Death, live

Capital punishment is a barbarism. But a society that endorses it must
be prepared -- and permitted -- to witness it

by Dan Kennedy

IF THINGS GO according to plan, the execution of Timothy McVeigh will be carried out with all the drama and moral grandeur of a dog's being put to sleep.

Next Wednesday, May 16, shortly before 7 a.m., McVeigh will be led into the death chamber at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. Outside the walls, a media circus will take place. Inside, however, the procedure will be bureaucratic, antiseptic, almost medical. McVeigh will be strapped down, and IV needles will be inserted into his veins. He'll offer his last words. Supposedly he'll recite an 1875 poem by William Henley that closes with "I am the master of my fate,/I am the captain of my soul." But who knows what his final outburst will really be? This, after all, is a man who has referred to the babies and toddlers he killed in the Oklahoma City bombing as "collateral damage."

Then the procedure will begin, so precisely calibrated not to offend modern sensibilities that the first thing to hit McVeigh's veins will be a painkiller. Only then will the fluids that will arrest his breathing and stop his heart be administered. By 7:30 local time -- 8:30 on the East Coast -- it will be over. The worst mass murderer in American history, the stone-hearted killer of 168 people, will be dead.

The execution will be viewed on closed-circuit television by 250 of the victims' family members, an arrangement approved by Attorney General John Ashcroft, who has said he hopes they can attain "closure" by watching McVeigh die. But even though the news media are sending so many people to Terre Haute that the hotels there have been booked for weeks, we won't see McVeigh being put down -- not unless a bootleg copy of the closed-circuit feed surfaces on the Internet (a Web outfit called Entertainment Network actually proposed a pay-per-view show), or someone slips a video to Mike Wallace, or even, as some have speculated, government authorities are forced to turn it over in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

The invisibility of the death penalty is by now well established. The last public execution in the United States took place on August 14, 1936, in Owensboro, Kentucky. A young black man named Rainey Bethea was hanged in front of 20,000 people after he'd been convicted of raping and murdering a 70-year-old white woman. Bethea's execution was the subject of a chilling oral history broadcast by National Public Radio last week, available online at www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/2001/apr/010430.execution.html. Since then, executions have become increasingly efficient and invisible. Hanging gave way to the electric chair, which in turn has been replaced almost everywhere by lethal injection. Public spectacles have been supplanted by private rituals.

But the pending execution of McVeigh -- "the Charles Manson of his day," as social critic Wendy Kaminer calls him in the current American Prospect -- has raised anew the question of whether executions should be carried out as they are now -- behind the walls, in front of just a few witnesses -- or in public, on television, so that everyone can watch the ultimate penalty being applied. Because of the closed-circuit broadcast, McVeigh's death, as the New York Times' Frank Rich has observed, will be the closest thing to a public execution in decades. Should we make the final leap, and execute people on live TV?

The problem with this question is that it is really two questions, and those of us who oppose the death penalty are often tricked into answering the wrong one. We shouldn't execute people on television because we shouldn't execute people, period. Yet it's easy to fall into the logical trap of arguing that there is something inherently bad about putting the death penalty on TV as opposed to there being something inherently bad about the death penalty itself -- as if capital punishment were an immutable, unchangeable part of our cultural landscape.

I can find no better illustration of this wrongheaded thinking than a 1994 guest column for USA Today written by liberal media critic George Gerbner. In opposing televised executions, Gerbner wrote that broadcasting "the ghoulish spectacle of an archaic barbarism, abandoned by every other Western industrial country, is neither good reporting nor a deterrent."

Here Gerbner has fused two unrelated ideas, focusing on the "ghoulish spectacle" rather than the "archaic barbarism." The death penalty is a barbarism -- an immoral response to immoral acts, a cruel, unusual, and arbitrary punishment rife with racial and economic biases. But we should not turn away merely because watching it would be ghoulish. In fact, as long as the government is killing people in our name, we should damn well be allowed to watch.

