By Melody Ermachild Chavis

I've worked for 20 years as a California private eye assisting the defense of prisoners facing execution, and, during those decades, nobody wanted to hear a thing about the death penalty. Suddenly, it's back in the news: In January, Gov. George Ryan of Illinois, a Republican, called a moratorium on lethal injections after discovering that since 1987 his state had freed 13 innocents from death row. In February, the Nebraska legislature narrowly defeated a moratorium. In May, the New Hampshire legislature repealed the death penalty, although Gov. Jean Shaheen, a Democrat, promptly vetoed the act. Even Texas governor and presidential candidate George W. Bush has gotten into the act by granting his first reprieve to a condemned Texan to allow DNA testing of rape/murder evidence. Perhaps Gov. Ryan has made the idea of death penalty abolition palatable to the media, a position more often discussed in living rooms than on TV screens.

I spend lots of my time in San Quentin, interviewing my 30-or-so condemned clients among the nearly 600 on death row. So when I heard that sculptor Richard Kamler was opening an exhibition which sought to create "the emotional, physical and social environment of San Quentin's death row waiting room," I booked a flight to Huntsville, Texas, the capitol of capital punishment. Kamler's exhibition, "The Waiting Room," was also slated to include a community conversation about the death penalty. This would be an old-fashioned town meeting, no "MacNeil Newshour" or "Frontline" talking heads participating.

Blocks from the infamous Huntsville Walls Unit where sometimes two or even three lethal injections are given in a day, I found the "Sam Houston Memorial Museum" and, inside, "The Waiting Room." Entering a dimly lit gallery, I recognized the familiar rows of plastic chairs bolted to the floor, just like at San Quentin, but this time eerily empty of the clusters of mothers, wives and children I usually see intensely talking, touching, whispering. In twenty years I have never become inured to the pain I witness in the waiting room.

From four small video monitors I heard the murmur of voices of family members of convicted killers condemned to death and of survivors of murder victims. "The Waiting Room" provides an outlet for their censored views. The relatives of victims who do not want death for the perpetrators are almost completely disenfranchised by the mainstream media, which invariably stages on-screen or in-print debates that pit a death penalty opponent against a vengeful family member of someone who's been tragically murdered. To learn that relatives of some of those killed in the Oklahoma Federal building bombing did not want death for the bombers, for instance, you have to find an alternative information source, such as Amnesty International's Annual Report.

It is this problem of impoverished media coverage that helped inspire "The Waiting Room" — in addition to Kamler's feelings about the death penalty itself. "Sure," he said, "if a responsible social or cultural conversation in a public space — like the media — were taking place I might be doing something else."

"The Waiting Room" also features "The Last Suppers": prison meal trays Kamler has fashioned out of lead. Incised into each dull, gray tray is a name and an execution date — some very recent. The viewer is invited to pick up a heavy gray hamburger, a soda can. Several trays are empty, and the inscriptions read: "Refused last meal."

If you haven't seen the Texas prison system Web site , it's worth a visit. Scroll down a smorgasbord of fried chicken, tortillas and chocolate pie: last meal menus next to the names of the executed. There is, however, no information about whether they were mentally ill, had good lawyers, were juveniles, remorseful, or innocent.

Kamler says he chose to work with lead because lead poisoning has been linked to violent behavior. "American Flag: Dead Women Waiting," a red, white and blue print screened onto a sheet of lead, presents photos of 38 women on Texas' death row (one, who killed her husband, was executed a month after my trip) and descriptions of their crimes. Like women murderers everywhere, nearly all of them have been convicted of killing members of their own families (often their batterers) or of helping men commit crimes.

Nearby, long gray banners of flattened lead chronicle the last day of Clydell Coleman, a man who was executed on May 5, 1999. The last entry reads: "Unusual occurrences: None."

Kamler has been making art about such socially and emotionally freighted issues since 1976. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and many other awards. His 1996 installation about gun violence, "The Table of Voices," was visited by 40,000 people on San Francisco's Alcatraz Island, who viewed an enormous table from which voices of victims of violence emanated.

Kamler himself, an elfin-looking white-bearded bald man dressed in blue jeans, called those in the gallery together for the community conversation I'd come to hear. Kamler explained that the conversation would be as much a part of the art as the sheets of lead, and that as we spoke we were all engaged in the creative act of making social sculpture. An auditorium adjacent to the gallery began to fill with about 200 people: murder victims' family members, former prisoners, at least one former correctional officer, defense attorneys and representatives from the District Attorney's Association. A racially integrated group of women sat together wearing t-shirts that read: "Stop the Tex-ecutions."

