This is by far the most dramatic report of my life as a reporter - a story in which love and death are closely intertwined.


It all started at an art exhibition in Montpellier. There I met Danièle and René Sirven, a couple who had been visiting a convict on Death Row in Texas named Rickey Lynn Lewis for ten years. Recently they had received a terrible piece of news: a date had been set for his execution, April 9th. They told me they would go to Texas and honor their promise to Rickey and attend his execution. I had read their book* about Rickey a few years ago and had been moved by it that I decided to make the journey and visit Rickey while there was still time to do so.


At this point, I would like to clarify that  René and Danièle are not the kind of people "who care about the killer, who don't give a damn about the victim". As citizens however they question the meaning of adding another cold-blooded crime by the state to a heinous crime committed by a private individual. As activists against the death penalty they had exchanged a few letters with a convict in Texas, a place they would visit annually in order to meet their youngest daughter, Virginie, who lived in Houston a few years ago. It was an opportunity to go and visit Rickey - a 2 hour ride from Houston. When they first met him in 2003, exactly 10 years ago, "It was an explosion in my mind", Danielle says.


Now about Rickey. From the very day he was born his life was hell. His father would regularly beat him and sometimes abuse him. He would beat his wife too, to the extent that one day 10-year-old Rickey fired at him to protect his mother. Rejected by his father, he found himself in the street, with violence as the only way of survival. Mentally retarded, he was easy prey to be manipulated. So, by the age of 28 he already had a substantial criminal record when on September 17, 1990 he and 2 other guys broke into the house of Georges Newman and his fiancée Connie Hilton in Tyler, 100 miles east of Dallas. Georges was shot and killed, Connie cruelly beaten and raped, not to mention the killing of their dog. Rickey was the only one arrested and tried. He was condemned to death despite strong doubt about his

responsibility in the killing of Georges: according to a ballistic study,

the person who shot at him was taller than Rickey. Nevertheless

under Texas law, a defendant can be given the death penalty if he

was a party to a killing, even if he didn't kill the victim himself.


Rickey denied the killing but acknowledged the rape during his last

statement. So were the Sirvens going to befriend a monster? The

‘Rickey’ condemned to be killed by the state' had little in common

with the Rickey who, 23 years before, was part of an odious crime -

to the extent that visiting him seemed to be a much unforeseen

experience. "For the American administration it was a caged

"monster" we went to meet. A monster accused of rape and murder.

But we know the man did not get a proper defense. Far from being a

"monster" the man we met was a bud of humanity through the work

of Rickey Lynn Lewis. We thought we were going to have to look for

that bud, instead we were dazzled by the new blossoming of a great tree. We saw before us a man full of the desire never to harm another. We met a man who had become human through the experience within himself, within us, which is infinitely greater than us."


Virginie, the Sirvens' daughter who visited him too says: "Suddenly I had the feeling "this is my brother". I could feel a bond, a pure bond without any artifice, unconditional love. Probably I wouldn't have had the same experience with another inmate. In this place where I should feel uneasy there is this bond. We are there face to face. I feel a great serenity. I have never experienced something like that anywhere else. It's maybe triggered by this journey to the very edge of life."  And from Rickey in one of his letters to the Sirvens: "I'm on Death Row with a date to die, but all this love is around, blocking away all the sadness of this date".


Me too, I was going to meet Rickey. The way to him was puzzling. From Montpellier I called the Death Row in Texas. The lady who granted me permission to visit Rickey could not have been nicer to me, and it was the same with all of the Public Information Office staff at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ). What a gap between the high degree of transparency displayed by the TDCJ,** the friendliness of most of its employees and the frightening apparent lack of concern for their work on Death Row, that of erasing a human being. So by the beginning of April, one week before the date scheduled for his death, I made the journey to the Polunski Unit, the jail where Rickey and 280 other convicts are detained prior to their execution.
But I was not to see Rickey. I learnt that a few days prior to my arrival a detective visited him and lied to him, saying that if he gave the names of the people who broke into the house with him, he would get a stay of execution. Rickey gave the names of some people and then became paranoid about it. He thought that as a result those people could endanger the lives of his visitors. So Rickey refused to meet me because he wanted to protect me …


The day after this tentative visit, I went to Huntsville - 60 miles from the Polunski unit -  a town of 39,000 including more than 8000 inmates, where Rickey was to be killed. In order to give you an idea of the context, the US is the only nation in the Western world to apply the death penalty and it ranks 5th for the number of executions, behind China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia! Since 1976, when the death penalty has been re-instituted in the US, Texas has executed more inmates than any other state, all of them in Huntsville, which makes this verdant town the killing capital of the world when it comes to legal homicide! There are 7 jails in Huntsville, the main industry for the town, to the extent that there is even a prison museum you can visit there.***


The Execution
Rickey’s execution was scheduled for April 9th. On the day

Danièle and René Sirven met with the chaplains attached to the

Death Row in order to "brief" them regards witnessing the

killing scheduled a few hours later. I was there, I attended the

meeting; it looked surreal, the striving for such perfection and

the anticipation attached to every single detail:  "Don't forget to

go to the toilet before the execution, you may cry and you will

have all the Kleenex you need, but above all don't touch the

plexiglass which separates you from the death chamber…."


One of the chaplains had already attended 111 executions and

maybe it had just become routine for him. I asked what his

stand was on the death penalty. "I don't do politics; I just talk

with the convicts". Another one would take the risk and say,

"Something senseless takes life away". I asked a third one

about Rickey, "I appreciated him, it's terrible".
Strapped on a table called a gurney, in the shape of a cross,

Rickey was to be killed for a homicide he probably didn't commit. The execution is carried out by lethal injection, a very clinical act, almost anticlimactic, according to Michael Graczyk, an Associated Press correspondent based in Houston who has witnessed more than 300 executions. At appointed execution time, I stayed in front of the jail with a handful of anti-death penalty demonstrators, less than a dozen people - among them not even one student from the neighbouring Sam Houston State University a few hundred meters away. Most of them just don't even know about the executions which take place at ‘The Wall’, the prison next to their university, despite a strong and famous criminal justice department.


And downtown Huntsville what's the local opinion on the death penalty and the jail industry? I entered a cozy fashion shop attended by a young and attractive assistant. Both her parents work for the jail industry. What does she think about the death penalty? She doesn't know. Why are there so many convicts on Death Row in Texas? She just doesn't know.
Although most people I spoke to in Huntsville don't seem especially happy about the executions, the larger sense I have is of a general indifference, perhaps because the locals have just got used to it; the state-condoned killings have become part and parcel of daily life. Routine trivializes atrocity.


Since Rickey, two other convicts have been executed in Huntsville. Despite the cold-blooded cruelty of those executions, through Danièle and René’s unwavering commitment towards Rickey up until the ultimate moment I witnessed something stronger than death, faith in being human.



*    ‘Texas couloir de la mort’ book by Danièle and René Sirvens and more information about Rickey: http://www.usa-couloirsdelamort.org/
**   http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/
*** http://www.txprisonmuseum.org/