Mid-Missouri
Fellowship of
Reconciliation

Vernon Brown - Reflections and Considerations

P.O. Box 268
Columbia, Missouri
65205
573-449-4585
email: jstack@no2death.org

Here you'll find a letter from 2 bishops in Missouri, reflections by Jeff on Vernon Brown's execution and two news stories about it.

(For the past couple of weeks I had hoped to get these done and pass them along)

(Instigated by a phone conversation on 17 May 2005).....

The state once more proved itself exceedingly dangerous and prolifically violent. Missouri executioners-- after leaving Vernon Brown strapped onto a prison gurney for three hours during appeal considerations by U.S. Supreme Court justices, an additional degree of cruel of unusual punishment-- killed him just after 2:30 a.m., Wednesday, 18 May. He became the 64th human being executed by state officials since 1989, 4th most of any US state (no woman in Missouri has been executed nor dwells under a death sentence in these “modern” times). He was the 3rd person killed in our state in 2005-- 2nd most only to Texas. All three men have been African-American). Whatever a person's level of dangerousness, their race or gender, regardless of the heinousness of their crimes, the Mid-Missouri FOR insists nobody forfeits their fundamental human right to life. No state, nobody has a right to kill a human, particularly not one already incarcerated in a high-security institution......

Vernon Brown paused reflectively on the telephone in his cell at the Bonne Terre prison in southeastern Missouri, also known as the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correction Center (ERDCC). He had about a half day of life left before state officials could “legally” murder, poison him. With reasonable indignity, he sighed then calmly asked me, “Why is it that so many of you guys ignored me for years then start to pay attention to me in the days before I'm about to be killed?”

It was a fair (and uncomfortable) question he asked of me. He and a few dozen of the 53 men sentenced to death had been living in Missouri's prisons for many years, yet this was the first time I had spoken with him. Frequently, I had been in contact through correspondence or personal visits with those condemned to state-killing weeks or months before the scheduled execution. But not this time. I reminded him that a few days before a planned execution, is one of the rare times the Department of Corrections allows the general public to call in to speak with a condemned prisoner (inmates can typically only make collect calls). It's a modicum of compassion in the state's execution protocol, a most cold-hearted system. Making at least a phone call to the condemned man has been sort of an anti-death penalty (conscience-calming) execution-protocol for me over the years. State officials, I commented to him, seem to discourage contact between those condemned and with individuals on the outside of prison walls, in part no doubt to make it easier for the state to execute people. Both he and I, however, knew I offered incomplete, pitifully-insufficient explanations of the non-contact by we, the “free” citizen-abolitionists.

The sad reality is that not only Missourians in general, but abolitionists like myself, have been paying too little attention to the humans cast off by courts with death sentences-- making it far too easy for the state to kill them. During my phone calls over the years, in the last few days of their lives, it's struck me as astounding, that almost always the man facing execution expressed thanks for what efforts other abolitionists and I had undertaken on his behalf. Vernon didn't pretend to express such charitable gratitude.

Far from being mean-spirited, Vernon spoke with dignity and frank eloquence. To ultimately get rid of the death penalty in Missouri, he insisted, those individuals concerned have to “get to know the guys” living under the death penalty. Change won't occur, “not just by writing about them in your publications. A lot can be said and learned from personal visits. Letter writing (through pen-pal correspondence) is cool, but you have to be there” to reach a more complete understanding of the people and of the system's inhumanity.

He's entirely right. It's a challenge I urge all Missouri citizens of conscience to try taking to heart. If you haven't yet done so, begin by corresponding with one of the 52 men still living under a death sentence in the Potosi Correctional Center. Susan Roling with the Western Missouri Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty coordinates a pen-pal program matching correspondents with death-sentenced individuals. Contact her through e-mail, at sjssm@hotmail.com to get involved. She reported last month that about half of the CP (capital punishment) prisoners had no one formally corresponding from the abolitionist community. Please step outside of your comfort zone and acquaint yourself with one of these human beings, our society claims is disposable and whom we collectively, publicly dispose of by poisoning.

