Category: book Nook
Change of heart by Jodi Picoult
available from book share and recorded books
Below is a rather lengthy passage from the author's web page, but it describes so perfectly how I felt and how we as a society should consider the death
penalty. This was a truly eye opening book. I give it a 5 out of 5.
Happy Reading,
Carla/TexasRed
Shay Bourne - New Hampshire’s first death row prisoner in 69 years – has only one last request: to donate his heart post-execution to the sister of his
victim, who is looking for a transplant. Bourne says it’s the only way he can redeem himself…but with lethal injection as his form of execution, this is
medically impossible. Enter Father Michael Wright, a young local priest. Called in as Shay’s spiritual advisor, he knows redemption has nothing to do with
organ donation – and plans to convince Bourne. But then Bourne begins to perform miracles at the prison that are witnessed by officers, fellow inmates,
and even Father Michael – and the media begins to call him a messiah. Could an unkempt, bipolar, convicted murderer be a savior? It seems highly unlikely,
to the priest. Until he realizes that the things Shay says may not come from the Bible…but are, verbatim, from a gospel that the early Christian church
rejected two thousand years ago…and that is still considered heresy.
Change Of Heart looks at the nature of organized religion and belief, and takes the reader behind the closely drawn curtains of America’s death penalty.
Featuring the return of Ian Fletcher from
Keeping Faith,
it also asks whether religion and politics truly are separate in this country, or inextricably tangled. Does religion make us more tolerant, or less? Do
we believe what we do because it’s right? Or because it’s too frightening to admit that we may not have the answers?
The story behind the story of Change of Heart:
I’ve explored religion and spirituality before in books – it’s a topic I could plumb many times and still raise more questions than answers. And I’ve looked
at legal issues that, when pushed, are less than fair. But right now in America, it feels to me like the country’s being broken apart on the fault line
of religion. All the big controversies – like abortion and gay rights and capital punishment seem to boil down to religion, and the weird thing that’s
happened to religion. Although historically it was a way to unite people, it’s become divisive – because beliefs have become absolutes. People think, “I’m
right, so you MUST be wrong.”
I found myself asking why we believe what we believe. Is it because it’s right? Or because it’s too scary to admit we may not know the answers? And suddenly,
I started to come up with the story for CHANGE OF HEART
It’s about a death row inmate, Shay Bourne, an uneducated, marginal man who’s been convicted of a double homicide, who decides that to redeem himself, he
must donate his heart post-execution to the sister of his victim – a little girl who needs a heart transplant. Now, we don’t have slavery in America, but
if you’re on death row, the state pretty much owns you. You’d have to petition for a less humane form of execution than lethal injection. Every state that
has the death penalty has an alternative method – a firing squad, a gas chamber, or – in New Hampshire – hanging. And if you do that the right way, you
COULD donate your organs.
As you can imagine Shay’s request attracts a lot of media attention – which the prison doesn’t want. They call in a priest to talk some sense into Shay
about what redemption really is – and the priest arrives just as Shay begins performing miracles. The priest can remember one other guy who had a death
sentence hanging over his head who was performing miracles…and things didn’t work out so well for Jesus in the end, either…and so instead of TALKING to
Shay, the priest decides to just listen. But nothing Shay says comes from the Bible. Instead, it comes verbatim from a real, ancient gospel that was rejected
as heresy by the Church, and excluded from the Bible. And the priest begins to think: People are always finding God in prison – but what if He was already
there? And what if the things he said didn’t match what you’d been told your whole life…but instead, the things you’d been told were WRONG?
Research for this book was two-pronged. I began by learning about the death penalty. America’s the only first world country that still uses capital punishment.
According to polls, 70% of Americans support it, but that number drops to 50% if the choice is between death or life imprisonment without parole. In New
Hampshire, where I live, the death penalty is on the books but hasn’t been used since 1939. In fact, the death cell is now used to store extra mattresses;
and the site of the old gallows is the chaplain’s office.
