 |
 |
 |
 |
Helping Karl
Las Vegas Optic
November 2007
Woman Awaits Son's Execution
Muina Arthur leaned back in a stuffed chair near the picture window of a friend’s Las Vegas home. A stack of poems typed on parchment paper sat at a table to her left. She gently ran her fingers over a small watercolor painting. She traced the face of a benevolent tiger, his eyes dark and expressive.
“People I knew, people I considered friends, would cross the street to avoid me when this happened.” She paused, her hands trembling with emotion. “Karl painted this in prison. Everyone thinks they know him by what he’s done. But they don’t see the person — the artist, the poet, the son — trapped inside the nightmare. That person is as real as the other. And I am a person just like everyone in town. This nightmare could happen to anyone.”
Sixteen years ago, Arthur’s son, Karl Chamberlain, knocked on the rough-sanded door of his apartment neighbor, a single mother with thick black hair framing a soft, round face. She filled his extended coffee mug with sugar. The temperature crept toward 100 degrees — a typical Dallas August day. Chamberlain returned minutes later. He held a roll of silver duct tape and a .30-caliber rifle. He forced the woman to her bedroom, bound her hands and feet with the sticky tape. He raped her. The woman’s brother and her 5-year-old son found her, dead, lying in a pool of blood on her bathroom floor, a bullet lodged in her brain.
Chamberlain was caught five years later. He admitted the rape and murder, stood trial, and was sentenced by a Texas jury to death by lethal injection. The state of Texas has scheduled Chamberlain’s execution for Feb. 2.
Dallas neighbor Samuel Chester remembers the day the victim’s body was found. “I lived in the same complex as Karl. He was a quiet man. He liked to take long walks. I didn’t suspect him of the murder,” Chester said in a drawl over the telephone. “I watched them take her body out in a bag.” His voice broke with emotion. “Her son must be nearly a grown man by now.”
Joe Whiteman, a retired radiologist, belongs to the Las Vegas chapter of Amnesty International, an organization working toward ending the death penalty. Whiteman researched capital punishment for a term paper in high school and has been against the practice ever since. He took a seat at Spic & Span and sipped from a tall glass of orange juice.
“It’s in all of us to separate ourselves when things like this happen. It’s difficult to bridge that kind of reality. But the truth is that we are one humanity. We’re ready to kill this man for an admittedly heinous crime — which he’s confessed to,” Whiteman acknowledged. “But where were we when he was a troubled child? Where were we when he first cried out for help? Maybe our society needs to think about how we are responsible for growing these kinds of problems.”
Chamberlain’s case is like many others on death row. His attorney — a public defender now under investigation for egregious mishandling of Chamberlain’s case — pleaded mitigating circumstances. Chamberlain was a troubled child with a domineering father; later he left the U.S. Army after being trained to kill, if necessary, as part of the U.S. defense.
Texas leads the nation in death penalties. There are 447 inmates on death row in Texas, 440 men — of which Chamberlain is one — and seven women. Executions are on hold at the moment; in September 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a Kentucky case challenging the constitutionality of execution by lethal injection. Executions in Texas and in other states that use lethal injection are halted until the Kentucky case is decided.
