Lee Harbaugh

Introduction

This post is part of my series exploring the death penalty. For much of my life, I supported capital punishment, and I eventually became the foreman of a jury that sent a Tarrant County, Texas man to death row in 2012. Here, I discuss my reasons for initially believing the death penalty was a useful tool.

In 1972, I was far too young to understand what was transpiring in the world of the American criminal justice system. This was the year that the Supreme Court effectively ruled that the various states' implementation of the death penalty was cruel and unusual in its landmark case Furman v. Georgia. Four years later, after many states created workarounds to the Furman v. Georgia decision, the Supreme Court turned around and ruled in Gregg v. Georgia that executions could indeed continue.

In spite of all this happening in my early childhood, I wouldn't come to understand anything about capital punishment until a few years later. I was probably 6 or 7 (1978-ish) when I first heard about state-sanctioned killings. I remember my mother telling me that sometimes they would strap a person to a chair and electrocute them. This seemed unimaginable to me. Why would they ever do that to someone? To my young mind, that seemed off-the-charts cruel and wrong, no matter what the person had done.

But the first time I ever really experienced any kind of discussion about the rightness/wrongness of the death penalty came in 1982 as Texas was preparing to execute its first prisoner since the Supreme Court's 1976 Gregg v. Georgia ruling.

Charlie Brooks

I entered the 6th grade in the fall of 1982. Where I grew up (Grand Prairie, Texas), the 6th grade was part of middle school, so this was a big semester for me. It was the first time I had a locker at school. It was the first time I met many of the folks I would become lifelong friends with. It was the first time I had to change clothes for P.E. class, and I was expected to shower afterward! It was my first time to play in band. Suddenly, all my classes were a little harder. It was my first time to take a history class or a literature class.

This was also the first time I can recall having class discussions at school about serious current-event topics. That fall, the state of Texas was preparing to make history. It had been 18 years since the state had last executed anyone, and no state had carried out an execution since the 1972 Furman ruling. But in late 1982, Texas was making final arrangements to execute Charlie Brooks for the 1976 murder of David Gregory, a used car lot mechanic. It would be the first execution in the U.S. since the Supreme Court effectively reinstated capital punishment in 1976, and it would also be the first execution in the world carried out by lethal injection.

Arguments for the Death Penalty

As Texas was preparing to execute Charlie Brooks, the story was all the talk around the state and the nation. I can remember people at school talking about it, people at church talking about it, and the adults at family gatherings talking about it. Kids talked about it too, but I don't think at the time we were truly aware of the significance of what was transpiring.

It was in the settings of school, church, and home that I first came to hear rational arguments in favor of using the death penalty.

I specifically remember an English class at school. Sometime around the December 7, 1982 execution, the teacher decided we would have a class discussion about the death penalty. To the best of my memory, there wasn't much actual debate about it. The overarching tenor of the discussion was in favor of its use, and most people who spoke that day spoke in favor of capital punishment, including the teacher. If anyone was staunchly opposed to it, they remained largely silent.

The overwhelming argument that was presented that day was that the death penalty could help keep us all safe by eliminating the worst of the worst criminals. Without it, it would always be possible for the most violent to harm again. Some people are simply so vile and so wicked that the only appropriate action for us as a society to take is to kill them—so the argument went.

Then, there were the arguments I heard at church. I grew up in a Southern Baptist church in the heart of the Bible belt. Southern Baptists—at least in the 1970s and 1980s—were generally very conservative politically as well as religiously and ideologically. There are passages in the Bible (especially the Old Testament) that appear to support capital punishment (see Leviticus 24:17-23 as an example). As such, in those days most Southern Baptists supported its use in modern times. (Never mind the fact that Jesus basically turned this passage on its head in Matthew 5:38-48. This is a discussion for another day.)

Between school and church, I was hearing that the death penalty kept us safer by eliminating the most violent criminals, and it also adhered to God's word because some Old Testament scriptures seemed to support its use. How could I oppose it?

Assimilating the Death Penalty Arguments

To a generally good kid such as myself, these arguments favoring the death penalty seemed logical and reasonable. Of course I wanted our society safer. Of course, I wanted to protect the innocent. Of course I wanted to obey God's word.

It was in this milieu that I began to form a very solid belief that the death penalty was a useful form of punishment. At home, I always felt my mom said it best: "We shouldn't use the death penalty often, but occasionally, for the worst of the worst, executing them is probably best for everyone."

And it was this exact line of reasoning that I embraced for the next 30 years. In fact, I am convinced that this statement is most likely what got me on the jury in 2012.

One of the many questions the attorneys asked us during voir dire—the portion of the trial in which the attorneys choose a jury—was whether we supported the death penalty and why. I had answered this question much in the way my mom had answered it for me decades prior, and one of the attorneys grilled me about it one day during voir dire. He asked me to spell out scenarios in which I felt the death penalty was useful. As I answered, I could tell he and the other attorneys were trying to determine if I showed any signs of biasedness or prejudice (not just racial or gender, but even against those who commit crimes or those who are just on trial for a crime). I also felt like he was trying to determine whether I had written something on my initial questionnaire that I didn’t truly believe—and whether he could wrestle it out of me.

But what I had written and what I was answering during that voir dire were absolutely true for me. I didn't believe the death penalty should be used often. But in clear-cut cases in which the defendant was definitively guilty and an absolute danger to those around him or her, I did think it was prudent to execute.

Conclusion

And so it was. After hearing those rational sounding arguments in favor of the death penalty in the early 1980s, I believed that the death penalty was a valid and useful form of punishment in certain situations. And though I would occasionally hear of someone who would make the case that we should never execute anyone, I never once visited this subject in my own mind again until I came face to face with it during the trial of Kwame Rockwell in 2012.

To me, it seemed simple and logical. If someone committed a vile act of violence and was dangerous to others, the safest thing for all of us was to eliminate them. By nature, I am generally a kind and compassionate person. I don't tend to fly off the handle easily, and I can't think of having ever been in a fight after about age 10 or 12. I point this out to say that even when I thought capital punishment was warranted in certain situations, I never thought it should be used willy-nilly. I always felt that taking a life was a heavy decision and one that should be respected greatly.

But in those rare situations in which a person was clearly guilty and dangerous, I did believe that taking their life through a state-sanctioned execution was right and moral. I believed it was in the best interest of all of us to do so.

That all changed after I sat on a capital jury. In my next post, I will talk about how the voir dire process impacted me and subtly began to alter my thinking even before the trial began.