Speaking at San Quentin

I’ve finally had a chance to catch up with MVFHR board member Bill Babbitt and hear about his talk at San Quentin prison last month. Bill does a lot of public speaking in the course of a year, but it was a new experience for him to be speaking at the California prison where his brother Manny had been executed in 1999.

Former California Senator James Nielsen wrote us an email explaining how this speaking engagement came about and sharing his thoughts about it:

For many years I served as Chairman of the California Board of Prison Terms. One of my many responsibilities was considering inmates’ clemency requests. I also am an alumni fellow of the AgLeadership Fellowship, a two-year leadership training fellowship for California farmers and agriculturalists. For many years I have conducted a two-day seminar on the death penalty at San Quentin State Prison for AgLeadership fellows. The seminar includes speakers supportive of and opposed to the death penalty.

This year we held the seminar in a hotel and Bill Babbitt came along to hear one of the speakers, exonerated inmate Greg Wilhoit, because Bill and Greg are good friends. It was a very moving experience for me to meet Bill at the seminar since I had presided over the clemency consideration of Bill's brother, Manny. Spontaneously, I asked Bill to speak to the group when he showed up with Greg. I believed Bill is also a victim and that he had a unique and compelling story and perspective.

Bill was surprised as he was only planning to accompany Greg. He is a marvelous speaker and he indeed has very personal perspective on how the death penalty has affected him. Bill was so compelling that I asked him to return a month later with Greg for the first ever death penalty seminar I conducted for alumni fellows. This was held at San Quentin prison.

That’s how Bill came to be speaking at San Quentin in November. Here’s his report of the experience:

It was surreal to go back there, right across the roadway from the entrance where I’d gone many times to visit Manny. This time I wasn’t searched before going in. After the presentations, our entire group was given a tour of San Quentin. When we got to the execution chamber, and I was standing in the same area where I had stood to watch Manny die, the prison official who was conducting the tour explained the procedure right before an execution. He explained that they bring the inmate down to a special holding cell, and he can have water, he can make phone calls, and so on. And then, the official continued, “We snag ‘em, we bag ‘em, then we tag ‘em.”

I had to look away, but something in me told me not to respond. It was very difficult to be standing there, reliving my memories of watching Manny be executed, and then to hear that callous remark from a prison official. But several of the others in the group were looking over at me and they seemed to be aware that this might be painful for me.

Even though parts of it were tough, I was glad to make this visit and speak to this group. On the bus leaving the prison, several of the alumni fellows told me that they had never heard anything like my talk and had never looked at the death penalty from the perspective of families like mine.