A Christmas story about ham, Gila monsters, and capital punishment

We’d all eaten our weight in risotto followed by a box of toffee Sarah and I had brought, when Sarah and Jan left the table for the hot tub.

Though the jacuzzi sounded nice, I didn’t feel like undressing and later being wet and cold, so I stayed at the table with my father-in-law, picking at my plate, nursing a small glass of red wine.

In the moments before Sarah and Jan left the table, we’d discussed teenage criminality: our own, mostly.

Shoplifting.
Drug use.
Underage drinking.
Speeding.
Stupid teenage shit.

We questioned whether the American legal system ought to lock up teenage criminals, much less sentence them to death.

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court passed a ruling saying all death sentences issued to people who committed crimes as teens shall be commuted.

What did we all think about this?

My father-in-law and I had the most thoughts. I, being a high school teacher and he being a retired superior court judge, we were both very familiar with the teenage male, in particular, albeit in very different contexts.

“They’re like baby apes,” I said of teenage boys. “They’re driven by impulse. They can’t help themselves. They make mistakes.”

“But are there teenage mistakes that are indicative of some greater anti-social issue that cannot be repaired?”asked my father-in-law.

We were talking about murder, of course.

I hesitated on the question, flipped back mentally to all the teenage boys I’ve known over the last several years, even the ones I didn’t like: I saw their faces in my memory, remembered their laughs, their academic performance, sometimes their tears . . .

“I can’t imagine one of my boys murdering someone unless they were being impulsive. Unless they were in a really bad situation,” I said, feeling only 90% certain because there’s so much we don’t know about a human being’s capacity for darkness — even a young human being.

The conversation between my father-in-law and I had now become big and philosophical and messy and unanswerable: the kind of conversation territory in which I feel happiest, most at home — both socially and in the classroom.

I don’t like small talk.

I like big talk.

“I just don’t think people should be sentenced to death for things they do as teens,” I said.

My father-in-law nodded, stared at the red tablecloth, replied, “I sentenced a kid to death once.”

BECAUSE OF COURSE HE SAID THIS. IT IS CHRISTMAS EVE IN THE YEAR 2020.

I looked up, suddenly regretting my passionate arguments against sending kids to death row — not because I believed doing so was right or just, but because it was Christmas Eve and I could see sadness in my father-in-law’s eyes over a decision he had to make, he explained, because the law at the time gave him no other choice.

“I don’t believe in capital punishment,” my father-in-law said. “But I had no other choice, and what this boy had done . . . “

I had never heard of Levi Jaimes Jackson or his victim, Patricia Baeurlen.

Sarah tells me, when she was in high school here in Tucson, the case was a big deal.

Mr. Jackson, a white male aged 16 and a half, along with two friends, carjacked a forty year old teacher on her lunch break which she was using to Christmas shop for her children. It was December 10th.

Jackson and his friends carjacked her for fun: they’d recently gotten a hold of a gun, and why not?
They forced Ms. Baeurlen to drive out to a remote part of the desert where Jackson forced her, at gunpoint, to undress with the intent to rape. When she removed her clothing, in the desert, Jackson told her she was ugly, to put her clothes back on again, then had her take them off once more, once more told her she was ugly and had her put her clothes on again before shooting her in the chest and driving off with his buddies in her car.

My father-in-law says Jackson laughed, years later, at his sentencing when reminded of how he humiliated the victim before murdering her.

This wasn’t a kid who got nervous robbing a convenience store and killed someone in the process. This wasn’t a kid who got a gun and accidentally shot a family member, or even a kid who killed their abuser.

Patricia Baeuerlen was only forty. Four years younger than I was, sitting with my father-in-law who told me about how he arrived at a decision in the case.

I am strongly anti capital punishment.

Too much margin for error, and plus we know (if you believe in data, science, and all that shit) that it does nothing to rid communities of violent crime. On the contrary, in states that have capital punishment, the opposite is often true.

