May 14
CONNECTICUT:
After a Mostly Silent Execution, Some Questions Remain
Michael Bruce Ross went to his death early Friday morning with his eyes
closed and his mouth shut.
Strapped to a table inside a state prison in Somers, in northern
Connecticut, Mr. Ross gasped and shuddered as the chemicals entered his
arm intravenously, according to 5 news media witnesses. At 2:25 a.m., he
became the 1st person executed in New England in 45 years.
Over the last year, the serial killer who murdered 8 teenage girls and
young women, raping most of them, had abandoned his appeals and fought to
be put to death. He dismissed those who would save him and said frequently
that he wanted to bring peace to the families of his victims.
In the end, however, when he was asked whether he wanted to make a final
statement before the 21 people who came to witness his death, he said, "No
thank you."
"It was just a cowardly exit on his behalf in that he couldn't even face
the families," said Edwin Shelley, whose daughter Leslie was 14 when Mr.
Ross strangled her in 1984. "There was no, 'I'm sorry,' no remorse shown
at all."
While his silence frustrated some, it also added to the mysteries that had
surrounded his motive: Had he truly acted out of sympathy for the victims?
Had he been driven to suicide by his years of solitary confinement? Or, as
psychiatrists suggested, had he gone stoically to death in a grand act of
vanity, a narcissist with a need to appear noble?
Or did it matter?
"To be honest, I didn't care what his motives were," Mr. Shelley said. "He
had made the comment that he wished to die. His wish is my wish,
regardless of how he dies."
Mr. Ross apparently never wavered on his final day.
"By the afternoon, he was - I don't want to say giddy - but by the time he
knew that no court was going to change anything, he became upbeat and
started joking around," said Martha R. H. Elliott, a writer who has
interviewed Mr. Ross extensively and spent more than 6 hours with him
before he died.
6 inmates remain on death row in Connecticut and several lawyers and death
penalty experts said that Mr. Ross's execution was not likely to speed
their path to execution. The death penalty has little support in the
Northeast, where only Pennsylvania and now Connecticut have carried out
executions in the last 40 years.
Given the rarity of capital punishment in the region, the distinctive case
of Mr. Ross led Connecticut and its courts on a strange psychological
journey that concluded on an uncommonly cold morning in May..
The case, drawn out over 2 decades, was replayed - and amplified - in a
few frantic months this year. Against the wishes of Mr. Ross, other
people, including his sister and father, tried to stop the execution. Some
claimed that Mr. Ross was incompetent, that his decisions were driven by
mental illness.
They seemed to have succeeded in January, after intervention by a federal
judge halted Mr. Ross's initial execution date that month. But a new
execution date, in May, was scheduled almost immediately, and a new round
of legal challenges began.
Judges reviewed testimony that "sexual sadism" controlled Mr. Ross's
crimes and that "malignant narcissism" controlled his desire to die. Death
penalty opponents accused the state, in one of the nation's most liberal
regions, of reverting to barbarism.
And then he was dead.
"The odd thing about the whole thing," said Kenton Robinson, a reporter
for The Day of New London who witnessed the execution, "was just the
silence." The state's first execution by lethal injection was carried out
at Osborn Correctional Institution, hidden behind a grassy slope in
Somers.
About 1 a.m., John Stamm was among 300 protesters walking quietly along a
two-lane rural road in the dark toward the prison entrance.
Mr. Stamm, 86, said his views against capital punishment were rooted in
his childhood in Germany, where he "saw the Nazis kill people." Asked
whether Mr. Ross's was a life worth saving, he said, "I think everyone is
capable of redemption; it doesn't mean they'll all make it."
Mr. Ross spent his final day in a holding cell, reading the Bible and
praying with several spiritual advisers. His last meal was turkey a la
king. He received last rites from a prison chaplain shortly before he was
escorted to the execution chamber about 1:30 a.m.
"He was at peace and he was ready," said Kathy Jaeger, who described
herself as a spiritual advocate and who met with him about 10 p.m.
Nine relatives of Mr. Ross's victims witnessed the execution. They stood
in the middle of a witness room with a victims' advocate, and the 2
detectives who had arrested Mr. Ross. On either side of them, separated by
heavy gray curtains, were 4 people there at Mr. Ross's request and 5 news
media witnesses with notepads and pens.
At 2:08 a.m., another curtain that had blocked the execution chamber
opened and revealed Mr. Ross strapped to a padded table, his arms
outstretched.
A microphone was mounted near the table but Mr. Ross chose not to make a
statement. Ms. Jaeger said Mr. Ross considered making an apology but "just
didn't know if he was going to be able to deliver it, from wherever he was
spiritually, emotionally."
"When he said, 'No thank you,' I was disappointed," she said. "But I
understood. I mean, my God, this guy's about to die, and knowingly."
A warden placed a call from the chamber to receive the execution order.
"Is there any legal impediment preventing me from issuing this order?"
Theresa C. Lantz, commissioner of the Department of Correction, asked the
chief state's attorney, Christopher L. Morano.
Over a web of open phone lines, lawyers and court clerks made a final
round of checks to see whether any stays of execution had been ordered.
None had been.
The injection began at 2:13 a.m.
"He definitely gasped and shuddered," said Shelly Sindland, a reporter for
WTIC-TV.
Some heard a family member say, sarcastically, "Uh, feeling some pain?"
And then, after the color appeared to fade from Mr. Ross's face, another
family member said, "It was too peaceful."
The execution had been scheduled for 2:01 a.m., "or as soon thereafter as
possible," according to a Correction Department directive. As the clock
neared 2:30 a.m., Christine Whidden, the warden of Robinson Correctional
Institution, addressed reporters gathered at the facility just down the
road.
"Death occurred at 2:25 a.m. on this day," she said.
Debbie Dupuis, the sister of Robin Stavinsky, who Mr. Ross murdered in
1983 when she was 19, told reporters, "I thought I would feel closure, but
I felt anger just watching him lay there and just sleep after what he did
to these women."
Brian Garnett, a Correction Department spokesman, said later that the
execution occurred slightly later than scheduled because "we were ensuring
that everything was done appropriately."
"There were no issues with the procedure last night," he said. "It went
totally according to plan."
(source: New York Times)
