NASHVILLE – David Earl Miller didn't care that I came to see him die.
He didn't care if anyone heard his last words. He didn't mention Lee Standifer, the woman he beat and stabbed to death a generation ago, didn't bother to apologize — even when he got a second chance to speak as all of us in the witness chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution leaned toward the glass in the dark.
Those might have been the only words he could say that her family would have wanted to hear. I heard the disappointment in her mother's voice. No more delays I won't write what was said on that phone call. I called the mother — with her permission — to give her the chance to speak for her daughter, since she chose not to make the trip to Tennessee from Arizona for Thursday's execution. But everything she wanted to say publicly, she's said. She's in her 80s now. She wants to remember her daughter, not Miller. But she wanted to hear the case was finally over.
For three decades, the brown envelopes in the mail found her as she and Lee Standifer's father, now dead, moved across the country — another notification, another appeal, another delay. She'll never get another one of those envelopes again. Mumbled last words I was 5 years old when Miller killed Lee Standifer, a woman he barely knew, in South Knoxville the night of May 20, 1981. Some of the reporters in the witness chamber Thursday night weren't yet born.
Two Knox County juries sentenced Miller to die for the crime. A faded clipping in the News Sentinel morgue tells how he showed "no expression" when he heard the sentence — maybe the same look he showed as he sat waiting in the electric chair Thursday night. He didn't look like the center of attention, didn't look like the longhaired young drifter turned interstate fugitive in his 37-year-old mug shot.
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He barely looked up at all as the blinds rose on the window to the death chamber. He sat strapped into the electric chair, bald, flabby, pale as the institutional white paint on the walls of the prison hallways. He looked resigned, indifferent — maybe even bored — as the warden asked him for any last words. If not for the straps, he might have shrugged. We could barely make out what he mumbled, either time. His attorney gave us his best guess at the statement: "Beats being on death row."
None of Miller's family came to see him die. No surprise. His appellate briefs tell a consistent story of a life of anger, alienation and abuse, from daily beatings to sexual violation to drug and alcohol abuse that began at the earliest age. He tried suicide over and over — the last time just before the hitchhiking trip that brought him to Knoxville where he met Lee Standifer.
He told psychologists he dreamed nightly of his abusive stepfather staring him in the face, cursing him, wishing him more pain. He chose electrocution in apparent hopes it might be quicker, easier than lethal injection.
Did he get his wish? Or did he see the specter from his nightmares as the straps on the helmet buckled and the hood slipped over his face? I can't know that, anymore than I can know whether the same man who died in front of me was the same man mentally, emotionally, spiritually as when he killed Lee Standifer that night. All I can tell is what I heard and saw.
I saw the saline water run down his face from the sponge fastened atop his skull to help the electric current course through his body. I saw him wince when the solution dripped into his eyes before a guard wiped his face — almost tenderly — with a rag. I heard the click of a switch and the hum of a generator or exhaust fan as the current kicked on once. Then twice. I saw his body stiffen, arch, rise as much each time as the straps allowed until the current stopped and a corpse slumped back into the chair. I heard the warden pronounce him dead and the sentence "carried out."
What I saw looked like a man who didn't care about life — not his, not Lee Standifer's, not even as he breathed for the last time.
Source: independentmail.com, Matt Lakin, December 7, 2018
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde