(11 of 12)
In Illinois, death row is up on a bluff in a sandstone prison opened in 1878. The 49 current inmates have a 19th century landscape artist's view—the Mississippi River and miles of rich farmland beyond—except for the bars and razor wire. Menard Correctional Center (pop. 2,600) is the principal industry of Chester, Ill. (pop. 8,000). The inmates, two of whom are scheduled to be electrocuted this spring, are alone in their cells for at least 21 hours a day. When they are in transit, once a day to the law library and once a day to the recreation room, they are handcuffed. Four of them are "honor residents," permitted to roam unchained in the gray hallways. One of these is John Wayne Gacy, 39, the building contractor and amateur clown convicted three years ago of murdering 33 young men and boys.
Death row is about the same size in Alabama, where 55 men await the chair in Holman. Mitchell Rutledge, 23 years old, I.Q. 84, is among them. "You're just sitting there waiting for somebody to come kill you," says Rutledge of his purgatory, "just like a dog out there in the dog pound." But he does not claim innocence. No: he did kill a man two days before Christmas 1980. Rutledge was doped up and drunk with two friends. One pal brought along a gun, and with it they took off on a joyride in the van of a driver they had robbed of $20 and stashed in the back. It was decided that the victim, Gable Holloway, 28, should die. He begged for his life. But Rutledge, like a zombie, took the pistol and fired. He fired again and again, five shots in all.
On death row, Rutledge, who was orphaned as a teenager, is visited only by his lawyer. He seems full of remorse. "I can't make nobody feel sympathy for me for what I did," he says. "But I just want to let everybody know that I'm sorry for what I did."
To most people the life of a foolish punk like Rutledge does not count for much. He is defective. His death would not be unbearably sad, but his destruction by the state of Alabama would be: not a large tragedy, not final proof that the U.S. is barbaric, but still better left undone. Executing Rutledge would be a waste, not so much of his diminished humanity, but of society's moral capital. The gunslinging heroes of corny adventure fiction had it right: there are guys not worth killing. Let Rutledge sit and stew in his 8-ft. by 5-ft. pen in Alabama. Forget him.
But then blue-eyed, kind-looking Lawrence Bittaker jerks into view, disrupting high-minded composure. Bittaker, 42, is on death row at San Quentin for kidnaping and murdering five teen-age girls. But that is not all. He and a partner raped and sodomized four of them first, for hours and days at a time, sometimes in front of a camera. But that is not all. He tortured some of the girls—pliers on nipples, ice picks in ears—and tape-recorded the screams. But that is not all. The last victim was strangled with a coat hanger, her genitals mutilated and her body tossed on a lawn so that he could watch the horror of its discovery.
If not for the Bittakers (and Judys, Gacys, Mansons, Specks and Starkweathers), the capital-punishment debate