The Ballad of Ricky Ray Rector

How crime became a bipartisan issue in 1992.

It was just after midnight on March 21, 1981 and Ricky Ray Rector was standing in front of Tommy’s Old-Fashioned Home-Style Restaurant in Conway, Arkansas. Conway is about 30 miles north of Little Rock, just south of where the Ozarks end and the fertile, low-lying areas west of the Arkansas River begin. Rector and two other friends came to Tommy’s because it was a Saturday night and Tommy’s had a dancehall. But this particular night, Rector didn’t want to pay the three-dollar cover charge to enter. Rector had grown up on Conway’s East Side, in a house at the corner of Prairie and Chestnut, at the heart of the city’s historically Black neighborhood. When Rector was four years old, the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, declaring that racial segregation was unconstitutional. When he was seven, federal troops escorted nine Black schoolchildren inside Central High in Little Rock, just down the road. When he was 14, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 went a step further than obstructionist Southern states would on their own, and officially ended racial segregation in the United States. When he was 15, Black Americans finally fully gained the right to vote. When he was 18, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and Richard Nixon became president, launching a campaign of “Law and Order,” leading to a massive expansion of police forces and prisons across the United States.

On that early Spring night in 1981, Rector had just turned 31. He had been arrested for petty crimes in previous years and had been unable to hold down a job. School and reading had long been an issue for Ricky. For most of his life, Rector had been considered slow, almost certainly the result of an undiagnosed and untreated learning disability. And on that particular night at the dance hall, Rector broke. After refusing to pay at the door, he took out a .38 pistol and began shooting. He clipped two people and killed another, Arthur Criswell. He then fled the scene—eventually calling his mother about what to do. She told him to come home. In the meantime, Mrs. Rector called Officer Bob Martin, a white patrolman who had worked the beat in Conway for nine years and had known the Rectors and Ricky. When Ricky returned home two days later on March 24 through the rear of the house as a fugitive, he did not recognize the police officer sitting across from his mother as Officer Martin. He took the gun he still had on him and shot Martin in the head, killing him. He then exited the house, put the gun to his own head and pulled the trigger.

Rector did not die but effectively lobotomized himself. Reports indicated that he developed “a near-total inability to conceptualize beyond a response to immediate sensations or provocations” and had been left “totally incompetent.” At best, he had a young child's behavior and diction. More often, he behaved like someone with a severe mental disability. After his hospitalization and arrest, he was afraid to go into the prison yard. He often bellowed like an animal in his cell, other times asking guards nonstop questions about dogs. According to his sister Stella, Rector believed guards had released alligators and chickens into his cell. Still, Rector was found competent to stand trial, was found guilty, and was sentenced to death by an all-white jury. At the end of the day, a white cop was dead, and a Black man with a record was left holding the gun.

At the time, none of this amounted to much. Just another day in America. But a decade later, Rector’s case—and the death penalty he still faced—would become a sign that the ideologies that drove American politics had continued to shift. Cities, once the center of American industry in places like Detroit, had begun to crumble and lose droves of its white population. During the 1950s and certainly the 1960s, the fight for Black equality had moral and political standing among large swaths of the American electorate. By the 1970s and 1980s, that was simply no longer the case. The hightide of the Civil Rights movement in the mid 1960s had coincided with riots in American cities, a war in Vietnam that was spinning out of control, and an economy that was turning away from benefitting the middle class and toward the wishes of the richest Americans. A case like Rector’s did not have the pull it once might have.

Rector’s family and lawyers appealed his sentence repeatedly, but it continued to be upheld. Even a writ of certiorari was filed to the Supreme Court, which was denied. They were out of options—the date of his death by lethal injection was set for January 24, 1992. Rector sat in his cell, waiting to die. At this point, only one man could spare him: Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton. Clinton, it just so happened, was running for president. More than that, he was the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. It was not a popular fight—potential frontrunners like New York Governor Mario Cuomo and Senator Bill Bradley refused to run, the thinking went, because incumbent President George H.W. Bush was so popular. After the swift US victory in the Persian Gulf War in early 1991, Bush’s approval rating was a sky-high 89 percent. Bush had been Regan’s Vice President for his two blowout wins in 1980 and 1984, earning himself the nomination and a landslide victory in 1988, defeating Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis by 8 points in the popular vote and winning 40 states.

