AMY GOODMAN: Tonight, for only the second time since the Supreme Court reinstituted capital punishment 20 years ago, three people will be executed at the same time: in the death house of the Cummins Unit prison in southeastern Arkansas this morning, 47-year-old Earl V. Denton, 49-year-old Paul Ruiz, who were both convicted of murder back in 1977, 20 years ago; Kirt Wainwright, 30 years old, is scheduled to die with them. The triple execution has sparked outrage from anti-death-penalty activists. They say it’s a bloodthirsty and cruel attack by politicians eager to show they’re tough on crime. Governor Mike Huckabee and other state officials defend the move. We talked earlier with Dina Tyler. She’s a spokesperson with the Arkansas Department of Corrections.

DINA TYLER: The simple explanation is that the stays of execution were dissolved on all three of these inmates on the same day by the United States Supreme Court, so those dissolutions all arrived on the same day. And two of these inmates who are scheduled for execution on Wednesday night were convicted of the same murders. Also, there is another factor here, and that is that executions are very difficult on the department, both on its employees and the inmates it supervises. They are most difficult things to do. There is an emotional preparation that the staff and the inmates, too, all go through to get ready, in essence, to steel yourself for this. And by putting these executions on one night rather than three, it saves at least somewhat on the emotional toll of the employees and the inmates.

AMY GOODMAN: How about the expenses?

DINA TYLER: Well, sure. I mean, I think common sense will tell you that by not having three execution nights and only having one, that there would be at least a little bit of money saved. But money has never been the factor here. That is not the issue. The factor is the emotional toll and also the fact that those stays — or, the dissolutions all came down on the same day. Money is not the prime concern and never will be.

AMY GOODMAN: What accounts for the expense of, you know, killing someone? What are the costs involved?

DINA TYLER: Well, I think that there is a cost of overtime within the department. We’ve got people who work long hours who are called in, because on execution day you need pretty much all hands on deck. So, we’ve got the department having to have people on extra hours. Plus, there are other agencies involved: the state police, the Attorney General’s Office, the Governor’s Office. Also, local law enforcement agencies around here have to supply people to us so that we can aid in the security effort. So, it is a salary expense there. As far as the expense of the actual execution, that’s minimal.

AMY GOODMAN: How are the condemned men going to die?

DINA TYLER: They are all going to die, if their executions are not stopped by the governor or the court, by lethal injection, which is the law under which they were sentenced. Ruiz and Denton, two of the inmates scheduled for execution, were first sentenced in 1978 to die by electrocution. Well, their death sentence then was overturned, but they were retried after the law changed in 1983, so it’s also — so it’s by lethal injection. So all three are by lethal injection.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you know what the chemical is that’s used? We hear it’s coming from a company in New Jersey.

DINA TYLER: I don’t know who supplies the drugs. It’s a combination of three drugs: sodium pentothal; Pavulon, which is a muscle relaxant; and potassium chloride.

AMY GOODMAN: Could you just explain what the protocol is? For example, in the terms of the three chemicals that are injected into their body, does a different person flip the switch on each one?

DINA TYLER: There are two executioners who are involved in the execution whose identity are kept confidential. They make the injections into an already running IV saline solution that’s already been placed into the arms of the condemned inmate.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you say to people like Mrs. Freddie Nixon, wife of the reverend, I guess, who married the president and his wife, Bill and Hillary Clinton — Freddy Nixon, who heads up the state chapter of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, who said, “Three in one night is horrible. It looks bloodthirsty”?

DINA TYLER: I say that it is, I think, easy to stand outside the department and not realize the emotional toll it takes. But once inside the department, it becomes painfully obvious how it affects everybody, how difficult it is. I speak from experience. I was a reporter in Arkansas. I covered many of the first executions once executions began in 1990. I always knew they were hard on the department, but I could not appreciate fully the emotional toll until I came to work here.

AMY GOODMAN: Dina Tyler is spokesperson for the Arkansas Department of Corrections.

We now turn to Pat Bane, director of Murder Victim Families for Reconciliation. She’s also a spiritual adviser to Paul Ruiz, scheduled to be executed tonight. And we’re speaking to her about an hour and a half south of Little Rock, where she is just outside the Cummins Unit prison, where Paul is inside.

Pat Bane, why don’t you first tell us about Paul’s crime?

PAT BANE: It’s a crime that happened in 1977. And like most murders, it’s not a pleasant one. I don’t think there’s any such thing as a good murder. He and another man broke out of a prison. They didn’t actually escape in the way that it sounds, but they walked away from a work detail at a prison in Oklahoma. And before the episode was over, they had killed two police officers — one a town marshal and one a park ranger — and had injured another. They were apprehended and sentenced to death. There is no justification or no condoning a crime like that.

