I got a phone call at about 10.45pm on 21 October. It was a collect call from a prisoner at the Missouri State Correctional Facility. AJ Bannister was calling to say goodbye.
Not long after we spoke AJ was strapped to a gurney and a needle was inserted into his arm.
At 12.01am, at the signal from a prison official, the state's lethal injection machine began pumping poison into his body. Four minutes later he was pronounced dead. The cause of death was, as AJ put it in his final statement, 'premeditated murder'.
AJ had called to speak to my wife, who works with the Campaign to End the Death Penalty. She wasn't at home. She was at a demonstration outside the state capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin, one of several events organised by the campaign to protest at AJ's execution and to oppose the death penalty.
AJ said that he wanted to thank the people who had protested on his behalf and that though he had only recently come in contact with us he appreciated the campaign's commitment to the fight against the death penalty. We were just a few of the tens of thousands of people around the world who rallied behind AJ.
His case shared many similarities with the stories of injustice that echo through death rows across the US. Police arranged the facts of the 1982 killing of Darrell Ruestman to fit their theory that it was a contract murder, and therefore a death penalty case. Because AJ couldn't afford a decent lawyer he was assigned a public defender who spoke with him for less than one hour before the trial began, refused to give an opening statement, called no witnesses of his own and based his 'strategy' for avoiding the death penalty on the fact that two of the jurors in the trial were members of his church.
During the 14 year process of appealing against AJ's conviction, one court after another focused not on the evidence that AJ's gun had gone off accidentally in a struggle with Ruestman evidence barely mentioned at the original trial but on clerical details. AJ Bannister wasn't executed because he murdered Darrell Ruestman. He was killed because he had a fool for a lawyer and because no one in the criminal 'justice' system wanted the evidence to get in the way of a good execution.
When we talked on the phone AJ, as usual, spoke with a calm clarity. It was far more than I could manage. He was not expecting a last minute reprieve as happened in December 1994 when he came within two hours of being executed before the US Supreme Court agreed to a stay. AJ knew that he was up against public figures both powerful and petty who would be happier if he was dead.
There was Governor Mel Carnahan, who saw which way the political winds were blowing and decided to turn down AJ's plea for clemency, refusing to meet with AJ's family and friends and look them in the eye before he announced his decision.
There were the nine justices of the US Supreme Court who unanimously rejected AJ's last-minute appeal.
There was Ray Gordon, AJ's public defender and now an associate circuit judge in Missouri, whose incompetence in the courtroom was matched only by his self righteous insistence that he had done just fine by AJ.
There was D Brook Bartlett in Kansas City, where many of AJ's appeals were heard, who complained to anyone who would listen that death row appeals were cluttering up his courtroom and taking up too much of his precious time.
There were these and many others. They have AJ's blood on their hands.
Of course, they began the process of killing him much earlier. AJ first went to prison at the age of 17 for the heinous crime of stealing a CB radio out of a car. He spent the greater part of the rest of his life behind bars, enduring inhuman conditions.
In his book Shall Suffer Death AJ described the rat and cockroach infested cell in the unventilated basement of a 100 year old jail where he spent his first years on death row:
'There was no escaping the sweltering heat of July and August, and to further compound the misery, the smell was...like no other: urine, sweat, backed-up toilets, dirty clothes and, worst of all, the stench of human misery. The winters weren't much better. The basement became an icebox... It was important to tuck in our blankets snugly because, on several occasions, rats also seeking heat would try to get under the blankets. In the morning, the first order of business was to flush the toilet as during the night a sheet of ice would form in the bowl.'
It is a wonder anyone could remain sane in such conditions, much less emerge, as AJ did, as an articulate spokesperson against the death penalty. His voice touched people around the world. At funeral services in Chilicothe, Illinois, a small town just north of Peoria, dozens of AJ's family members, friends and neighbours turned out to pay their respects. And for every one of them there were literally hundreds of strangers who learned about AJ through documentaries like The Execution Protocol and Raising Hell: The Life of AJ Bannister, who visited the world wide web site dedicated to AJ or who heard about him at meetings organised to protest at the death penalty.
For all these people when they think about the death penalty they will think about AJ Bannister and the cruel injustice of his execution. 'Do not underestimate the magnitude of what we have accomplished,' AJ wrote before his scheduled execution in 1994. 'We've stood fast in the face of a well established system, which exists to serve the interests of a privileged few at the expense of others. A system which uses innuendo and scare tactics to dupe the population into supporting capital punishment.
'No matter what happens, we all did our best, and I know myself to be the luckiest man on this earth to have been blessed with your friendship.'
We have lost an important voice in the fight to end the death penalty. But the spirit of AJ's struggle will live on long after the Carnahans and the Gordons and the Bartletts and all the mediocre fixers of the criminal injustice system are deservedly forgotten.
We will miss AJ but we will also remember him, and when we finally abolish the death penalty, we will think about AJ Bannister and the part he played in that great struggle.
Sharon Smith will be back next month