Bush termed Dukakis as just another liberal who was “weak on crime”—part of the same playbook Reagan had used against Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, caricaturing their positions as 1960s-styled fantasies that increased spending on social programs. Led by the Chairman of the Republican Party, Lee Atwater, Republicans knew how to use crime as an issue. There was no clearer example of that than a 30-second ad highlighting Dukakis’ criminal justice record as Governor of Massachusetts and the furlough program to occasionally allow inmates out of prison. (The ad did not mention that all 50 states had furlough programs.) It only highlighted one case: the release of Willie Horton, a Black inmate convicted of murder. In the 30-second ad, the narrator says that Bush “supports the death penalty” while Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty but “allowed first-degree murderers to have weekend passes”—citing the example of Willie Horton, “who received ten weekend passes from prison.” Flashing Horton’s name alongside his mug shot—a grainy black and white photo of an unkempt, Black prisoner—the narrator then says that on one such weekend, “Horton fled, kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend.” As the narrator reads the offenses, the words KIDNAPPING, STABBING, RAPING appear below a separate, grainy, black-and-white photo of an afroed Horton being detained by a white police officer. The ad ends with a photo of Michael Dukakis as the narrator says, “Weekend Prison Passes…Dukakis on crime.”

Clinton was not going to make the same mistake. In 1991, the homicide rate had reached an all-time high, and rather than be caricatured as a flower child liberal, he often said, “I can be nicked on a lot, but no one can say I’m soft on crime.” Despite the tough-on-crime playbook having proven itself to be a winner, no Democrat had yet to fully take up the mantle. Now, after the party suffered three consecutive presidential losses, “New Democrats” led by Clinton would turn the tide. For Rector, the timing could not have been worse. Clinton was behind in the polls for the nomination. With Iowa Senator Tom Harkin running, it was clear Clinton would lose the Iowa Caucus. What was not as clear was what would happen in the New Hampshire primary in late February, a crucial step in Clinton’s quest for the nomination. And to top it off, Governor Clinton was facing his very first national sex scandal, soon to be his political daily bread: the accusation that he had an affair with Gennifer Flowers.

Clinton fielded calls from across the state pleading Rector’s case. Jeff Rosenzweig, Rector’s attorney and an old friend of Clinton’s, phoned the Governor and told him, “it’s like killing a child.” Jesse Jackson called him to stop it on a “moral, humanitarian basis.” Instead, Clinton said that there was nothing he could do—when, in fact, he was the only person who could do something. He left the campaign trail in New Hampshire to return to Little Rock for Rector’s execution, a step that was legally and logistically unnecessary. The night prior, Rector saw Clinton on television and said that he planned to vote for him that November, apparently unaware that he was set to die the next day.

The prior 24 years in the United States had changed the political winds of the country. The conservative revolution had moved from the fringes into the mainstream. A new political age had begun, wherein both parties shifted rightward, creating a bipartisan effect that raised white fears and made Black realities worse. Bill Clinton was not about to change that—so he and the Democratic Party jumped in midstream. It was a tectonic shift in American politics, and for Clinton, if Rector’s life was the price to show strength and win, so be it.

On January 24, 1992, Ricky Ray Rector requested and received his last meal: steak, fried chicken, cherry Kool-Aid, and a slice of pecan pie. He ate the steak, he ate the fried chicken, he drank the Kool-Aid, and he got up to walk his last steps on this Earth toward the lethal injection chair. Before he left the room, a guard stopped him to ask him if he wanted his slice of pecan pie.

“No,” Rector said, “I’m saving it for later.”

Sources:

Nathan J. Robinson, Super Predator: Bill Clinton’s Use & Abuse of Black America. (Somerville, MA: CA Press, 2016)

Michelle Alexander. The New Jim Crow. (New York: The New Press, 2010)

Lily Geismer. Left Behind: The Democrats' Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality. (New York: PublicAffairs Publishing, 2022)