The fact is, this happened 20 years ago. The men have had three trials. And I’ve known Paul, the man I’m here to visit and to advise, since 1980 and have seen him over the years grow and change and become someone who is no danger and who in fact could live out his life in prison and, I think, be a contributing member of that society. He is a really different person than the man who committed a crime 20 years ago. And I just think that it’s ludicrous to take people and do what it is we say we want to do to really change them and to bring them to a new self, and then to take their lives. We’re not killing the people who committed that crime. Those people are gone. And we’re killing two men who are 20 years older and who have, I believe, used their time well and have kind of educated themselves and just made new ways of life.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell me about your own experience with murder, being the head of this murder victim’s families reconciliation group.

PAT BANE: I think that’s a very important component here for me, because I have a real concern for these victims’ family members in this case. Back in the late '50s, my dad's brother was murdered. And he and my father were very close. He had four children, and he left a wife. And the cousins were about the ages of my sister and I, and so we were close to that family. And I watched my aunt having to change her life and raise her kids without her husband. And I saw my father’s anger and turmoil, as well as the rest of his brothers an sisters, when they lost their brother to a very senseless crime. He was mugged and left brain-damaged on the street after a severe beating and died as a result of that beating. So I know what a family goes through when a crazy crime like that happens.

I think I was very fortunate, and I realize more and more as the years go on, that I was lucky to grow up in a family that never supported the death penalty. And despite our anger and confusion and pain over that incident, somehow we never translated that into support for the death penalty. First of all, there was — the crime is still unsolved. There was an arrest, and for a while it looked like there would be a trial, but it turned out that there was insufficient evidence, and the man was released. Now, there was a lot of anger around that, too, but we never had to deal with a trial. But nonetheless, until he died in his eighties, I never heard my father support a death penalty. And I really didn’t appreciate it so much then as I do now.

I think that what happens to a family when a loved one is violently taken from them is that they have two things to deal with: They have to deal with a crime, and they have to deal with a loss. And unfortunately, when we seek a death penalty, we put great emphasis on the crime, very often casting aside the loss and the grieving and the things that you do when you lose somebody you love. And those things don’t get taken care of. These families, in their pain, were offered death sentences for the men who committed this crime. And when you’re at the lowest point in your life, you’re just reaching out for other people to give you something to make you feel better, and you take what you’re given. And we put this expectation on victims that they want the very worst thing that can be done, and we offer them more bodies, and they accept that. Once they accept it, they begin to equate it with justice.

If these two men had been sentenced to life in prison and they had begun serving that sentence, justice would already be being achieved. They’d be serving their sentence. When they’re sentenced to death, you wait for them to die for justice to be done. And they’ve been waiting 20 years. And all this time, they’ve been focused on these men and probably, from the things I’ve been reading in the paper and hearing that they say, probably are still very, very angry at them. When these men are killed, the focus of the past 20 years for these families is going to be gone. And I hope they have something to take its place. I hope that they can really find closure, and I hope that they have grieved and dealt with their loss, as well, because many families do not. And people come to us and say that the execution opened everything up for them again, and they were right back where they were when the murder happened.

AMY GOODMAN: Pat Bane, what has it been like to be in the death house with Paul Ruiz?

PAT BANE: Grim, although it’s not because of Paul that it’s been grim. He is handling it very well. He is very accepting, and I don’t think even afraid to die, and has been as much a support to me as I hope I have been to him. But it actually, to me, has felt like I am living in some alien place or in a place where everybody’s crazy, and you begin to doubt your own sanity. And these people are, no doubt, good people, and I think they try their very best to make things as easy as they can. But to sit down and see in black and white the preparations being made to take three lives just is beyond my comprehension.

And to sit down and talk — we were visiting one day — this is just an example — when someone came to the door and said, “Could you come down to so-and-so’s office? We need to know what you want done with your body.” Now, to just holler something like this in the door to somebody really, really startled and upset me, more than it did Paul, because he’s been living with this. He’s been living on death row, where this is said to men over and over. I think that he has the advantage of experience, and nothing is a surprise. These are all surprises to me. I’ve never been in the death house before; although I’ve done this work for many years, I have never actually been this close. And it’s a very bizarre place to be.

AMY GOODMAN: Does President Clinton being the former governor of Arkansas fit in here at all?

