The Death Penalty Punishes Us Alll

[janet]

Even before Joseph Clark struggled grotesquely, groaning through 90 minutes it took Ohio executioners to put him out of his misery on May 2, the courts had already refocused our attention on the evolving methods we employ in our efforts to find a humane way to put a human being to death. The method du jour, lethal injection, has replaced such methods (still in use) as hanging, lethal gas and the elctric chair in 37 or the 38 states that have the death penalty, and it is also the method chosen by the United States government.

Among the reasons, challenges to the particular chemicals used in the lethal cocktail as violating the ban against cruel and unusual punishment have resulted in eleven stays of execution since the beginning of the year. eleven others were executed over the same period, despite their challenges.

One of those stays was in California in the case of Michael Morales. Until issues in his case are resolved in an evidentiary hearing now scheduled by Federal Judge Jeremy Fogel for September, there can be no executions in California. In January, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the execution of Clarence Hill in Florida to consider whether or not he has the right to challenge that state's legal injection protocol in civil court. In North Carolina, Patrick Moody was among the eleven unlucky ones. He became the state's 41st casualty of lethal injection on May 17, though the first to have a court-ordered monitor attached to his temple to ensure that he was not conscious while the drugs killed him.

In Professor Robert Johnson's seminal 1997 book about those who carry out today's executions, Death Work, A Study of the Modern Execution Process, he makes the point that each member of the modern execution is trained to do a discreet task, like securing an ankle or a wrist, and then repeatedly drilled so that the task becomes automatic, like robots carrying out a pre-programmed task. The robot is not programmed to kill a person, but only to strap down his ankle.

But executioners are not robots, and things happen to them, especially when what they've rehearsed is not what's played out. Will these terrible groans of Joseph Clark -- or the sight of him raising his head and shaking it while yelling, "It don't Work!" -- affect the men and women in that room? Will it affect the warden and his staff? The guards? The witnesses? And if so, how? And for how long?

Some still alive today are haunted by the ghost of 15-year-old Willie Francis who survived his attempted electrocution in Lousiana in 1947, burned and smoking; no one who was there will forget how, in 1983, Jimmy Lee Gray died "banging his head against a steel pole in the gas chamber while the reporters counted his moans (eleven, according to the Associated Press); some witnesses fainted as they watched William Landry's execution team to reinsert the lethal needle after it popped out of his vein -- after the deadly drugs had begun to do their work; in 1990, the head of Jesse Talefero burst into flame as he died in Flrida's electric chair. There are literally dozens of examples of botched jobs, and unexpected horrors scattered among every method of execution.

But even when the executions go as planned, the potential effects on those involved cannot be minimized. The state of Florida, for example, provides for post-execution counseling for members of the execution team in its "Methods of Executions and Protocol:. Most capital punishment states, including California, offer counseling services to all execution witnesses -- except those connected by blood or love to the condemned. But as one who has witnessed his friend's execution by lethal gas, I can confirm that the experience is deeply traumatic and long-lasting.

In the radio documentary, "Witness to an Execution", produced in 2000 by South Portraits Productions and first aired on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," a number of men who had been part of Texas' very busy execution process, agreed to sit and recall their experiences. Among them was Fred Allen who, after participating in 130 executions as a member of the state's "tie down" team, suddenly found himself collapsing emotionally. "I started shaking," he remembered, "and tears --- uncontrollable tears -- was coming out of my eyes .... And I just though about that execution that I did two days ago, and everybody else's that I was involved with ... and it just -- everybody -- all of these executions all of a sudden sprung forward ..."

Huntsville Warden Jim Willet, who presided over approximately 75 of the 152 executions carried out when George Bush was the state's governor, noted, "We've carried out a lot of executions here lately ... Sometimes I wonder whether people really understand what goes on down her and the effects it has on us."

Former Mississippi Warden and latter-day death penalty abolitonist Donald Cabana described the aftermath of being part of the gassing of Edward Earl whom he had come to befriend, in Ivan Solotaroff's 'The Last Face You'll Ever See: The Private Life of the American Death Penalty. " I was in the shower two hours later, scrubbing and scrubbing. Then I showered again. I just couldn't get the sweat and grime off me to the point where I felt clean enough to go to sleep."

In the 1990's, when Louisiana had just 40 people awaiting death as opposed to the 87 it has now, the Australian version of the news magazine "60 Minutes" did an episode titled "The Executioner" about Lousiana's good ol' boy executioner they called Sam Jomes. At that time, Jones, an electrician by trade, had electrocuted 18 men and boys. In this fascinating interview, Jones appears to embody the "good German" banality of evil mentality, telling the interviewer that he's pull out fingernails or execute his own son if that's what he was told to do. With straight face, he says, "It's no difference to me executing somebody than going to the refrigerator and getting a beer out of it." He insists that he "sleeps like a baby" following every execution.

