Hope, resignation and an unexpected reprieve on death row | Opinion

As you know, Oscar Franklin Smith was placed on death watch and moved to an isolated containment unit with 24-hour surveillance for the days leading up to an execution. He’s stripped and chained if he moves to the visitation room, and if the condemned person has chosen the electric chair then they’re shaved.

I visit him cell-side. He is eager to see someone. His shirt pocket, usually overflowing with pencils, is empty. We talk through the bars. He’s sleeping randomly, and when I come in he sits up on his bed, the two tufts of hair on either side of his head sticking straight up and out like wings. He sits cross-legged at the end of his cell bed like a kid at a sleepover. His wild beard spirals out and a random mustache hair swings down into his mouth while he talks, but he doesn’t mind.

His last meal arrives, the main entrée a burger, in a Styrofoam box; he handles it with awe. Oscar looks to everyone in the room and offers them a bite. They politely decline. He hasn’t stopped expressing generosity and gratitude for everyone around him, including the guards. He is already beginning the process of leave-taking.

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His execution is hours away. At this moment, the most gruesome characteristic of the situation is the hope held over his head with each possible court appeal that’s slowly poisoned each time the appeal is denied. Oscar updates me each day; yesterday he said his odds were 50/50. (These are not the statistical odds. These are the odds of his own hope to not die.) “Today,” he says, “I’d say my odds are 80/20” as we await the last possible final appeal from the U.S. Supreme Court. He finds out that it’s been denied.

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“That’s it,” he says. What he means by that is that there are no more odds, just zero, but he doesn’t say it. Do you know what happens to a body when the last gasp of hope slips out of it? You can see it. The body slumps just a little, the fire in the eyes dims slightly, you can sense the mind finally accepting what’s it fought so hard to reject. It’s the machinery of execution already at work in the body. Execution is not an event, it’s a process. Here at this moment, the needle is already at the vein.

All hope being lost, we celebrate Holy Eucharist, the Christian sacrament commemorating the Last Supper before Jesus was executed by the state. I pray the words, we share communion, me on one side of the cell bars and Oscar on the other, doomed to die, despair dripping into his heart and yet strangely buffeted in that tragic moment by some fugitive connection between a condemned man and a condemned God.

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The prayer is finished. I help Oscar open the prepacked cups that contain the bread and grape juice. We eat quietly. There is silence. Oscar believes that the extraction team will be coming any minute. He looks to the back and sees the wardens enter. “Just in time! Would you like to join us?” Oscar gestures to the extra communion that’s left over. The moment could not have been more splendidly ironic. There was for a brief moment the possibility of communion between executed and executioner, the remembrance of an executed God.

But the wardens decline. And they come closer to the cell. “You’ve been granted a reprieve,” the warden says. We are stunned. Someone may have said, “Excuse me?” I don’t know. He repeats it word for word. There is no more information given and that is that. No one knows anything more. In the next instant, the room clears. Oscar grabs my hand through the prison bars and asks, “What just happened?” I reply blankly, “I don’t know, but something.” And we pray before I leave, like usual.

After I pray with Oscar, I walk through the many armored doors and step out into the open air, feeling glad and yet wanting to throw up, feeling hopeful and fearing it would choke me. Oscar goes back to his unit that evening to his empty cell. He has already cleared out his possessions, mailed away his 1970 radio, dispossessed himself, said his goodbyes and watched all his appeals drain away. He’d resigned himself to die as the needle was at his arm. And now, if everything goes to plan, he’ll have to do it all over again.

The Rev. Matthew Lewis of Christ Church Cathedral was the spiritual adviser for Oscar Smith.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Hope, resignation and an unexpected reprieve on death row