At the Death House Door
Anyone who has been following me on Twitter for the past, oh, about 18 days or so (all 613 of you–How did I get 613 followers? Oh yeah, probably because I down and out abandoned my blog and have just been using Twitter to bitch, moan and complain. Gotchya.) knows that I have been on quite the documentary kick. I’ve made my way through crime documentaries and have also been peeping in and out of political documentaries. Now, because I usually split-screen my desktop monitor so I can work as well as watch movies because I’m a multi-tasker like that, although it’s pretty obvious I haven’t been working on this website, I usually pick films that are light and airy and frankly, something I don’t have to pay much attention to so I can still be productive. For instance, I have watched several profiles on serial killers, a plethora of the best Cold Case Files episodes and so on. You know, because serial killers always provide that light and airy material I crave in the early morning hours when I need to get shit done.
Tonight I did very much the same thing I’ve been doing over the past two weeks–settling into some work and looking for something to watch. I settled on At the Death House Door, which I have stumbled across several times before and never really felt compelled to watch, so I’d always just glanced right over it. Tonight, however, I did watch it and I thought it was going to be one of those documentaries I kinda-sorta watched while I also typed away at the computer since the synopsis merely said that two filmmakers examine the state of the death penalty in Texas from the perspective of a “death house” chaplain who had witnessed nearly 100 executions throughout his career. Light and airy right!? Well, not exactly, but still something I could kinda-sorta work through.
The chaplain of the Huntsville, Texas death house in At the Death House Door was Rev. Carroll Pickett who you see throughout this documentary as being one of the nicest, caring people you could ever possibly meet in your entire life. His words were always careful and articulately chosen and throughout most of the documentary you do not know where he stands on the whole death penalty issue because he said that if he were openly for the death penalty, no inmate would have trusted or talked to him and if he were openly against it, he would be fired by the state of Texas. When you’re covering the death penalty in a documentary, the inevitable shoe to drop that I knew was coming, was the topic of a man who had been put to death who was completely innocent and this had happened on more than one occasion in the state of Texas, but one case is greatly highlighted and the family of this man was absolutely heartbreaking as they strove to raise awareness of what had happened to their family member.
Here’s the trailer for At the Death House Door:
Anyone who is familiar with me and this website can assume my stance on the death penalty. I think it is completely hypocritical, heartbreaking and downright wrong. While I had planned on working while watching this documentary, it did not pan out that way. From about ten minutes in until the end at just over an hour and a half in length, I was glued to it. It pulled me in and then tore me apart because while I haven’t really covered it too often here, the death penalty is one of those political hot points for me where I am so adamantly against it that I get angry about it, it tears me to shreds to think that something as corrupt and utterly and consistently unjustified, like the government (federal as well as state-wide) are under the tragic misconception that they have the right and even the responsibility to choose who lives and who dies. Whenever I encounter these hot button issues, one thing that repeatedly pops into my head is that one section of Network where Howard Beale is shouting:
We know things are bad–worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller and all we say is, ‘Please, at least just leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’
Well I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad. I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot. I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a human being, goddammit! My life has value!’ So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it and stick your head out and yell ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’
There are a lot of things that make that little segment go through my head and the injustice of the death penalty is one of them.
By the end of the documentary, Rev. Carroll Pickett actually starts advocating for the end of the death penalty in Texas, after seeing nearly 100 executions and being that last person someone has contact with before the state puts them to death. He speaks with people who are for the death penalty and tells them what the government would and still will not. That what is injected into the veins of a person to kill them was also once used to put animals to sleep–before it was outlawed because of how inhumane it was against those animals. Regardless of your stance on the death penalty, At the Death House Door is an absolutely amazing, enlightening, gut-wrenching and incredibly depressing documentary that I felt very much compelled to write about here, even though at the time when I finished watching the documentary and knew that I had to write about it, I didn’t know what to say or if I would have anything to say before sitting down to write.
Rev. Carroll Pickett, the man whose perspective this documentary is from, is also author of a book that I now must get–Within These Walls: Memoirs of a Death House Chaplain. If it’s even half as good as this documentary was, it’s going to be amazing.
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