Brian Haas: CROSSVILLE, Tenn. — Paul Gregory House says “Oh, well” a lot.
His mother says it’s a quirk of his damaged brain. A sort of sigh, a mental reset, when his thoughts don’t crystallize quickly enough.
He says it all the time, though — not least when contemplating a life that took him from death row in 1986, days away from electrocution at one point, to his mother’s modest ranch home in Crossville, where she now feeds him and helps him go to the bathroom and get in and out of bed.
The quarter-century in between says a lot about capital punishment in Tennessee. As state officials makes an unprecedented push to execute prisoners — at least 10 are scheduled to die in the next two years — the implications of Paul House’s life story loom over the state’s death penalty system. Dozens of appeals of the murder charge against him, in both state and federal courts, failed to free him, even as he maintained his innocence and new technology ripped apart prosecutors’ evidence against him.
Now 52 years old, House sits in a motorized wheelchair, thanks to the ravages of multiple sclerosis. He got sick while on death row. He needs constant care and wears adult briefs, since he can’t go to the bathroom on his own. And though he has moments of lucidity, the lesions on his brain often make him lapse into a more childlike state.
“Some days, he hardly talks at all,” says his mother, Joyce House. “But he never complains.”
He probably could.
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