The other humans who pay for the death penalty

The US Presidential election is finally over and, regardless of how he got there, the American public has got what almost 24 per cent of them wished for – George W. Bush presiding for the next four years. As is the custom, the mainstream media has unleashed a tide of cautious optimism, keen to give the new guy a chance. So it may then seem bad form for me to come in so early in the piece and predict the end of the world as we know it but Texas already gave the fella a go and it is only fair to treat the state as a litmus test for the future of the nation.

Of course the subject of which I speak – and it really is the only thing Texas leads the nation in – is capital punishment. Now before y’all yawn and say "yada, yada, yada, he executes lots of people and seemed to enjoy it way too much during that second debate – tell us something new", I will issue a promise that this article will be a little different.

Death in Texas

Of the 682 people killed since 1976, Texas has accounted for 239. This year 84 people have been executed in the US – 40 of them were in Texas The next state is Oklahoma, with 11. Now, since the death penalty is supposedly reserved for the most heinous offenses, this suggests either that Texas is a state with such a concentration of extraordinary criminal horrors that the death penalty is the only thing saving the state from plunging over the precipice into brutal anarchic criminal chaos OR, as all the evidence suggests, that the death penalty is a pretty darn lousy deterrent.

After all the publicity about problems with the death penalty in other states – including a moratorium imposed by Illinois when it was discovered that 13 of their death-row residents were innocent (oops!), people started to ask Presidential hopeful Bush about Texas and their administration of the death punishment. Bush stated famously:

The only things that I can tell you is that every case I have reviewed I have been comfortable with the innocence or guilt of the person that I've looked at. I do not believe we've put a guilty ... I mean innocent person to death in the state of Texas. All Things Considered, NPR, June 16, 2000

Freudian slip? The most comprehensive examination performed to date of the Texas ‘machinery of death’ found the system to be "thoroughly flawed" including alcoholic and drug-addicted defense counsel, 84 cases of police and prosecutors presenting deliberately false or misleading testimony and a significantly greater likelihood of the death sentence being imposed upon blacks. The New York Times has called the Texas death system "little more than legal lynching".

Many people thought that the excessive use of the death penalty in Texas and its questionable justice system would be an issue that would plague Dubya’s campaign (just as failure to support the penalty had irrevocably harmed Michael Dukakis). The biggest political opportunity occurred when it was revealed that in the murder trial of a mentally retarded man, the court-appointed defense lawyer, Joe Cannon, had slept, and even audibly snored, through witness testimony. When asked about the quality of fairness and justice in Texas, as illustrated by the case, Bush said that the case had been overturned on appeal and that therefore "the system worked".

He was right – the court sensibly held that "a sleeping lawyer is the equivalent to having no lawyer at all". However Bush stayed quiet when a Texas court overturned the appeal decision and reaffirmed the conviction – the death penalty stands. The court ruled that, in essence, Cannon could have just been catnapping through the trivial parts of a murder trial of a man facing the penalty of death. This was not even an isolated case.

The Fun Test

With that boring background out of the way, let’s play a game. Go to the following links and read as much as you can:

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/botched.html, or for the more fragile - http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/finalmeals.htm

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.

Yet try to forget they do. But I wonder what we find more disturbing – the agony that these people went through their first time – or the fact that their agony turned into indifference?

Lets go back to Leighanne Gideon, witness of 52 executions:

I was twenty-six years old when I witnessed my first execution. After the execution was over, I felt numb…A lot of people will tell you that, that it’s just a numb feeling afterwards…I’ve walked out of death chamber numb and my legs feeling like rubber sometimes, my head maybe not really feeling like it’s attached to my shoulders. I’ve been told that it’s perfectly normal, everyone feels it and that after a while that numb feeling goes away. And indeed it does.

Captain Terry Dean, left-wrist guy in the tie-down team at Texas Huntsville Prison states:

I am glad we are not using the electric chair… This process here, it’s clinical, The inmate, other than the fact that he’s expired, you don’t know anything has happened to him. And you know, that’s good.

Is it good? I believe that just as we are right to be horrified by gruesome murder details, we are right to be sickened by botched, or even successful, executions. Our viscera is trying to tell us something when we experience these emotions and we are ill-advised to ignore its message or drown it in alcohol or avoidance.

While the post-traumatic shock experienced by guards is awful, what is really scary is that America as a nation – judges, politicians and people at large are becoming immune to visceral impact of the death camps operating in a nation. Innocent or guilty – when a man or woman is killed once a week by the state and it barely rates a mention – I am scared for us all.

I'm not sure 80 per cent of people will get death...But I know this: 100 per cent will get it if I'm president.
– George W Bush