PAT BANE: Well, President Clinton executed several people while he was governor. So I don’t think that he would be apt to be any influence against an execution. President Clinton, if you will remember, interrupted his campaign, his first campaign for the presidency, twice to come back to Arkansas and sign two death warrants, one for Ricky [Ray] Rector, a man who had been shot in the head and had had a bullet in his brain and was, according to all accounts, little more than a vegetable and didn’t even know where he was going when he was taken to the execution chamber, and the other a young man named Steven Hill, who was kind of borderline mentally retarded, had escaped from prison, after having been raped in prison, and holed up in a farmhouse with another young man who had escaped with him, and when the police came in to take them, they shot one of them. At first, they said that Steven committed the killing, and he was sentenced to death. After that death sentence, the other young man admitted that in fact he had committed the killing and had talked Steven into confessing, believing that no jury would ever sentence him to death. Governor Clinton — or, yes, it was then Governor Clinton — refused to stop that execution. So I’m not sure that he would be very helpful in this.

AMY GOODMAN: Any final words as you go off today to be with Paul Ruiz one last time?

PAT BANE: Well, I think that we will be preparing for the worst. We’ll be hoping for the best. And I would urge people across this country who don’t think that sending the message that it’s OK to kill people, as the state of Arkansas is doing, is the right message to send. I think that we need to say we won’t tolerate killing. And we need to practice that by not performing executions. So I just urge people to call Governor Huckabee and to express their feelings about this triple execution, particularly as we come out of the Christmas season, where we have just celebrated our goodwill and our love for one another.

AMY GOODMAN: And the number we have for Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is (501) 682-2345. That’s (501) 682-2345. Pat Bane, thanks very much for being with us. Pat is the director of Murder Victim Families for Reconciliation, based in Virginia, but she’s in Arkansas right now. She’s the spiritual adviser to Paul Ruiz, scheduled to be executed tonight. You’re listening to Democracy Now! When we come back, we’ll talk to a witness of an Arkansas execution this past summer. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Democracy Now! The Exception to the Rulers. I’m Amy Goodman. Reverend Kobutsu Kevin Malone is a Zen priest and a spiritual adviser to Frankie Parker, formerly an Arkansas death row inmate, who was executed this past August. Reverend Kobutsu is leading a protest tonight outside the headquarters of the Organon Company in West Orange, New Jersey. Organon manufactures the muscle relaxant Pavulon, one of the three drugs that make up the deadly cocktail that will be injected into the prisoners tonight, unless there is a last-minute stay.

Kobutsu, rarely do people get a chance to find out what happens in the last minutes and hours before a prisoner is executed. Can you describe what happened in August, when you were advising Frankie Parker?

REV. KOBUTSU KEVIN MALONE: One of the deputy directors of the Department of Corrections informed me that it was almost time. We had been sitting in a very tiny cell, over 95-degree heat all day long, so it was extremely hot. There was no ventilation or air conditioning. And we — at that point, I prepared by putting on my robe and my vestments. Shortly thereafter, a squad of men called the tie-down team burst into the area. These men were all dressed in body armor with helmets, boots, gloves. Two of them came in with large full-body shields. They ordered Frankie to assume the position at the back of his cell. They poured into the cell. They pinned him up against the wall; the two shield-carrying men pinned him against the wall while other men chained his ankles, put chains around his waist and chained his hands to the waist chain, at which point they moved him out of the cell, into the corridor.

And I was guided — I was chanting at the time, and I had agreed to chant the three refuges, the Buddhist chant: “I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refute in the dharma. I take refuge in the sangha.” And we did this over and over again. It was a very short walk to the hallway that constitutes the last mile in this hallway itself. It was only about 15 or 18 feet long. And the hallway was lined with more men dressed in riot gear, each side of the hallway. You know, they were shoulder to shoulder pretty much.

We got to the center of the hallway, and by prior arrangement, there was a small cardboard box with a Buddha figure on it. And we approached the Buddha figure. We turned to it. We bowed once to the Buddha. We turned and faced each other. And we bowed three times — once for the Buddha, once for the dharma, once for the sangha. And at that point we stopped our chant. And I looked at him directly in the face, and I saw a single tear came from his right eye and rolled down his cheek. We embraced, as best we were able. He was chained. And as we embraced, he whispered in my ear, “I love you, my brother. Thank you so much.” And at that point, I backed away. We bowed one more time to each other. Our foreheads touched as we bowed.

