A Killer Makes His Last Request

SAN JOSE — Proponents of the death penalty in California, particularly those who consider San Quentin’s heavy backlog of condemned a mockery of societal intent, may have found their most effective spokesman yet. His name is David Mason. He resides on Death Row, the barehanded killer of four elderly Oakland residents and later a cellmate he suspected of being a snitch. For 13 years, his case has traveled up and down the court system. Now he wants to dismiss his attorney, drop all appeals and take his punishment.

“I am pro death penalty,” Mason has said. “Always have been.”

Volunteering for execution, though, is not a simple process. The system is suspicious of Death Row inmates who don’t fight until the final writ is lost. Mason’s court-appointed attorney has protested, arguing that his client is not mentally competent to make the decision. To settle the matter, a hearing was convened in federal court here late last week.

For two long afternoons, psychiatric experts discussed Mason. There was testimony about a childhood of extreme abuse, a history of suicide attempts. A diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder was offered. His early horrors, a psychiatrist explained, programmed Mason “for destructive and self-destructive behavior just as clearly as if (he) had a spinal cord injury and was paralyzed. We don’t have an X-ray to look at it, but it is there.”

In such matters, experts can be counted on to cancel out experts, and so it went with the psychiatrists. Finally, late Friday, it fell to Mason to make his own case.

*

Five guards escorted him to the witness stand. A chain was wrapped around his waist, and his hands were cuffed to the chain. Mason is not a bad-looking young man. His dark hair was blow-dried, his mustache neatly trimmed. He wore his orange jumpsuit unbuttoned almost to the waist. The courtroom grew still. In the front row sat Mason’s wife, seemingly near tears. In the back row, the daughter of Mason’s first victim took notes.

Mason spoke in a soft, flat voice. He revealed little emotion. He was articulate and thoughtful, and he never wavered. Time after time, the lawyers and judge returned to the central question.

You could be executed by the end of summer, do you understand that?

“Yes, I do.”

This is your final avenue of appeal, and if you abandon it there won’t be another.

“Yes, I understand.”

Are you prepared to die?

“Yes, I am ready.”

He gave his reasons. He spoke of “personal growth” and “responsibility” and “justice.” He told of wanting to set an example for a “kid brother” who seemed to be slipping toward crime, and of holding a newborn nephew in his hands and wondering how he would react should someone murder the baby. He spoke of the pain he had caused and claimed that he had fabricated the stories of early abuse. He derided as a “farce” a legal system that consigns people to Death Row but does not kill them. And he spoke of death with “dignity,” of “not wanting to pass from my life as I lived my life--as a manipulator, telling lie after lie after lie.”

“I knew the rules of the game when I was out there going. I chose to be a criminal. It was my choice. The bottom line is: you play, you pay. You can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.”

*

Afterward, Judge Ronald Whyte said it would be a few weeks before he issues a ruling. “I want to give this some thought,” he said. The judge is not to be envied. As framed by the warring psychiatrists, the judge’s central dilemma is this: Is Mason a crazy man pretending to be sane in order to commit the ultimate suicide, or is he a common outlaw who has pretended to be crazy in the past in order to manipulate the system?

If Whyte decides Mason is telling the sane truth--that he is a man who in his 36th year at last has made himself whole, a career criminal who finally has learned to distinguish right from wrong--the remade man’s reward will be death.

Should the judge find Mason mentally incompetent, it would mean he bought the business about childhood abuses and post-traumatic stress disorder, a relatively new diagnosis in the field. The implications would be provocative, calling into question not only Mason’s death sentence, but also his conviction and, conceivably, creating a new avenue of appeal for many of his Death Row neighbors. In this event, capital punishment’s new poster boy would go down as one of the best allies death penalty opponents ever had.