Texas Preacher Pushes the Gospel of Mercy for Death Row Inmates

The great Texas sun is rising on a cool summer morning as the Rev. Carroll Pickett, a minister who once ushered condemned men into the execution chamber and watched them die, speaks of redemption. His Sunday school students, middle-aged and elderly couples from a gated community just north of Houston, contemplate the message of repentance given by the former prison chaplain of Texas' most notorious penitentiary, a prison whose name is synonymous with hard time: Huntsville.

Pickett, a Presbyterian minister, wears a mint-green suit and a tie dotted with gold crosses. Tucked under his arm is a hand-tooled leather case containing a Bible, a gift from the inmates who once sought his counsel and lent their voices to his prison choirs. During the course of his career, this soft-spoken man with a good-ole-boy twang has witnessed prison officials pump poison into the veins of 95 men.

Pickett reads aloud the warning delivered by an angel in the final book of the Bible, Revelation: "I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot ... So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of my mouth."

"In other words, get off the fence," Pickett tells his class. "Every Christian has got to get off the fence."

It took decades -- nearly a lifetime -- but Pickett made that jump himself. After his retirement in 1995, he spoke out against the death penalty. Since then, his unique insider's perspective and "Texas gentleman" manner has made him a potent force within the movement to abolish the death penalty. Few men can claim to have witnessed the first execution by lethal injection in the world, as he did 25 years ago. Even fewer have sat in prayer, listened to the confessions and final requests of men on the last day of their lives, heard their final words and their last gasp.

In Pickett's 2002 book, Within These Walls: Memoirs of a Death House Chaplain, he described in poignant detail his personal journey from death penalty supporter to ardent abolitionist. A documentary film about the possibly wrongful execution of Carlos De Luna and Pickett's final moments with him, At the Death House Door, is slated to air on the Independent Film Channel in the spring. Pickett has testified before Texas lawmakers, taken his abolitionist message to Rotary clubs and to big-city and small-town congregations alike. On an issue that imposes absolute and final judgment, he injects nuance.

"I was for [the death penalty] because I saw the injustice," explained Pickett after Sunday school. "I began to change because the system was so bad. I saw 17-year-old killers and the mentally retarded [executed], and the fact that nobody had any education."

In 2002, six years after Pickett's retirement from the Huntsville Prison, the Supreme Court ruled against executing the mentally retarded; in 2005, the Court exempted juvenile offenders from capital punishment. In September, as Texas carried out its 400th execution, the Supreme Court agreed to consider whether the mixture administered in lethal injections amounts to "cruel and unusual punishment," thus violating the Constitution. The case will be argued in February 2008.

Steve Hall, director of the Stand-Down Texas Project, an anti-death-penalty group, says Pickett's indisputable credibility and authenticity is compelling in a state that leads the nation in executions.

"People understand it's not gloss, it's not some sales job, it's not some distillation, it's not something he has picked up from the AI Web site," he said. "When you hear him, you really get a vision of what he went through and the questions, the doubt and that gradual transformation that changed him, and that now really drives his activity." Pickett grew up in Victoria, Texas, a small town east of San Antonio. "My daddy was a [death penalty] supporter, and his office was next to the jail," Pickett says, over a breakfast of homemade biscuits at an old-fashioned restaurant in Montgomery, birthplace of the "Lone Star" Texas flag. "My father believed that anyone who was arrested was guilty, and I was raised that way."