"The Executioner's Song", by Norman Mailer

I am a big fan of Norman Mailer, but this book was a disappointment.  He obtained the rights to Gary Gilmore's life story through his partner, Larry Schiller, and he wrote a 1,092-page book giving a day-by-day account of the last few months of Gilmore's life. 

Mailer uses very sparse language, with simple, declarative sentences, using few adverbs.  He gets so into using this voice that even when he is not quoting one of the many Utah figures he writes about, he still uses incomplete sentences and silly slang.  To me this was quite off-putting.

The book really flounders in the last half, when Larry Schiller becomes a major character in the narrative.  The account of how Schiller went about obtaining the rights to Gilmore's story is simply not very interesting.  He wasn't permitted to visit Gilmore himself, so he had to go through Gilmore's two attorneys.  Every day Schiller would come up with a list of questions, and the attorneys would visit Gilmore on Death row and tape record his answers.

This Q and A went on for months, with no real results.  Schiller wanted to get at what makes Gilmore tick, why he killed two people in cold blood like he did.  Gilmore was an intelligent person, but he was unable or unwilling to delve into his own psyche and come up with any coherent explanation for his actions. 

The result is that we are left with a portrait of someone who was an incorrigible child, even, according to Gilmore, when he was as young as three or four years old.  He went to Reform School at age 13, and spent most of his life after that in prison.  When he got out, a few months before the killings, he continued to steal on a daily basis.  He would go into a store and walk out with a six-pack of beer, preferring to do that even when he had money in his pocket.  He just enjoyed the stealing, and was never caught.

Mailer came onto the scene after the execution, and interviewed the other key characters in the story.  But the failure of Schiller and Mailer to come up with any coherent explanation for Gilmore's psyche renders the book a failure.  Nevertheless, there are some interesting aspects which would have made a shorter book of some value.

One of these is the great love affair between Gilmore and his girlfriend, Nicole.  They were truly soul mates, and in fact both tried to kill themselves as part of a suicide pact, with Gilmore using drugs that Nicole managed to smuggle into the prison.  The efforts both failed; Gilmore tried a second time to kill himself, and at one point went on a 16-day hunger strike.  Surely one of the great love affairs in literary history.

The role of Gilmore's attorneys is interesting.  His original set of attorneys tried to appeal the conviction, and were fired by Gilmore who wanted the execution to proceed.  The new set pledged to carry out Gilmore's wishes, and so they were reduced to being messenger boys relaying messages between Gilmore and the outside world.  They really did nothing that we would consider to be actual legal work.

Since Gilmore's own attorneys could do nothing, outside forces tried to intervene on Gary's behalf.  His family tried to intervene, without success.  The ACLU intervened, on the theory that as a taxpayer it had standing.  Another capital punishment defendant tried to intervene, on the theory that Gilmore's execution would make it more likely that his own death sentence would be carried out.  And anti-capital punishment groups tried to intervene, on the theory that the Supreme Court had not yet ruled on the constitutionality of Utah's death penalty statute, and on the theory that a mandatory appeal should be required for any death sentence.

These efforts all came to a head on the day before the execution, when last-ditch efforts resulted in a decision by a federal judge, issued at 1 AM,  putting a stay on the execution, which was scheduled for sunrise that day.  Attorneys for both sides rode in a prop plane all night to get from Utah to to the Court of Appeals in Denver, where an early morning hearing was held.  At 7:35 AM the three-judge panel issued its ruling lifting the stay. 

At this point the warden in charge of carrying out the execution had qualms about whether he could proceed, given that the sentence specified that the execution was to take place at "sunrise", and he could not get it done by sunrise.  The sentencing judge was pressured to issue a modified order stating that it was to take place on that date, either at sunrise or at a later time.

The heart of the case, and the book, centers around issues regarding Gilmore's state of mind.  Specifically, can someone who insists on being executed be sane?  His original set of attorneys tried to raise the sanity issue, but Gilmore refused to go along, and psychiatrists who examined him pronounced him sane.  (Gilmore believed in reincarnation, which was part of why he didn't fear death.)  His mental functioning was completely intact; the conclusion, therefore, was that he had no psychosis, but he was definitely a psychopath and/or sociopath.  There was no mental disease, just a severe character defect.  He knew what he was doing and that it was wrong, but did it anyway, so no insanity defense could be (successfully) raised.

The fact is that people have a right to die, despite the Catholic Church's propaganda to the contrary.  We wonder about why Muslims are so willing, even eager, to die for their cause.  One reason is that the faith teaches that the quickest way to get to paradise is to die in a Jihad.  But what I learned recently which finally explained the suicide bombing phenomenon is that Muslims believe that your time and manner of death is determined at the time you are born.  Now it all made sense to me.  If your death is predetermined, then by dying you are simply fulfilling your destiny.

When Gary Gilmore was executed by a firing squad on January 17, 1977, he became the first person executed in the U.S. in nearly ten years.  Since then there have been 1,526 executions, an average of 35 a year.  The trend, however, is away from the death penalty; in the first nine months of 2020, there have been only 14 executions, and only half of those by the states.  The number of years which elapsed between sentence and execution ranges from 13 to 34.