Riffs From The Row

By William Van Poyck - November 4, 2006

This mourning the guards came and took my friend away. John Yancy Schmitt is scheduled to be executed on November 9, 2006, and according to the protocol he was taken away to Greensville Correctional Institution, the place where he will be put to death, six days prior to the deed. Those men who will kill him, like the public at large, will know nothing about the man himself – his dreams, his character, his intellect, his spirit – they only know, and only care about the few grim details of those fleeting moments of time during which Yancy made the worst decision in his life and a bank guard died. From that point on Yancy’s entire life, all 33 years of it, was defined solely by what happened on that tragic day. In the public’s mind the man and the event became one and the same. This, of course, is true with every person on the row. The public sees the crime, not the man or woman behind it. The prisoner is just a name and a jailhouse photograph, linked to the crime, forever frozen in time, a symbol upon which to vent society’s collective rage. The public does not want to know that the prisoner has a mother or father, or a wife and children who love him dearly, that he once was an honor student in school, or she once bounced her giggling baby on her knee. I’ve known Yancy for the last five years and I know him as a good and honorable man, a man I’m proud to call a friend. And this Thursday I will lay on my bunk at 9:00 p.m., as I have done so many times before, thinking about my friend as he is strapped down on that gurney 20 miles away, with the terrible poisons pouring into his veins. Once again I will be haunted by my own inner soliloquies as I try to grasp the purpose of putting this person to death. At 9:15 p.m., when the prison doctor declares him dead and the prison spokesman announces that the sentence has been carried out, what will have changed? How will society be better off or the state of mankind improved? Will “justice have been served” as the pundits are pleased to declare, and if so, at what price to us as a people? What is it about our nature as Americans that we so dearly embrace the concept of killing people as a solution to our perceived problems? Where does this relentless thirst for blood emanate from, and more importantly, where is it leading us?

These are all rhetorical questions of course, and I’m not the first to ask them. This will be our third execution in 3 months, and I long ago lost count of the number of execution I’ve already lived through. I say my own little prayer during each one, for whatever it is worth, but there have been so many that the grind takes its toll, and it’s easy to get worn down, to stop asking these questions. But though they may be common and simple questions and though the answers may remain as elusive as ever, they are not pointless, and they need to be asked. The real crime will occur when we, as a people, simply stop asking why?

William Van Poyck was sentenced to death in Florida but was transferred to Virginia’s death row by the governor of Florida after Florida State Prison guards murdered Van Poyck’s codefendant, Frank Vales, in his death row cell in 1999.

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