Insight

If you could have seen the pictures …

If only you could have seen the pictures of Clara Eva Birmingham. She rested on her side, on the worn carpet of her den, facing a wall spattered red. Her white underclothes soaked up the life as it bled from her. Someone had covered her legs with a crocheted blanket to preserve her dignity. What dignity is left in a murdered 80-year-old woman whose beaten face is no longer human?

Across the room an old man’s walker stood while the old man lay dead, knife gashes on his neck and head. Henry Owen Birmingham, 85, unlike his bride of only a few months, wasn’t screaming when he was slaughtered; his mouth was closed. He was an ex-military man. When he was attacked in the bathroom he fought. The yellowed picture from his Navy days was in a broken frame on the hall floor. Blood speckled his seaman’s uniform of black and white.

To think this was done by the couple’s grandson, 28-year-old Ellis Louis Mashburn Jr, is beyond comprehension.

Looking at these photos, as the jury did earlier this year, odds are you might feel the death sentence isn’t punishment enough. It was enough for 11 of the 12 jurors to recommend death, and for Calhoun-Cleburne Circuit Judge Sam Monk, in the last capital case of his 28-year career, to affirm it.

You can’t read what fate Clara Eva Birmingham would have wanted for her grandson from the evidence in the case or from the photos. We are left only with the vision of her eyes almost crystalline blue, frozen wide, staring up past her grandson — to God.

But revulsion can go only so far. Through Mashburn and his accomplices, we’ve reached our quota of heinous acts. How can we choke the life out of a third person and expect to right the first two?

It is spitting in the face of the Creator.

When Mashburn — and if — is executed, he will have pulled one over on the public. With our consent, we’ve committed his crime. We have thrown someone’s son on the pile of dead. They’re stacking up fast.

Two-thirds of Americans approve of adding another death to every egregious murder through capital punishment. But when we’re forced to confront our demons and they look like us, what do we do? If murderers fit a type — 5-foot-9, brown hair, crazy eyes — we’d catch them before they could commit the crime.

We’ve met Mashburn — or someone like him — at church, at Wal-Mart, at the bar, but we don’t remember. He is a face we’ve seen in the community, and — in some cases — he is family.

Clara Eva Birmingham’s sister, Evelyn Whatley, was at the trial. Her grief was not purged when the killer — a member of her family — was told he was going to be executed.

Mashburn’s callousness may have deepened the wounds.

His mother Victoria also was there. She collapsed when the verdict came down. Do three deaths in a single family bring more closure than two?

Humanity is the ability to reason beyond our visceral reactions. Human bile like Mashburn does not deserve to walk among us. We must not sacrifice our passions; we must moderate them.

If you could have seen the pictures, you would understand why 11 of 12 jurors condemned Mashburn to death. Yet the image that resonates isn’t of gore but of a slain 80-year-old woman with her eyes fixed on heaven.

Nick Cenegy is a Knight Fellow of Community Journalism at the University of Alabama’s master’s degree program at The Anniston Star. He can be reached at npcenegy@bama.ua.edu.