The other humans who pay for the death penalty

Now, think about how these sites make you feel:

1. so sick I had to take a really deep breath to stop being violently ill;
2. pretty grossed out but I am still mindful of the horrible things those guys did to get in that position;
3. entirely indifferent except for some mild amusement at the Groundhog Day style caloric and fat consumption of those who know they won’t face tomorrow; or
4. hungry.

If you answered c) or d) – Congratulations you have just won a top-level position in the Bush Administration Justice Department. Better pack your ten-gallon hat and jump on a plane quick-smart as the transition time is running out fast.

Now I am an a) girl myself but for those of you who answered b) – I hear you. I really do. You are right to remember the crime and there is an entirely defensible line of argument that, irrespective of deterrent arguments, if the death penalty can bring some comfort to the victims of horrific crimes then maybe it is worth the risk of botched executions.

But I would like to point out that we should never assume that the current US death-row inmates committed any crime at all. Try to imagine how you would fare being accused of murder and tried with all the might of the state with nothing but a snoring lawyer and mental disability between you and death row.

Administering Death

Once upon a time almost no one was executed in the US. In 1972, a Supreme Court case called Fuhrman v Georgia held that the death penalty was unconstitutional. One basis for the decision was that the death penalty was already administered so rarely. The judges argued that because so few people were sentenced to death, and the chance of being executed was so arbitrary and capricious, a death sentence was like being struck by lightning twice.

The judges assumed that that decision would be the final nail in the coffin of capital punishment. However, most states quickly rewrote their death statutes to be constitutionally compliant. Five years later the death penalty was back in action with the death by firing squad (!) of Gary Gilmore in Utah. Since then there has been a steady upward climb in executions per year.

But while the execution rate has sped up dramatically in all states, none come close to Texas, where a person is killed at least once every other week. Initially, executing someone was a big deal – appeals got television coverage, the event was highly publicized and debated and everybody in prison knew about it and looked toward the event with dread. Now an ordinary execution in Texas will not make the front page of the local paper. But can the "machinery of death" really operate as efficiently as a machine?

National Public Radio discovered that the people who cannot turn away from the reality of death – prison guards, wardens and chaplains – are paying a terrible toll for the nation to feel safe. Fred Allen was a member of the "tie-down team", a five-member group that gets assigned to a part of the prisoner’s body each when he is strapped to a stretcher before the lethal injection is administered. After 120 executions Allen had a nervous breakdown – he was working in the garage when he began to cry uncontrollably. Now he can not escape mental images of the men he helped put to death: "just like taking slides in a film projector and having a button and just pushing a button and just watching, over and over, him, him, him." Allen feels he will never find peace "there was just so many of ‘em".

Journalists assigned to executions talk about witnessing the impact of an execution on the condemned man’s family:

Leighanne Gideon: You’ll never hear another sound like a mother wailing whenever she is watching her son be executed. There’s no other sound like it. It is just this horrendous wail. You can’t get away from it. That wail surrounds the room. It’s definitely something you won’t ever forget.