H. Palmer Hall

We are killing so many people on death row here in Texas that I thought I might tell you about the day I killed a man. I did not pull the trigger, but had I not been there a young man named Bao would not have died.
          I had been in the Central Highlands of Vietnam for only a couple of months. During the previous few weeks, the VC and NVA had been carrying out massive attacks on the U.S. base at Dak To (only a couple of miles from the tri-border area of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam). For a week or so after the battle, American convoys making supply runs from Dak To to Pleiku were ambushed almost every day. We knew it was going to happen because we were intercepting messages from someone spying on the base camp at Dak To. The reports always indicated the time the convoy left Dak To and the number of vehicles (three jeeps, five big trucks, three personnel carriers, and so on) in the convoy.  Somewhere on Vietnam Highway 14  that convoy would be attacked.
          I was sent to Dak To, feet dangling out of a HUEY as I looked down on, first, rice paddies, bomb craters like pimples on a teenager, and then densely canopied hills and mountains with strange names like Ngok Rinh Rua. The first night I was there, the VC dropped mortars and rockets on the camp, and I pretty much spent the night in a reinforced bunker.
          The next day, I got to work. I was able to triangulate Bao’s position using the Army’s Direction Finding gear. He was on a hill overlooking the camp and about a klick away. We had already known he could see the camp, but high hills surrounded it, and we had no idea which one he was hiding on until I was able to fix his position.
          The next morning, the camp commander sent out a pre-arranged convoy, and I listened to the radio on Bao’s frequency.  When he began to broadcast, I gave the signal and then walked outside. Within a very few minutes, American jets dropped napalm all over the spot I had indicated and then circled back to strafe the whole area. If you have not seen napalm except in movies like Apocalypse Now, you have no idea of the sheer beauty this death bringer can display. It opens up like flowers blooming as if the blossom developed in only a few seconds in those old Disney nature films.  With napalm blossoms no ultra-slow motion is needed.
          I stayed the next day when the camp commander sent out another convoy. He wanted to be sure the millions of dollars in munitions he had expended had killed one young man.  The convoy went out and there was not even a carrier sound on Bao’s frequency.  Oh, yes, I am not certain “Bao” was his real name. “Bao chi” is Vietnamese for “reporter,” but he ended all his messages with “Het Roi! Bao.” “That’s all, Bao.”
          For years, I have thought back about that incident: about the young man at the other end of my radio, about napalm blossoms, about responsibility.  I pointed the finger at Bao, the commander ordered the attack on him, three pilots dropped the napalm and strafed the area, Congress sanctioned the whole thing, the President bore some responsibility, taxpayers bore the rest.  But, ultimately, I think I’m the one who pulled the trigger. I pointed the gun when I pointed my finger, the pilots were only the physical triggers, part of my weapon.
          I suspect that I am also responsible for what is going to happen once again someday soon when a man, perhaps with only one witness against him, perhaps who had an attorney who slept through most of the proceedings, perhaps who could be cleared with DNA tests since no other physical evidence convicts him, will have an IV inserted in a vein and will fall asleep without waking up.  In Texas we prefer not to think we have killed an innocent man, but we sometimes do.
          I often thought, while marching in demonstrations against the war, almost as soon as I returned from Vietnam, that I was
really marching for Bao as much as for the American soldiers who would still die in the war. People, today, march frequently in Austin and in Huntsville, Texas, against another kind of government-sanctioned killing. I am not marching, though I know I should. Perhaps it’s age and cynicism, perhaps it’s that there have been too many such demonstrations and too few results. I came home from Vietnam in 1968, after the Tet Offensive had pretty much demonstrated that we were not going to win that little war, and, only a short time later, a man running for president indicated that he had a “secret plan” to end the war. Almost as many Americans and Vietnamese died after he became president as had died before that date.
          And now, another man running for president refuses to consider DNA evidence and fires a panel he appointed to investigate the possibility that we killed an innocent man, Claude Jones (Had I mentioned his name?  We need to remember his name!), convicted erroneously and murdered by the State ten years ago. Yes, we are all guilty of something, but he was not guilty of that murder.*
          This is going nowhere. But it’s what I’m thinking about, rambling though my thoughts. The injections that take the lives of Texas death row inmates are not as spectacular as watching a whole hillside light up with deep red napalm blossoms to kill a single man, but the results, though cheaper to achieve, are  identical.

Claude Jones Texas Convicted 1989 Executed 2000

Executed But Possibly Innocent

There is no way to tell how many of the over 1,000 people executed since 1976 may also have been innocent. Courts do not generally entertain claims of innocence when the defendant is dead. Defense attorneys move on to other cases where clients' lives can still be saved. Some cases with strong evidence of innocence include:
Carlos DeLuna Texas Conviction: 1983, Executed: 1989
Ruben Cantu Texas Convicted: 1985, Executed: 1993
Larry Griffin Missouri Conviction: 1981, Executed: 1995
Joseph O'Dell Virginia Conviction: 1986, Executed: 1997
David Spence Texas Conviction: 1984, Executed: 1997
Leo Jones Florida Convicted: 1981, Executed: 1998
Gary Graham Texas Convicted: 1981, Executed: 2000,
Claude Jones Texas Convicted 1989, Executed 2000
Cameron Willingham Texas Convicted: 1992, Executed: 2004