Cedric Ricks Said He Wanted To Die. Texas Is About To Oblige.

A Strange Witness

I have been inside enough courtrooms to know that they lie to us. They dress themselves up in wood paneling and procedure and the careful language of the law and they ask us to believe that what happens inside them is precise. Measured. Just.

Then something like Cedric Ricks’ testimony happens and the whole performance falls apart.

What Happened When Cedric Ricks Took the Stand

Cedric Ricks is scheduled to die today in Texas. Before the state goes through with it, I think people ought to know how he ended up on death row. Not the crime…that was real and it was terrible, two people killed in a Bedford apartment in 2013, a child left behind to carry it. I am not here to argue around that. What I want to talk about is what happened when Cedric Ricks took the stand at his own trial.

Defense lawyers almost never let their clients testify in capital cases. The risk is too enormous. But Cedric Ricks got up there anyway and what the jury heard was not a man defending his life. It was a man who had already let go of it.

Cedric Ricks couldn’t explain what happened. Couldn’t or wouldn’t…I’m not sure there’s a difference when a person is that far gone. He kept circling back to the same words: “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.” At one point, he said that what happened that night was “irrelevant.” And then somewhere in the middle of a trial that was supposed to decide whether he lived or died, Cedric Ricks told the jurors he wanted to die.

I have sat with people in the days before their executions. I have watched what despair does to a human face. And I am telling you that what that jury witnessed was not a calculating killer making a strategic decision. It was a man coming apart.

The Jury That Convicted Cedric Ricks Came Back in Less Than an Hour

The jury convicted Cedric Ricks in less than an hour.

I keep coming back to that. Less than an hour. In a capital case. With a defendant on the stand who could barely speak on his own behalf, who said openly that he wanted to die. The machinery of death moved through that courtroom like it had somewhere to be.

We are told that the death penalty is different. That it is surrounded by more safeguards, more scrutiny, more sober deliberation than any other punishment in American law. We are told that when the state takes a life, it does so with its eyes wide open. But there is nothing wide-eyed about what happened in that courtroom. There is something almost sleepwalking about it.

Cedric Ricks Was Not Asking for Mercy

Here is what troubles me most: Texas capital sentencing asks whether a person poses a future danger. It asks, in other words, whether there is still something alive in them that the rest of us need to be protected from. But Cedric Ricks sat in that courtroom and told the jury there was nothing left. Cedric Ricks wasn’t asking for mercy. He was asking to be finished.

When the state executes a man who asked to die, what exactly is it doing? Is that justice? Or is it something closer to an assisted surrender…the government lending its machinery to a man’s own destruction, dressing it up in the language of law so we don’t have to look at it too closely?

What Are We Actually Doing

I am not asking anyone to forgive what happened in that apartment. Forgiveness is a long road and it belongs to the people who lost the most, not to me. I am asking something smaller and harder: I am asking us to look at what we are actually doing today.

We are going to execute a man whose trial lasted long enough for a jury to eat lunch and come back. A man who got on the stand and unraveled in front of strangers. A man who, by his own words, had already given up.

The death penalty asks us to be certain. Certain about the crime, certain about the person, certain that there is no other way. I do not know how anyone walked out of that courtroom certain about anything except that something had gone terribly wrong long before the verdict came in.

Cedric Ricks said he wanted to die. Texas should not be in the business of taking people at their word when they are sitting in the ruins of themselves.