By Gretchen Keiser

When John Eldon Smith went to die in the electric chair Dec. 15, he was linked by prayer to the church outside the prison walls at Jackson.

Last Thursday he became the first person executed in Georgia since 1964. He was sentenced to death for the 1974 slaying of a Macon couple, Ronald and Juanita Akins. A crime, prosecutors said, committed to get $20,000 in life insurance that Smith’s wife, Rebecca Machetti, held on Akins, her first husband. Mrs. Machetti and a third person were sentenced to life in prison in the case.

Father Richard Wise, assistant pastor at St. Philip Benizi parish in Jonesboro, who has known Smith for the last three and a half years, accompanied him to the execution chamber Thursday morning and, at his request, read a prayer of abandonment into the Lord’s hands, written by Brother Charles de Foucauld, and a scripture passage. The reading from Second Corinthians, chapter five, says, in part, “For we know that when the tent that we live in on earth is folded up, there is a house built by God for us, an everlasting home not made by human hands, in the heavens.”

After the reading, Father Wise said, he gave Smith a final blessing. “He said, “thank you,” Father Wise said, “and then I went into a room off the execution chamber.”

“I didn’t have to witness the actual execution,” Father Wise said, “although the sounds and smells were very real.”

That morning and on the previous day, Smith was “very brave,” Father Wise said, “not bravado – true courage.”

“He abandoned himself into the hands of the Father,” Father Wise said. “His relationship was so strong with the Father that he was not afraid to stand before God. He was a good Catholic, a very good Catholic.”

On the day before the execution, Father Wise celebrated Mass for Smith in his prison cell and heard his confession. On the morning of the execution, Father Olivio Novario, who works in the chaplaincy program at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center at Jackson, escorted Smith from his cell to the “death watch” area near the execution chamber. Early in the morning, the two priests concelebrated Mass in that area with Smith. He received a plenary indulgence for the dying and renewed his baptismal vows at the Mass, Father Wise said.

The St. Philip Benizi prayer group held a prayer vigil from 10 p.m. the previous night to 10 a.m. the morning of the execution to support Smith and Father Wise in prayer, the priest said. “John Smith was very appreciative of that,” Father Wise said. “He was very close to the universal church” although he was physically cut off from the larger church, the priest said.

After the execution, Father Wise and Father Novario concelebrated Mass for five Catholic prisoners on Death Row, telling them about the execution and reading the particular scripture passage Smith chose.

As he talked about the man he had been with up to death, Father Wise saw more similarity than difference between him and people outside prison.

People tend to divide society into victims and victimizers, he said, when in reality “all of us victimize each other all the time.”

Rather than being a man set apart, Smith “was probably more typical of us than most of us would like to admit,” Father Wise said.

Father Wise pointed out that the man he knew was a number of years removed from the crime he committed.

But he also said that the death penalty was the extreme extension of the way people cut off and try to remove those who are unwanted and difficult in any way – whether it be the unborn, the elderly, the handicapped or any other group. He called this a “very dangerous way of thinking” which, sooner or later, touches every group and endangers every life.

Instead he said, “people need to know themselves and begin to realize the potential toward evil that exists in each one of us.”

“Once people look at themselves, confront themselves and forgive themselves,” he said, “they can begin to have mercy and forgive others.”

Father Wise, who has worked on Death Row for several years, acknowledged that what he was saying was very disturbing to many people and emphasized that he was not saying it lightly. He said that in his own life he had to confront the cost of what he was saying after being held up at gunpoint several years ago and fearing for his own life. He experienced anger, fear and a desire for revenge, he said.

“The call away from those emotions and attitudes is “not heroic at all,” he said. “It is just a call we all have to follow scripture.”