And at that point, the men guided me out, out a side door, by my elbows. And Frankie was taken into the execution chamber. As soon as I stepped out of the building, the hearse that we had arranged to take his body was sitting there waiting. I continued chanting. And I was directed around the perimeter of the building to another entrance, where I was told to wait. And I continued my chanting. Directly behind me was a white van that had the witnesses in it. They had it there with the air conditioner on and the engine running. And we waited for a few minutes until they had tied Frankie down to the gurney in the death chamber. This is done. The witnesses are kept out of the building in cast there’s trouble. They don’t want to upset the witnesses by having them listen to a man scream for his life as they’re tying him down to be poisoned.

The door opened, and one of the officers indicated that I should enter. And I entered and went to the front of the room and stood next to the large picture window that was at the front of the room. The room was — it was the coolest I had been all day. All the room itself was completely air-conditioned. And the seats were, you know, all plush, plushly upholstered. It was a very nice room, certainly quite a bit different from where I had spent the earlier part of the day in over 95-degree heat. The witnesses came in. They were seated. A few minutes later, there was a blind, a screen behind the window, which was opened. And the witness chamber, the witness room, the viewing room, was immediately filled with an intense white light. And we were able to see into the actual death chamber.

And Frankie was strapped to a gurney. His hands, his arms were strapped to two boards that came out diagonally from the gurney. There were two intravenous bags on stands behind him and intravenous lines going into his arms. Directly behind him stood Mr. Larry Norris, who is the director of the Department of Corrections for the state of Arkansas. And behind him on the wall was a large digital clock with red numerals indicating the time.

I had promised Frankie that I would continue chanting earlier, and I continued counting out loud during the entire procedure. They made an announcement, which couldn’t really be heard. The public address system was not very loud. And I think my chanting probably contributed to the fact that we weren’t able to hear exactly what was said in there.

Frankie had a — was covered with a white sheet. And we had — he had been ordained as a Buddhist monk earlier. I ordained him four days before he was killed, before he was put to death. And we had arranged with the Department of Corrections that he be allowed to wear his rakusu, which is a bib-like vestment, and it’s essentially an abbreviated form of the Buddha’s robe. So he was allowed to wear that. There was a small — Frankie had clipped, paperclipped, a small picture of His Holiness the Dalai Lama on one of the straps of his vestment. And you could see His Holiness’s head sort of peeking out from under the sheet. He made me promise that I would present that picture to His Holiness the Dalai Lama the first opportunity I got. His head was strapped between two plates, and there was a strap over his forehead. It was difficult to see any of the other restraints, because they were all covered with a sheet.

A few minutes went by; approximately four minutes went by. And another announcement was made, and then a man came in with a stethoscope and examined Frankie. I knew at that point — because I knew the procedure, I knew that he had been wired to electronic monitors and that the electronic monitors had indicated that he was dead. And they were bringing in the coroner to make the official pronouncement of death. And the curtains closed, and the witnesses were all ushered out. In the room, I continued my chanting and my prostrations. And finally, a man — two guards came over and essentially took me by the elbows and said, “You must go now, Reverend.”

The following morning, I went to a local radio station down there, spoke for approximately an hour, told of my experiences the night before. During that time, people came to the door of the radio station pounding on it, trying to get at me. The lady who answered the telephone quit for the day because she couldn’t take the abuse that — the abusive telephone calls they were receiving.

I finally finished at the radio station, and I went back to the prison where the death row is. And I was allowed by the very gracious warden — I was allowed to walk death row. And I went to each cell, and I shook hands with each man, told them exactly what I had experienced, told them how Frankie had died, told them that he had died as a man. I told them that he had died in an extremely dignified manner. Many of them wept. They thanked me because I was the only spiritual adviser who had come to them and told them the truth after the execution.

AMY GOODMAN: Were some of those men the men who will die tonight?

REV. KOBUTSU KEVIN MALONE: Three of those men will die tonight, yes, unless there are reprieves. One of them had been in tears when I met him.

AMY GOODMAN: Reverend Kobutsu Kevin Malone, I want to thank you very much for recounting that story. I know it’s tough. Kobutsu is a Zen priest. And if you’d like to get a written account of his story, as well as find out about the work that his group is doing, the Engaged Zen Foundation, you can write to the Engaged Zen Foundation, P.O. Box 700, Ramsey, New Jersey 07446. That’s Engaged Zen Foundation, P.O. Box 700, Ramsey, New Jersey 07446. Again, Reverend Kobutsu Kevin Malone, spiritual adviser to Frankie Parker. He had murdered his in-laws and was executed by the state of Arkansas this past August. You’re listening to Democracy Now! If you’d like to get a copy of today’s show, you can call 1-800-735-0230. That’s 1-800-735-0230.