But when the interview moves to his house, it becomes clear that sleeping is not the only thing he does following every execution ... he also paints -- masks of horror on canvas! The interviewer describes them as "Dark, morbid paintings, that seem to capture the essence of death itself." Tue to his public image, Sam Jones denies any connection between what he does at work and what he paints at home immediately afterwards. "I just call it paint on canvas," he deadpans. "They don't really represent anything." But then his own mask slips a little, and he adds, "It's an outlet ... people jog ..."

At this point the interviewer interrupts, "People jog and you draw pictures of death and execute people."

"Well," Sam drawls, "I draw pictures and I execute people." But after a moment, he allows, "It's my way of relief ... the pictures ..."

Beyond the actual chambers of death, how far do the ripples go? Do they extend to the jurors who serve in capital cases and about whom more and more empirical evidence is gathering of long-term effects? To the DA and defense attorneys on both sides? To the multiple layers of judges? And ultimately to us, the indirect spectators?

These are questions that seldom get asked as we understandably focus on the much narrower legal question of whether the condemned suffers a cruel or unusual death. But they are questions very much worth examining. They are among the questions that former California governor Edmund G. 'Pat' Brown considered in his book, 'Public Justice Private Mercy, A Governor's Education on Death Row.' During his tenure (1958-1966), California put thirty-six individuals to death, but the governor spared the lives of twenty-three others who were condemned to die. As he looked back near the end of his life and considered those 59 individuals, he wrote:

"I am 83 years old as I write these words ..... And looking back over their names and files now, despite the horrible crimes and the catalog of human weakness they comprise, I relaize that each decision took something out of me that nothing -- not family or work or hope for the future -- has ever been able to replace."

(source: Michael A. Kroll)

[skyloom]

A productive way to react to an act of violence is to have the courage to resist the normal impulse for revenge and punishment, to refrain from allowing anger, hatred, rage, and vengeance to destroy one's inner peace. Civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. observed: "Returning violence for violence only multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

On the day of McVeigh's execution, a pastor at a memorial service for some of the victims' families asked, "Is there another way we can respond to this violence without doing violence ourselves?" Restorative justice doesn't promote anger, hatred, rage, or revenge by society or by the victim but offers a nonviolent response to the violence done. The focus of restorative justice isn't the punishment of the offender; it is the separation of the violent person from peaceful society for the protection of law-abiding citizens. With a peaceful attitude and conscious decision to choose a nonviolent and nonvengeful response, the cycle of violence can be broken and the contagion stopped. It is all a matter of attitude and the realization that violence should be countered in a mature and rational manner in order to protect society without doing damage to its citizens.

So we need to approach the problem of capital punishment not as a legal matter determining the rights and duties of the parties but as if we were treating a disease—the disease of violence. The past one hundred years have comprised the most violent century in human history. That violence is reflected in our television programs, movies, video games, literature, political attitudes, militaristic paranoia, the alarming abuse toward children, pervasive domestic violence, hostility toward the genuinely poor and helpless, the persistence of racism and intolerance, the way we treat petty juvenile offenders, and the mistreatment of prisoners. When we impose severe and excessive punishment, when we seek an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life, when we seek revenge on lawbreakers by some clumsy arithmetic we call justice, we become violent law abiders. We become what we say we abhor—more like criminals—more violent people. And the contagion spreads.

Every time we send a criminal to jail, especially a juvenile offender, it is a failure of society; every time that we execute a murderer, it is another failure of society. Where were the caring family members, helpful friends, concerned teachers, and supportive social workers when that criminal was a child being abused and neglected? Who loved that child? Who educated that child so that he or she could succeed in this world? Who demeaned that child because his or her skin color or religion or ethnicity was different from the majority in the community? Who did violence to that child by relegating him or her to poverty and then hating that child because he or she was poor? Generally speaking, children who are loved and cared for don't become criminals. Family and community violence toward children, including top-down governmental violence, turns some of them into criminals. Ethical communities don't need a police officer on every street corner because ethical communities care for all their children. Criminals aren't born; they are made.

And once made, society gives little thought to rehabilitating the offender, since the purpose of retributive justice is to punish. Or they view punishment as itself rehabilitative. Americans pretend that state-inflicted cruelty will somehow teach a violent felon not to be cruel and violent; and then 97 percent of these "rehabilitated" violent criminals are released into civil society. The theory seems to be that punishment teaches one how to become a good and respected member of the community. Yet the current punishments only succeed in destroying an offender's self-esteem by imprisoning that person and separating him or her from family and friends, then dehumanizing the prisoner by referring to him or her by a number instead of a name. Prisoners also become victims of the internal violence of prison life and, when not building up resentments, become schooled by other inmates in the techniques of crime—aware that society's rejection will continue once they are released.

Grant, Robert. "Capital Punishment Exacerbates Violence." Capital Punishment. Ed. Mary E. Williams. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2005.