Without clemency from the governor, Don Johnson will be put to death on May 16
As detailed in his application for clemency, which was delivered to Gov. Bill Lee earlier this month, Johnson’s mother Ruby was married to a relentlessly brutal man named James Lee who “throughout their 46 years of marriage … treated Ruby like a whipped animal.”
Her husband slapped, beat and choked her, Johnson’s lawyers write. At one point, Ruby fled to Michigan, and a brief relationship with another man, Elmer Young, left her pregnant with a baby boy. But she returned to James Lee in hopes of finding financial security. “It was into this violent and hate-filled home that Don Johnson was born,” Johnson’s lawyers write.
They go on: “Donnie Johnson was a frail little boy, with bad eyes, and no love. He wore coke bottle glasses and was a regular target of bullies (at school and at home). He was routinely and mercilessly beaten by James Lee for any and all reasons. James Lee would use a leather shaving strop, a switch, or his fists and feet. Through all of this abuse, Don Johnson was kept ignorant of his true origin — he was raised believing that James Lee was his biological father, and that his biological father hated him.”
Now 68 years old, Don Johnson sits on death row more than 30 years after a Shelby County jury convicted him of the murder of his wife, Connie Johnson. Barring an act of mercy from the governor, Johnson will be executed on May 16 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
The attorneys pleading on his behalf for that act of mercy have built their case on Johnson’s remarkable redemption story, and his reconciliation with Connie’s daughter, Cynthia Vaughn.
“This is a case for which clemency was designed,” they write. “While Don Johnson’s death sentence may be legally acceptable under all of the analytical considerations of dispassionate law, it is not morally right — in the words of Alexander Hamilton it would be ‘unduly cruel.’ The remarkable transformation that Don has made warrants mercy. Cynthia Vaughn, the person with the greatest claim on his life, deserves to have her forgiveness honored.”
Johnson and Vaughn’s relationship is indeed an extraordinary testament to the power of forgiveness and the possibility of redemption — one that challenges notions about what the death penalty does for victims. But it is Johnson’s violent, abusive childhood that makes him fit in perfectly with the men who have gone before him into Riverbend’s execution chamber. For the most part, this is who we put to death — men who have been victimized, starting at a heartrendingly young age, and have gone on to victimize others as adults. Along with mental illness, childhood abuse is such a common feature of death row prisoners’ stories that one risks becoming inured to the descriptions of physical and psychological violence.
All 3 men executed in Tennessee last year were said to have experienced varying degrees of physical abuse as children at the hands of their parents.
Billy Ray Irick (executed Aug. 9 by lethal injection) was sent to his first mental health institution at the age of 6. He told people “that his mother mistreats him, that she ties him up with a rope and beats him,” according to a clinical social worker who performed an assessment of him.
Ed Zagorski (executed Nov. 1 by electrocution) grew up in a dilapidated home with a mother who suffered from mental illness and would chase after him trying to beat him. On one occasion, according to an affidavit signed by a cousin, Zagorski’s mother broke his arm. Even in this context, the details of David Miller’s upbringing are particularly disturbing. Miller (executed Dec. 6 by electrocution) was repeatedly sexually assaulted by his mother — in addition to other family members and adults — who also beat him, whipping him with a belt, an extension cord, a wire coat hanger and an umbrella. Miller’s stepfather, according to court documents, once “knocked David out of a chair, hit him with a board, threw him into a refrigerator with such force it dented the refrigerator and bloodied David’s head, dragged him through the house by his hair, and twice ran David’s head through the wall.”
In Johnson’s case, after enduring years of violence, he started acting out and running away from home. When he was 14, he was sent to a juvenile facility known as Jordonia where he lived for six months. Newspaper clippings from around that time in the 1960s referred to Jordonia — officially called the State Vocational Training School for White Boys — as a “concentration camp” and a “prep school for the pen.” In Johnson’s clemency application, his attorneys write that he suffered physical abuse there and was victim of an attempted rape.
After a brief return home, Johnson — then a teenager — was sent to Pikeville, another notorious juvenile facility. Johnson’s attorneys quote newspaper reports about the conditions there: “The Kingsport Times-News described a sentence to Pikeville as ‘like going to Hell.’ A Murfreesboro Daily News-Journal headline read ‘Humans Treated Worse Than Animals, Report Says.’”
As quoted by his attorneys, Johnson describes his stint in the Ohio Penitentiary as a relief by comparison: “It was like going from the darkness into the light, the conditions in prison were so much better.”
Johnson’s attorneys stress that he “does not place blame for his subsequent wrongs on his father, on Jordonia, or on Pikeville.” But to explain is not to excuse. People who are abused as children are, of course, not destined for a life of violent crime. But is it any surprise that so many men on America’s death rows were victims first before they went on to make victims of their own?
Source: Nashville Scene, Steven Hale, April 17, 2019
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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