Clearly, I needed to see a working death row – so I scheduled a visit to Arizona to see the facilities and to talk to a death row inmate face to face. I
was halfway across the country on a plane when my visit was cancelled – apparently, they decided I was the WRONG kind of media. I found myself banging
on the door of the prison – instead of having trouble getting out, I couldn’t manage to get IN! Eventually, I sweet-talked my way into a tour of Death
Row. To be honest, if it’s working right, it’s very boring. Prisoners are locked down for 23 hours a day, in individual cells. So I begged to be taken
to the execution chamber, which in Arizona is called the Death House. They’ve got a gas chamber and a lethal injection chamber. Both were spotless. I was
flicking the microphone switch outside the gas chamber when a woman came up and asked me what I was doing. I told her that I’d been brought down by a correctional
officer, and I explained what he’d told me about Death Row.
She folded her arms. “I wish he hadn’t told you that,” she said. “That’s not quite the way it is.”
“Well, maybe you could talk to me, then,” I said, since surely she had all the RIGHT answers.
As it turned out, this was the warden of the prison. I asked her if she had ever presided over an execution – she had. Then I asked if she’d ever attended
an execution she wasn’t running. She looked at me and said, “That’s a very personal question.”
I stared at her. “Uh huh.”
Finally, she told me about Debra Milke, a woman who told her four year old son that they were going to see Santa. He dressed up in his Halloween costume
and she drove him into the desert, where they were met by the hit men she’d hired to kill him for insurance money. She was sentenced to death, and told
the warden that no one in her family spoke to her anymore. She asked the warden to come to her execution for that reason, when it happens.
The warden said yes – not because she thought Milke was innocent, but because she was a Catholic and someone had to pray for her soul.
“You’re Catholic?” I said, surprised. “Do you believe in the death penalty?”
She hesitated, and then said, “I used to.” Then she turned to her assistant, and instructed him to get a binder off her desk. The man returned with a huge
book full of the statutes and procedures used to execute someone in the state of AZ. This is a legal document that very few people have ever seen. Most
condemned men sue to get a copy, and it’s usually denied. The warden began to read it to me aloud. It included instructions for doing run throughs of the
execution, and how to time them so that the victim’s family and the inmate’s family didn’t come into contact on the prison grounds. It gave information
about how to find a vein for lethal injection in difficult situations – like in between the toes, or in the groin. It explained where the doctor was during
all this – much more hands on than the AMA would like you to think, since an execution isn’t sanctioned by the American Medical Association. Yet although
the doctor’s name doesn’t go on the death certificate, they check the IVs and monitor the entire procedure. And finally, she
This is fascinating, and appalling. Please post the rest, if you can. I will have to read the book, since I became so engrossed in reading this little bit that I forgot my surroundings...if that makes sense. It doesn't happen often. *grin*
, she told me how an execution is
performed. There are three officers who serve as the executioners behind a wall, holding hypodermic needles. The IV line that runs into the inmate’s vein
splits into three separate lines, each attached to one of these hypodermic needles. Two needles have a placebo, the third has the drug used to stop the
inmate’s heart – so the three officers never know which one of their three hypodermics actually killed the inmate.
The warden comes in and reads the legal document stipulating the death penalty for the inmate. They she says, “Do you have any last words?” This is the
cue for the doctor to administer the sodium pentathol, which is meant to put the inmate to sleep before the potassium chloride is injected to stop his
heart. Now, most inmates don’t have a lot to say. “I’m sorry”, or “I love you mom”, or maybe “Screw you”. But when the inmate finishes, the warden says,
“May God have mercy on your soul” – and this is the cue for the three executioners to push down on their hypodermic needles.
What this means, basically, is that the amount of time between the administration of the sodium pentathol and the potassium chloride is NOT usually enough
to put the inmate to sleep – and this is why the Supreme Court is debating whether or not lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment.
I was writing so fast and furious as the warden was giving me this information that at one point I spread out on a horizontal surface – and then freaked
out a little when I realized I was sprawled across the lethal injection table.
The warden told me that this was her job, and she’d do it – but she didn’t believe in its effectiveness anymore. She’d seen feeble old men executed, because
it took so long for the system to run its course. She’s seen hardened criminals return to the street because their murders didn’t fit the criteria for
death penalty sentencing. In her mind, justice didn’t seem very JUST. In fact, of all the people I met who worked there, not a single one actually advocated
the death penalty.
That warden retired unexpectedly about a month after my visit. I sort of like to think maybe I had something to do with it!
