The other humans who pay for the death penalty

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.