TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — If jurors sentence Brendt Christensen to die for the kidnapping and killing of Yingying Zhang, his next move will be just over the state line — to the federal “death row” at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, where he’d join a list of infamous inmates.
Like Dylan Roof, the 25-year-old white supremacist — now the youngest in the Special Confinement Unit at the high-security federal prison — convicted for the 2015 Charleston, S.C., church shooting that left nine dead.
And Timothy McVeigh, who was housed in Terre Haute for two years, then put to death there, for killing 168 in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
Eighteen years after McVeigh’s execution, residents of the Indiana town of 60,000 still remember where they were at 7:14 a.m. June 11, 2001, when he became the first federal prisoner put to death since Victor Feguer 38 years earlier at the Iowa State Penitentiary in Fort Madison.
“It was chaos,” Terre Haute resident Jan Shirley recalls of the days leading up to McVeigh’s execution by lethal injection, the only method used by the federal government.
Shirley lives across State Highway 63 from the sprawling maximum-security complex that covers more than 1,100 acres along the Wabash River on the southwest side of the city. She remembers the masses camped along the highway back then — in yards, ditches and corners of fields — all awaiting word that inmate No. 12076-064 was dead.
“It was a big deal,” said Shirley, who’s gotten to see the inside of the federal execution chamber twice, both times while it was being built.
Her husband worked there for 20 years — as a guard, then foreman of a construction crew of inmates. During two retirement dinners, guests were given tours of the ongoing construction of the chamber, located in a small brick building separate from the penitentiary.
“It was scary,” Shirley said. “Just to think someday people would die there.”
‘It was like a circus’ for McVeigh’s day in 2001
Eight days after McVeigh was given a lethal series of three chemicals, Texas drug smuggler and convicted murderer Juan Garza was put to death in the same room.
Louis Jones Jr. — convicted in 1995 for the kidnapping, rape and murder of Army soldier Tracie Joy McBride — became the third person on Terre Haute’s death row to be executed.
That was on March 18, 2003, the most recent execution carried out in Terre Haute’s chamber.
If jurors choose death over life in prison for Christensen at the end of a sentencing phase that begins Monday in Peoria, he may spend a decade or more living in his own cell in the third-floor Special Confinement Unit at the Indiana federal prison before seeing the inside of the chamber — if he does at all.
For federal death row inmates, the appeal process “typically lasts at least a decade — and often significantly longer,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center. “Six times as many prisoners who are sentenced to death have had their sentences overturned than have been executed.
“You’re much more likely to have your death sentence overturned than you are to be executed.”
McVeigh might have had a much longer wait had he not chosen to give up on the hope of an appeal after losing his first attempt. That’s why his execution came so soon after his crime, with just four years separating his conviction and death.
The timeline for both Garza (convicted in 1993) and Jones (1995) was twice as long. But neither’s execution was met with the same public fanfare as McVeigh’s.
“It was like a circus,” said Rita Clare Gerardot with the Sisters of Providence, a community of vowed sisters near Terre Haute who were bused into the Federal Correctional Complex to gather in prayer during McVeigh’s execution.
Hotels were booked full, schools in Terre Haute and Vigo County closed on the day of his execution, and most local police officers worked special prison details assisting federal law enforcement officials.
There was “tons and tons of hoopla,” recalls Kevin Beaver, an employee of the Federal Correctional Complex from 1995 to 2015 who now works at Indiana State’s Criminal Justice School in Terre Haute. “It was a media frenzy.”
Boston bomber awaits death at supermax
Though the federal government has continued to seek the death penalty, there is essentially a moratorium on executions, with Terre Haute’s death row now housing 61 men and one woman — Lisa Montgomery, convicted in 2007 of strangling a pregnant Skidmore, Mo., woman and cutting her unborn child from her womb.
In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all capital punishment. Although states were later allowed to carry out executions — Illinois officially reinstated the death penalty in 1977 — it was off-limits at the federal level for 16 years.
It was brought back when Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 and Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which made more than 60 crimes eligible for capital sentences.
In 1994, the federal government also designated Terre Haute as the sole site where executions would be carried out, based on its central location. It also became the facility where most death row inmates are housed, though there have been exceptions.
Among them: 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who’s housed at the “supermax” prison in Fremont County, Colo., where inmates who are especially dangerous, high-profile or national security risks are kept. The supermax population also includes inmates serving life, or multiple life, sentences — Zacarias Moussaoui, the al-Qaida operative who helped plan the Sept. 11 attacks; Ramzi Yousef, convicted in 1994, for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; and Richard Reid, the so-called “shoe bomber.”
But besides Tsarnaev, Philadelphia drug kingpin and fellow supermax inmate Kaboni Savage and a few others, the majority of those sentenced to death have been housed in the Special Confinement Unit at USP Terre Haute since its July 13, 1999, opening, when inmates were transferred in from federal and state prisons all across the country.
