Anyone visiting the death chamber at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla after Wednesday, Sept. 18, will see a plaque on the wall with a quote from Gov. Jay Inslee.
"When the ultimate decision is death, there is too much at stake to accept an imperfect system."
The plaque was placed in recognition of the formal closure of the death chamber where 78 convicts were executed by the state over the course of 106 years.
Zenon Champoux was executed by hanging at the penitentiary on May 6, 1904, for the crime of murder in the first execution at the prison.
More than a century later, Cal Coburn Brown was executed by lethal injection on Sept. 10, 2010, in the prison's final government-endorsed killing.
In between, 74 more offenders were hanged and two more killed by lethal injection in the most final — and in a case of a mistaken conviction — unfixable, punishment of our justice system.
End of the death sentence
Though the ceremony was Wednesday, it's been 14 years since the last execution in Washington.
The reason is Inslee, who is serving a rare third term, instituted a death penalty moratorium during his first term on Feb. 11, 2014.
While Inslee can stop all executions while he's in office, a moratorium alone would not stop the next governor from allowing capital punishment again. However, in 2017, the Washington Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment, as used in Washington, is unconstitutional.
Finally, in 2023, Inslee signed a bill passed by state lawmakers removing capital punishment from the state's laws.
At the closure ceremony, Inslee said his decision in 2014 was not made in haste.
"When I made the decision to issue this moratorium, I thought about the most fundamental precept of justice," Inslee said. "It's carved into the marble over the U.S. Supreme Court ... It says, 'Equal justice under law.'"
Inslee's — and the Washington Supreme Court's — argument against the death penalty centers more on its unfair use, rather than the practice itself being wrong.
Inslee, as well as the court's ruling, points to a 2014 University of Washington study that found that Black defendants are four times more likely to be sentenced to death than white defendants in similar cases.
"Basically, we (were) telling people that, for the same crime, one person will die, and one person will live," Inslee said.
Inslee took the equal justice argument past race.
"What we found is, the same crime on one side of a county line would end up with the state government killing that citizen," he said. "And then ... on the other side of the county line, that person would live. That disparate system is untenable and unacceptable in any state that ought to welcome the idea of quality justice."
He referred to the inconsistent practice as a "fatal lottery."
At the end of the ceremony, Washington State Penitentiary Superintendent Rob Jackson gave Inslee a tour of the death chamber, the gallows above, and the adjoining cells where the condemned spent their final day alive.
The death chamber
The Walla Walla Penitentiary is where men in the state of Washington were executed since 1904. Before that, executions were in the county in which the crime was committed.
The chamber itself is simple. The room where the witnesses sit is just large enough for two rows of chairs to be placed in front of a window into the next room.
The next room, the death room, currently has a bed, where the condemned would be strapped down before the lethal injection was given.
On the ceiling above is two trap doors, which were used when hangings were the method of execution. The window in the observation room goes high enough so that you can see into the room above the death room, where the gallows are.
The trap doors, and the mechanisms to operate them, are still in place.
From 1993 to 2010, a total of five executions occurred in Walla Walla.
Two retired Union-Bulletin reporters, Terry McConn and Andy Porter, both of whom still live the Valley today, attended some of these executions.
McConn attended the hangings of Westley Allan Dodd in 1993 and Charles Rodman Campbell in 1994, as well as the execution by lethal injection of Jeremy Vargas Sagastegui in 1998.
Porter attended Cal Coburn Brown's execution in 2010, the final execution at the prison.
Though many years have passed, McConn was able to describe his feeling of the room in vivid detail.
McConn remembers the mood and "eerie" feeling.
"It was like going into a theater. It was dim," he said. "We were told not to talk to each other."
He said he still remembers today the quietness of it all.
"I remember the sound," he said. "You weren't allowed to talk. It was silent. It's the first time in my life I ever heard people writing. I could hear the other reporters scratching their notes with their pens."
Then, in the two hangings he witnessed, came the sound that McConn remembers the most.
"The most haunting was the trap door," he said. "That was the largest bang I ever heard."
The final execution
Though it wasn't known at the time, Porter witnessed what would be the final execution in the chamber, when he viewed the death of Cal Coburn Brown on Sept. 10, 2010.
"Let me give you some advice," Porter said. "If you ever attend an execution, which you won't now, don't sit in the front row ... I was front and center. The curtain parted and there was Cal Coburn Brown, not very far away. And he was looking straight at me."
Porter said that when the curtain opened, Brown already had IVs connected to him and was covered under a sheet to his neck.
Brown was executed for the murder of Holly Washa.
"(The then superintendent) held the microphone and told him to do his final statement," Porter said. "He thanked the staff. He said he had no complaints of his treatment. He then went on to complain that 'I only killed one person, (infamous serial killer) Gary Ridgeway killed a whole lot more. But I'm being put to death.' Then, he was done. He just closed his eyes ... And (the superintendent) gave the signal to the team to start the injection ... He didn't really make any other movement. His chest rose up and fell back down ... That was it. His head didn't move a bit. The curtain was drawn. A few minutes later the phone rang. The press officer picked it up and listened, and then said, 'Cal Coburn Brown was pronounced dead at 12:56 a.m. today.'"
Porter turned to McConn.
"I don't mean to sound unemotional, but it was kind of anticlimactic," he said. "I would have hated to attend a hanging like you did. That would have been very difficult."
Hangings
McConn said the two hangings he saw differed greatly from each other. He said Westley Allan Dodd, convicted of killing three boys, wanted to die.
Dodd pleaded guilty and did not appeal his sentence.
"This was basically a suicide for him," McConn said.
McConn said the media did not hear all of Dodd's final statements because the microphone was not working properly.
After his statement, the curtain was closed, but it was backlit so that observers could see a silhouette of what was happening. A hood was placed on his head and then the noose was placed on his neck. Then came the boom McConn described earlier.
"Bang," McConn said. "It only took that long. It was very efficient."
Charles Rodman Campbell was a different story. McConn said he was noncompliant the whole time, had to be dragged to the platform and refused to give a final statement.
McConn said the mood was very different from Dodd's hanging. Where Dodd had accepted his fate, and even wanted it. Campbell did not.
"And," McConn added, 'he was evil."
Before the murder convictions that would earn Campbell the death sentence, he was convicted of raping a woman, Renae Wicklund, and sentenced to 40 years in prison, though he only served about five years.
After he was released, he was convicted of killing Wicklund, as well as her daughter and neighbor.
"These were revenge killings," McConn said. "He was a rapist ... He was a monster. An absolute monster."
McConn said Campbell thrashed and struggled as they put the hood on his head and the noose around his neck.
His death though, McConn said, was just as fast.
Aftermath of witnessing deaths
Both former U-B reporters got emotional at times when describing their experiences. McConn admitted that at one point, he had been haunted by dreams about the experience.
Both said it was part of their job that they did not enjoy but did anyway because they felt it was important for the public to understand what was happening, and why.
Porter and McConn joked, visited and reminisced during the interview, which occurred in downtown Walla Walla. However, the mood changed for a moment when they were talking about some of the experiences.
At one point, McConn looked at his interviewer.
"You are never going to have to cover an execution ... and I am grateful for that for you."
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