I had to fly back a second time to Arizona to visit a death row inmate – a man named Robert Towery. Robert and I sat down on either side of a Plexiglas
wall. He was very polite and called me Ma’am. He stood up when I walked into the visiting booth. We have kept up a pen pal relationship, where he asks
me about my kids or talks to me about the plots of Lost and Grey’s Anatomy. He is an accomplished artist who makes his paints from the pigments of shells
of Skittles and M&Ms, or from diluting coffee and ink on the pages of magazines. He’s taught me how you make a knife in prison, or a stinger to heat up
your soup. He’s a very nice guy – except for the fact that he was convicted in 1991 of armed robbery, during which he told the victim that he was going
to sedate him and instead injected the man with battery acid and killed him. He admits to being high at the time – and he’s been drug free for ten years
now. Which brings me to the real issue for the death penalty: everyone knows it’s not right to execute an innocent man. But what about one who’s guilty?
The death penalty was suspended in 1972, but by 1976, it was back in action. 38 states have capital punishment on their law books. Is it a deterrent? The
FBI Uniform Crime Report in 2004 showed that the South had the highest murder rate, even though it accounts for 80% of all executions. Is it cheaper than
life in prison? Well, it differs from state to state, but in Texas, for example, it costs three times more to execute a man than it does to imprison him
for forty years, mostly due to the judicial appeal process. Is it fair? What seems to matter more than the race of the inmate is the race of the victim
– if a victim is white there is more likelihood of a capital murder conviction. Plus, only certain murders qualify for capital punishment – suggesting
that the legal system thinks some deaths are more awful than others.
The best argument I’ve heard to explain the death penalty comes from another author, Scott Turow. He says it’s the adult equivalent of: “I don’t want you
playing in my sandbox anymore.” It’s society’s way of saying to a person that they will never fit in; will never be like the rest of us.
It was this focus on the differences between people, instead of the commonalities, that led to the second branch of research for CHANGE OF HEART – namely,
the history of religion. Everyone knows which gospels made it into the Bible, but very few people realize that there was a history behind that editorial
decision. In 1945, two brothers were digging for fertilizer in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, when they found an earthenware jug filled with leatherbound texts. They
burned some for firewood…and the rest made their way to scholars, who identified them as the Gnostic Gospels.
As it turns out, in the years after Jesus’s death, Christianity was a mess. There were tons of groups calling themselves Christian, and all believing different
things. The Gnostics were one of these groups. Gnosis means KNOWLEDGE, in Greek. They believe that being Christian was a good start, but to truly reach
spiritual enlightenment, you had to find a secret knowledge – the truth that there is a little bit of divinity in all of us…and that the journey to find
it is unique for everyone.
According to the Gnostic Christians, you didn’t need a priest to help you find God, because you were already a PART of God. Jesus wasn’t a savior – just
a guide. Religion was deeply personal – you couldn’t believe what anyone told you to believe, because you had to find your own path to spiritual fulfillment.
To that end, you should always be asking questions about faith, instead of believing what you were told. They followed multiple gospels which preached
this secret teaching, including one I particularly like, the Gospel of Thomas. It sounds much more like Buddhism or mystical Judaism than a traditional
gospel. It’s full of riddles and cryptic quotes, such as: “If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring
forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.” Well, when I read that, I knew exactly how Shay Bourne, my character on death row, would
interpret it – he’d want to donate his heart.
You can imagine how threatening the beliefs of the Gnostic Christians were to the early Christian church, which was trying to unify itself. Iraneus, the
bishop of Lyons, decided he’d had enough, and set about standardizing the Christian faith. He picked four gospels that were important to him – Matthew,
Mark, and Luke – which all followed a history of Jesus’s life – and John, because he’d distantly known the author. He said that all other gospels were
heresy – and thereby made an editorial decision that’s lasted 2000 years.
To be honest, if Iraneus HADN’T done this, Christianity would probably have died out in a mess of infighting. And yet – the baby got thrown out with the
bathwater. By getting rid of those Gnostic texts, Christians also dismissed the belief that people might reach spiritual enlightenment in a bunch of ways
– not just one RIGHT way. Isn’t it fascinating to think about what the world might look like today, if Iraneus had chosen a Gnostic gospel, instead of
the Gospel of John?
It’s no coincidence that I wrote Change of Heart during an election year. More than ever, I think it’s important to put the history back into the story
of religion. And if I could ask people to take away one thing from my book it would be this: to stop thinking of beliefs as absolutes…and to see them instead
as an invitation to have a conversation, and maybe learn something from someone else’s point of view.