Gregory Russeau: Life on death row
Don’t wear white.
Don’t wear white and button up your shirt.
Don’t wear white, button up your shirt, and the clock starts as soon as you start talking to him. Oh, and the guards are trained to shoot, just in case you step off the path while you’re filming.
All delivered with Texan bonhomie, but the directions we’re given by the authorities the day we arrive to film an interview with death row inmate, Gregory Russeau, give some insight into the world of rules constructed around the more than 250 inmates, who wear white jumpsuits and are housed in the Polunsky Unit at Livingston.
It’s not where they’ll die. For executions they’re taken down the road to the death house in Huntsville prison. There they can prepare with a spiritual adviser of their choosing, before they’re strapped onto a gurney and the warden orders the massive dose of pentobarbital – a barbiturate – delivered into a vein, and delivers justice, the Texan way.
Gregory Russeau says he’s ready. When he enters the cubicle for our interview, a giant of a man, he has to bend backwards to allow the guards to unshackle his hands through a flap in the lower part of the door, so he can sit and talk on the phone through glass to me. He calls me Ma’am.
“To some, it’s life and they want to live it. Me, I’m ready for it to be over with. I’m not ready to die, but the madness, the sadness, the humiliation, you know just life in general, being in this situation, is not good.”
Nothing, he tells me, could be worse than living out his life inside a prison. He says that he is at peace, after thirteen years of waiting.
“I have peace today, so I have no problem laying on that gurney to accept whatever the state’s going to do to me, but it’s not going to change the fact that they strapping an innocent man to a bunk and injecting drugs into them, just to get their satisfaction.”
He talks eagerly throughout our meeting, stopping only to mop sweat from his brow. The tissue paper sticks to his cheeks. He’s never agreed to a media interview before, but says his friends urged him to speak, so people would see the man they call the ‘bear’, not the felon the DA described as “a monster”.
I don’t know whether Gregory Russeau is innocent, as he says he is. His lawyers were ineffectual, he claims, when he was tried 13 years ago and eventually convicted of killing a 75 year old white man, James Syvertson. He accuses police of planting evidence to frame him, because he knew police involved in the illegal drugs trade, as he was. These claims were dismissed on appeal. He was stopped driving Mr Syvertson’s car but says he didn’t know it was stolen.
“I had an all white jury, and this was a 75 year old man and I’m an African American drug user.”
He describes the death penalty as a tool, that’s neither lawful nor just.
“No-one will get justice. No-one will get peace.
“They’ll be talking about, oh, he went to sleep – that’s not peace. James Syvertson is not coming back. Greg Russeau is not coming back. So there is no peace in it.”
There will be no last minute reprieve or legal absolution for Russeau. On Thursday, he will die – and become the 527th person executed in the state of Texas in the past four decades.
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