We talked a long time, my father and I, on Christmas Eve 2020 about the murder in 1992 that resulted in this gentle man having to pass a death sentence on a boy — even if the boy was still laughing at his sentencing, he was still a boy.

Levi Jaimes Jackson is exactly six months older than me.
When he is released, he will only be forty-eight.
His victim only lived to see forty.

“Maybe he’s a changed man,” my father-in-law posited, reaching for another piece of the dwindling toffee. “Think people can change that much?”

“No,” I said, softly. “I really don’t.”

And I don’t.

I think the kid who fucks up badly as a teenager — selling drugs, accidentally kills someone trying to make a few bucks, deliberately kills someone because they’re a kid and caught up in a fucked up life . . . I think that’s different.

I think the kid that would torment a woman in the desert, her car full of gifts for her children (a detail from the case revealed to me by my father-in-law), then drive around in her vehicle, blasting music, while her body lay dead for the snakes and javelinas, the kid who suggested to his friends they kill someone else that night? I don’t know if that kind of broken, in a kid, can ever be repaired: and we sure as shit don’t repair that kind of broke in America’s prison systems.

I’ve had maybe three students in my teaching life that really scared me.

One scared me because he robbed me, and I thought,”damn, man. I’ve been super nice to you, and you do that to me? You scare me.”

I mean, I’d been robbed/pickpocketed before.
Feels less bad/scary when it’s a stranger who does it.
A student? That felt like a betrayal.
(Plus I was in chemo at the time — he and the other students knew I was a cancer patient, in a fragile place in life, so . . . )

Another student was prone to violent outbursts in the classroom, over really small things, like another student disagreeing with him about — like — anime or some shit.
Or if the computers were being slow.
Or if someone looked at him the “wrong way.”
He’d breathe hard through his nose like a horse, his face would get red, and he was a big guy, and yeah, he scared me. (He once sang the whole of “Will You Still Love Me” AT me, as I was packing up after a NIGHT CLASS, and I just let him because I was honestly worried if I interrupted/stopped him he would murder me. No joke.)

The last student that ever scared me was a teenage boy.

He was a textbook sociopath.

The kind of kid whose eyes make your blood run cold because there’s nothing behind them but contempt and rage.

Even when he’s smiling.

Even when he’s laughing.

Even when he’s eating Takis.

He scared me. He scared other faculty and was eventually expelled or gently encouraged to move on. I no longer remember . . .

Note they were all men. I don’t think that’s an irrelevant fact.

Maybe people and kids like this are broken beyond repair, but maybe their existence should cause us to ask ourselves, as a society, as communities, what are we doing to produce such people?

In the case of Mr. Jackson — he had no parents.

I mean, he had them, but they weren’t a part of his life and when they were, they had abused him terribly.

He was basically on his own from birth.

And yes, there are lots of people for whom this is true who don’t go on to be sadistic murderers.

Thank the gods for that.

Anyway. It’s Christmas Day, and I’m in my STUDIO writing about a murderer.

Because OF COURSE I am.

Because it’s 2020, and only in 2020 would a small Christmas dinner turn into a super intense conversation with a man who actually sentenced a teenager to death.

Like what? Huh?

What you need to know about my father-in-law is that he is a gentle man.

He bought a snake grabber so there’s no need to kill the rattlesnakes that regularly slither their way from the foothills into their yard and garage.

Sarah told me a story of him once trying to save quail eggs from a Gila monster..

He has a tattoo on his arm that says, in Greek, “Philotimo” — roughly meaning, “Love of honor.”

His voice is soft.

He loves children and has a particular soft spot for troubled teenage boys because he himself was once a troubled teenage boy.

When he talks about the many teenage boys who stood before his bench over the years, there is always a tenderness, a palpable empathy. Sometimes he chuckles remembering the simply stupid criminal shit teenage boys would get themselves into. Just STUPID shit. But Jackson was different. This wasn’t “stupid shit.”