‘Funny guy’ Ryan: It’s Governor, not George
In 2004, the Terre Haute penitentiary opened a three-floor, 719,000-square-foot, 1,369-inmate facility on the southern portion of the 1,100-acre site.
It includes the 120-cell Special Confinement Unit, where Christensen would be if sentenced to death.
The older brick facility — where McVeigh had been housed — is now a medium-security federal correction institution, housing 969 inmates.
There’s also a federal prison camp here, with room for 329. Its former residents include Illinois’ 39th governor, George Ryan, who served nearly five years for political corruption. (Ryan, incidentally, was responsible for placing a moratorium on Illinois’ death penalty in 2003, commuting the sentences of 167 inmates and pardoning four. In 2011, Gov. Pat Quinn abolished Illinois’ death penalty completely).
Beaver remembers interacting with Ryan while working as a case manager — similar to a probation officer — at the facility.
“He was a funny guy,” said Beaver, not referring to Ryan’s sense of humor. He remembers everyone calling him “Governor” after Ryan asked not to be referred to as “George.”
Hanging on Beaver’s wall in his office at Indiana State is a retirement plaque made for him by inmates at the work camp, including Ryan, whose job was to etch letters into metal plates for plaques and trophies.
Other familiar names who have served time in areas of the correctional complex outside of death row include John Walker Lindh, the first U.S.-born detainee in the war on terrorism, dubbed the “American Taliban,” who completed 17 years of a 20-year sentence before his May release; and Chicago businessman William “The Pope” Cellini, who in 2008 was indicted on charges of conspiring with convicted political fundraiser Tony Rezko, who was connected with former Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Cellini was released in 2013.
“It is a complex place,” said Beaver, who started as a correctional officer there about four years prior to McVeigh’s arrival. He worked the death row unit during McVeigh’s stay there.
Ex-guard: ‘I never took my safety for granted’
Unlike inmates in the general population, those on death row are housed in single-person cells, Beaver said. They do everything there — eat, shower, use the restroom. They don’t freely share space with anyone.
When a condemned inmate on death row is moved from his cell, he is fully secured in chains and escorted by two to three security guards, with another watching their every move through security cameras, Beaver said.
There’s a caged area where death-row inmates can go — one at a time, for fresh air and limited recreation, such as using a bar to do pull-ups. It’s a tiny area, Beaver said, with a view of the sky but nothing else.
For those on death row, “literally, it is choreographed all day long,” he said. “It’s the most restrictive measures. It’s very, very stringent and labor intensive. ... It is a cumbersome, very secure operation.”
It’s a far cry from the general population areas of the two prisons on the complex, which resemble confined high school campuses, where inmates have designated “passing times” to get where they need to be, including work areas, classes, lunch and medical appointments, Beaver said.
Still, he added, death row was a fascinating place to work.
“These men had nothing to lose. Your personal safety was always on your breath,” he said. “I never took my safety for granted in that environment.”
With no access to television, the internet or each other, death-row inmates often engaged the guards in conversation, Beaver said.
“It’s the only stimulation they receive all day. ... It’s their only connection to the outside world,” he said. “When you talk to these infamous inmates facing their execution, you learn a lot about human behavior.”
He declined to reveal the content of any specific conversations he had over the years, including ones with McVeigh. Beaver said he was part of the team that escorted the Oklahoma City bomber to the execution chamber, a small brick building surrounded by fencing that’s separate from the two prison facilities on the complex grounds.
It was built as a stand-alone structure, Beaver said, because it’s easier from a security perspective to safely bring members of the public on execution days into an easily accessed separate building rather than filtering them through the labyrinth of the prison.
For residents, ‘it’s like living anywhere else’
Safety concerns have driven every decision made at the Terre Haute penitentiary, officials say.
It’s why Kenneth and Amanda Marles, who live across West Lombardi Drive from the complex with their 13-year-old daughter, Jaelynn, say they’ve never feared the unthinkable.
Scenes like the one surrounding McVeigh’s execution have been the exception since Terre Haute began housing federal prisoners convicted of death.
Motioning toward open, mowed grassland between their property and a prison surrounded by secure fencing, Kenneth Marles notes that the entire area is under 24-hour video surveillance and that buried lines inside the property detect movement by anyone, or anything — even deer.
If he as much as parks a bit closer than usual, someone shows up asking questions.
“So it’s pretty secure,” said Marles, who’s grown accustomed to seeing inmates from the work camp mowing the grass. “They can’t even wave at you. It don’t scare me. It’s like living anywhere else.
Source: News-Gazette, Tracy Crane, July 7, 2019. Tracy Crane is a Danville-based reporter for The News-Gazette.
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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