand how it might temporarily satisfy the victim's family. I would not resist their vengeance; but it is that kind of hate and hurt that destroyed me.How about your family? How have they dealt with this situation?
My mother has tried to commit suicide many times. It took me half my life to realize that it wasn't that she didn't love me, but that she was so destroyed as a child that she is still mostly like a little girl insideFor me, this is the hardest thing. I don't mind dying at all; even my own suffering in prison I do not complain about, I strive not to complain about, because suffering expiates sin. The fact that my entire family has been torn apart; that my friends have lost faith in themselves, in our justice system, because they were denied the right to answer pertinent questions—to me this is also an evil. We like to say that "eye for an eye" is just, but the truth is that we are often blinded by our own prejudice, our fallible system—because who will stand beside a murderer?
How has this process changed or colored your view of the justice system?
How can the system learn from its crimes and mistakes? When a new death house chaplain ends up becoming jaded and destroyed after months, or years, of watching men die, they just replace him with a new recruit. When guards burn out, there are always more people desperate for a job—and the prosecutors, police investigators, the judges at trial and especially on appeal—they never have to talk to me, they never have to see me as a human being, or the consequences of their decisions when I die. They say that aloofness makes justice impartial, but it also removes the responsibility from their actions.Are you ready to die?
In a sense, I died years ago. All the good in my life, the people I may have helped over the years, the changes in myself and my life, all these lie at the innocent feet of my victim. And if I truly thought my death would do any good, I would have died years ago by my own hand, or by simply dropping my appeals."To die is nothing; not to live is terrible," Victor Hugo once wrote, and I believe that. I am so sorry that I did not begin to understand life until after I had done such an irrevocable wrong.
Over the years of being caged, condemned to die, how have you dealt with it? How do you keep from going crazy?
Who says I'm not crazy? Life is crazy. The experience of being human is one full of isolation, fear, and suffering. If you understand this, if you are willing to face this like facing death, then everything else comes naturally.