Kamler's reference to "social sculpture" derives from the work of the mediagenic, postwar German artist Joseph Beuys, which included the creation of the Free University in Germany. Such works of art function as attempts to create both alternative institutions and conversations, to wrest control of public dialogue from the commercial media, politicians and NGOs.

Artists today are often accused of preaching to the converted — that is, to the liberal-leaning denizens of the art world. But the people in the "Sam Houston Memorial Museum" 's auditorium all seemed to have genuine stakes in the issue and radically opposed views. Kamler opened by observing, "Art can bridge the greatest divides and allow people to look at differences in a new way. When people feel cemented into rigid opinions, only art can slip in — only artists have that elbow room." He said he hoped the dialogue would contain "some fluidity."

Sissy Farenthold, a determined white-haired woman who had run for Governor of Texas, spoke first. She argued persuasively about the unfair randomness of how offenders end up on death row, pointing out the disparity in sentences between Texas counties. Rural Harris County, with a tough D.A. and conservative jurors, has 53 citizens on death row, compared to 8 from urban Dallas.

Suddenly, four men in the front row stood up, tore up their programs and walked out. Kamler later told me that they were family members of murder victims. Kamler not only hoped the men would stay, but that they would speak from the podium at some future community dialogue.

Arguably the bravest man in the room was David Weeks, the lone defender of the death penalty at the speaker's table. Weeks is District Attorney of Walker County (which includes Huntsville). A prosecutor in his 40s who wears cowboy boots, Weeks also serves as president of the Texas Association of D.A.s. He defended regional disparities in death sentences, saying "each community has a right to set its own standards."

He continued by evoking the murder of a child in graphic detail and asserted that the perpetrator had "forfeited the right to live." He conceded the danger racism and class inequalities pose to fairness. He acknowledged that nearly every condemned person is poor. He admitted that "the system is imperfect." He emphasized that he does not take lightly the life and death decisions he makes in asking for the ultimate punishment. Weeks said nothing about what circumstances might have contributed to the child's murder, or what might have been done to prevent it. He simply argued for vengeance.

The room exploded in argument. Heads were shaking, arms were crossed, and many rose to debate Weeks.

Then Renny Cushing, president of Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation, spoke about the murder of his father and the need for healing. He shocked us by recounting that fellow New Hampshire legislators told him, "You're lucky your father was murdered, Renny. You can come out against the death penalty." And he cut through the duality of the debate by talking about healing. These were the words I'd come to Texas to hear.

Survivors of murders need just two things, Cushing observed: to know the truth and to be helped to survive the experience of having a loved one murdered. Instead, he said, the government offers only vengeance in the form of the death penalty, which he termed "a cruel trick" and "an impediment to healing." He challenged our society to find ways murder survivors can maintain their loving values — values which are important to society. Would he ever be able to forgive the man who killed his father? He wasn't sure, but the man's execution would "preclude my ever having a chance at an act of forgiveness."

Cushing's words moved me so deeply I was glad to hear that the proceedings were being documented on videotape. Kamler isn't sure what use he will make of them and firmly asserts the necessity of creating face-to-face, people-to-art experiences, but he frequently thinks about spreading the word more effectively. "This material needs to be turned into a book or edited as a videotape," he says. "And I'm fully aware of the need to scale up on the order of ten. I can have a conversation with 300 people, but how else to reach people about the work except by engaging the media?"

Kamler observes that both political and cultural reporters are confused by the non-traditional content of his work and his insistence that the "conversations" are part of the art. "The print media in Texas has been mixed. They covered this, but their confusion forces them to trivialize it on one hand, and on the other it allowed me the opportunity to get my views quoted. I'm not sure I know what to do about it," he smiled. "But I am learning to manipulate the media."

One thing, anyway, is clear: Kamler's timing couldn't be better for his art campaign of subversion.

"The Waiting Room" is currently visible in Houston at St. Thomas University, and will travel to Los Angeles in October and then to Boston, Memphis, and New York City.

For more about Renny Cushing, see Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation. Another recommended, mostly anti-capital punishment site with lots of dialogue is http://ethics.acusd.edu/death_penalty.html.

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