And I think maybe my father-in-law is a little haunted by the story of Levi Jackson.
Not only because he sentenced the boy to die, but because he never wanted to sentence the boy to die: the legal system was broken and he just had to work, as ethically as possible, within a broken system, and not to harp on this, but once again we have systems — education, healthcare, law — who are full of good and talented fucking people who are hogtied constantly by beauracratic nonsense rules made by people who are so out of touch or, worse, are utterly divorced from their own humanity . . .

So you take a judge like my father-in-law, a good, thoughtful person, and you tell him, “Okay, here’s this kid who has done something incredibly heinous. Really grisly and awful and cruel. You can give him virtually no time for his crime OR you can sentence him to death.”

That’s it.

Those are the options.

Pass or Fail.

My father-in-law told me what he’d rather have done with Mr. Jackson.

I’ll keep that between us, but suffice it to say what my father-in-law wanted was nothing cruel or unusual for the boy, but fair and just.
He did not want the boy to die for his sin.

I would never want to make such a decision.

My father-in-law has had to make this choice twice.
That’s two times too many for any human being to have to carry.

At least, I think so.

Get rid of the death penalty and you can get rid of forcing the hands of good men and women who are sitting on our courts’ benches.

I tried to find a picture of the victim, Ms. Baeuerlen online. No luck.

I guess when I hear stories like this, I like to see faces.
Anyone can see Jackson’s face online.
I don’t know what to make of his face.
He looks mean, but mean can be play acted — and often is
by men who feel, for one reason or another, vulnerable.

Maybe Mr. Jackson learned to be mean really early on,
when he figured out he was on his own.
Maybe the emptiness was too overpowering for his fragile, underdeveloped moral core — if the seed ever germinated. (I mean, I think we’re all born with the potential to be good. The seed for good is there, but that doesn’t always mean it receives the sunlight and water needed to grow.)

The cruel, cold, awful, painful parts of life sometimes threaten to overwhelm even the strongest, most developed moral fibers.

I’m not trying to be an apologist for Jackson merely because he was a “teen.”

Far from it.

I’ve worked with enough teens to know 99% know the difference between basic right/wrong.

Most teenagers want to follow the fundamental tenets of a civilized society: don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t hurt-on-purpose.

At least this has been true for virtually every teenager I’ve ever known.

Do they do incredibly stupid shit sometimes? Yes. They’re teenagers.
But “stupid shit” and “sadistic murder” are two very different things.
The line between “sold weed at school” and “killed a woman in the desert for fun”
is thick and clear.
One is just damned stupid and plainly illegal.

The other is felonious and evil.

And I know “evil” is a loaded word, but I wish we could all come to a common understanding of what it means.
I think some words must have very specific meanings, and that we all must know what those specific meanings are.
And I think “killing someone in the desert for fun” is evil
— whether the perpetrator is sixteen or sixty.

So. Yeah. On Christmas Eve, 2020, I talked at length with my father-in-law as he processed (surely not for the first time) a decision made nearly three decades ago to put a teenager on death row.

Mr. Jackson will be a free man in four years.
His victim is still dead. Her children are grown and probably have children of their own. I’m guessing the actions of Jackson and his buddies ruined Christmas for their family forever. Not just in 2020, but every year, until all the generations who remember the stunning horror of the loss are also in their graves.

As for me, I am alive.
I am alive in my STUDIO and showered and in my pajamas because it’s Christmas Day.
Even if this is my last Christmas, I will not regret that I spent it writing in my studio, the birds twittering in the bush outside the window, my wife watching television in the other room.

Writing is one of the things I like best.
Followed closely by cooking/eating.
Even though it’s a sort of lonely, melancholy Christmas Day, I have a ham in the slow cooker, and will be (quite shortly) making dessert and Zooming with my family in Chicagoland. Safe, I think, for today.