For those of us who have either been involved in this struggle for a long time and/or those among us with the will and fortitude, please also consider beginning to regularly visit with at least one of the men condemned to be killed (prison regulations will limit one person to visit just one individual at a particular institution). It's been a few months since my last visit. I plan to take up Vernon on his challenge, a last wish, increasing the visiting I do with those condemned, not merely waiting until an execution date is given. Provided the individual incarcerated is willing, I'd encourage all of us to let our communities and state know who these human beings are, along with acknowledging their wrongdoings-- through our written and spoken words, based on our dialogues with them.

As long as the public continues to see individuals sentenced to death (and indeed all persons we incarcerate), as beings defined solely by their crimes through the lens of the media, executions may indeed continue indefinitely. It's easy to kill a “killer” as the person is all too often described in bold headlines. Murder, by the state as well, becomes far more complicated, when the individual is recognized for the human beings whom they are. Please contact myself at 573-449-4585 or by e-mail to discuss a prison visit.

“What I've said, you can put in your newsletter” or via other public outlets, he allowed. “Maybe it will help” end state killings.

Vernon Brown, to be sure was convicted of reprehensible crimes, killing at least two people, Janet Perkins, a nine-year-old child and a woman named Synetta Ford. Reports came out the day of his execution, speaking of his possible involvement as well in other violent crimes around the country. Vernon spoke to me on the phone, it seemed with genuine sincerity saying, “I feel real bad for what I had done, but I don't remember anything.”

I too mourn for the people he killed and the loved ones whose lives he has emotionally ravaged. It's vital that we acknowledge the ravaged being he was as well, not to excuse his violence but to more compassionately understand what helped prod him to commit such vile actions. In childhood, he was sexually and physically abused by his grandfather, the same man who had raped his own daughter, impregnating her-- and thus the man who was likely Vernon's biological father. Vernon suffered traumatic head injuries, apparently causing a seizure condition beginning when he was five. Migraine headaches preceded these memory-marred events, which he told me occurred 2-3 times a week, and on occasion lasted for 4-5 days when he wasn't taking prescribed medicine. Over the years I have met a few people who have had seizures similar to what Vernon described-- they behaved bizarrely and recalled none of what they did.

Making him far more dangerously volatile, he become a chronic user of drugs, including PCP or “Angel Dust.”. “I only remembered picking up my stepsons,” the day he later abducted and killed the young child Janet Perkins. The next moment of lucidity, he recalled, didn't come “until jail, not until the (following) Saturday morning...when I had seen it (details of his horrible crimes) on the news.”

The attorney general and other officials contend Vernon was faking such a condition to evade the ultimate punishment. I'm not sure. Perhaps there was some truth to their assertions. His appellate attorneys and institutional documents refute those state claims. No doubt, he was a man who did harm many others, someone who needed to be incarcerated but, by many accounts, a person who was well-behaved provided he took his meds (for the past 10 years he said he'd been taking Elavil, prescribed typically for migraine headaches, thus apparently limiting his seizures).

My phone conversation to the death house that afternoon began unusually as well with the first words uttered. “Hello, ERCCC, James Purkett speaking.” “What?” I internally wondered. It was the prison's superintendent answering the phone. After I questioned him, he explained he was briefly filling in for the receptionist. I had wished in vain it indicated the prison was significantly short-staffed because so many employees refused to work that day for reasons of conscience, unwilling to labor while officials prepared to execute a human being there late that night.

Perhaps that day will come.... When the governor, attorney general, prosecutors, lawmakers, judges and other zealous Missouri officials will have no one willing to kill for them, when they'll have to do their bloody business with their own hands.

Sadly, we're not nearly there yet.

There is some good news: the Missouri Supreme Court has set no more new execution dates at this time.

In hope and struggle,
-- Jeff Stack, coordinator
Mid-Missouri Fellowship of Reconciliation

Vernon Brown’s wait draws criticism

State kills another human being

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