Killing Behind Closed Doors:
The Execution of Donald Wallace, Jr.
by Sensei Robert Joshin Althouse (c) 2006

On a bitterly cold night of Wednesday, March 9th, eight people from the Chicago Chapter of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship and the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty sat outside the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, Indiana. We were there to bear witness to the execution of Donald Wallace, Jr. As I sat there in silence, I thought of how the power of the state of Indiana had massed itself behind those closed walls to commit this legally sanctioned murder. If it really thought this act was a deterent to others, why not show it to the world for everyone to see?

It's difficult to be here, knowing what is about to take place behind those walls. I don't want to be here, but am pulled nevertheless to show up and bear witness to something that seems distant and removed from my daily life.

Joseph Ross, a volunteer chaplain who visited Don on death row said that his time there changed him from the angry young drug addict he was many years ago to a person who loved silence, read and meditated, fasted and prayed and asked hard questions of himself. Don treated his time in prison as that of a monastic. He immersed himself in the Psalms, reading them aloud, sometimes in English, sometimes in Latin. They slowed him down and helped him become peaceful. Joseph writes that "Don is a man who allows things to emerge, rather than thinking he has to demand things. His patience, his willingness to be still, taught me a valuable lessan that I'm still trying to heed: Go slowly. In time, things unfold and become what they truly are."

I am sad to be here now, knowing what is coming. Is it possible the Governor will call and stop this deed? I doubt it. The machinery of power has come too far to slow down and reverse itself now. The news media are gathered for a story. Bright lights are everywhere in the cold, freezing dark night.

It's easy for me to forget about people behind bars. They are not part of my life. It's easy to disassociate part of myself from all of this. I guess that's why I'm pulled to be here. So that I can be more concscious of my own indifference. A man like Donald Wallace is disenfranchised by our country. He is written off as unredemable, and such a danger to our communities, that he must be killed by the state. What is disenfranchised and ignored in my community becomes something in myself that has become dull and disowned. So I sit here with this dullness to bring back that part of my humanity that is being robbed tonight by this act.

Some time past midnight, we hear the news that he has been executed, by lethal injection. People come out from the prision. The press gathers around a spokesman to get the story. And I feel empty, tired, exhausted, cold. I don't feel any safer now that Donald is dead. I don't feel vindicated for the murder he must have done many years ago of a family in Indiana.