In the 64 years that have passed since 20,000 people turned out to see Rainey Bethea twitching at the end of a rope, the death penalty has been transformed so as to feed our own cultural need for denial. We can't see it. It doesn't hurt. It's like going to sleep. Our thoroughly modern methods of execution allow us to support the death penalty as an abstraction without having to think about it too deeply or too long.

According to a recent Gallup poll, 81 percent of those surveyed said Timothy McVeigh should be executed, but fewer than 25 percent said they would watch if his final moments were televised. This is a shocking abdication of responsibility.

As Andrew Sullivan recently wrote in the New Republic: "A society that accepts this but will not witness it is deeply cowardly. In fact, no moral argument in defense of the death penalty is, to my mind, plausible unless an individual is prepared to witness the death he has endorsed. Being somewhere else when the trigger is pulled is a form of denial, of moral escapism."

SULLIVAN SPEAKS eloquently to the moral argument for televising executions. Equally important is the constitutional argument. For years, broadcasters as varied as former talk-show host Phil Donahue and 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace have argued that the government has no right to stop the media from covering executions. Donahue went to the Supreme Court, and lost. Wallace put a proxy execution -- the death of one of Dr. Jack Kevorkian's patient-victims -- on the air, provoking a public outcry and landing Kevorkian in prison, possibly for the rest of his life.

The media are not completely banned from covering executions, of course. Print reporters are allowed in, and 10 will be at McVeigh's. (Also attending, as a guest of McVeigh's, weirdly enough, will be Gore Vidal, who's exchanged letters with McVeigh in which they've expounded on their anti-government views, and who plans to write about the execution for Vanity Fair.) Members of the print press will be able to take notes, and to report on what they see and hear. But the First Amendment does not specify which reporting techniques are constitutionally acceptable and which are not. And this is the television age.

Emily Rooney, the host of Greater Boston, on WGBH-TV (Channel 2), has been arguing for more than 10 years that executions should be carried on television. "I feel passionately about this," says Rooney, who's been a news director at WCVB-TV (Channel 5) and an executive at ABC News and the Fox News Channel. "I believe we have the right to have access to something like this that is part of our government in action. Period." (Disclosure: I'm a semi-regular paid guest on Greater Boston's Friday "Beat the Press" roundtable.)

The strength of the First Amendment argument is that it trumps the utilitarian concerns that televised executions might whip up hysteria among the condemned's supporters, or intrude on his right to privacy, or lead to prison riots.

For instance, when I asked Rooney whether she has a position on the death penalty, she replied, "I do, but I'm not even going to tell you what it is. This is a freedom-of-the-press, right-of-access argument." And when I asked her whether she was concerned that televising McVeigh's execution could reignite the right-wing militia movement (something McVeigh himself probably had in mind when he asked that his execution be televised), she said, "I refuse to participate in a political discussion on this. I have the right to see it because it is the ultimate intervention of our government."

In fact, though Rooney doesn't put it this way, all the concerns raised by opponents of televised executions would be better solved by abolishing the death penalty than by preventing us from seeing what is being done in our name.

That's not to say there aren't legitimate worries about televising executions. It may not turn out, as some death-penalty opponents like to think, that such broadcasts would diminish public support for capital punishment -- support that's already on the wane, thanks to a number of widely publicized wrongful convictions in recent years. Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center on Violence at Northeastern University, says televised lethal injections could be so dull as to leave people even more inured to the death penalty than they already are.

"It'll draw big ratings the first time, but when people realize how boring it is they won't watch anymore," Levin says, arguing that in terms of "visceral brutality," such executions "pale in comparison with R-rated slasher films that teenagers see every day." Conversely, Levin also points to evidence that, dull or not, the death penalty already creates a "brutalization effect" in places where it is most often carried out. Not only is the death penalty not a deterrent, says Levin, but it can actually lead to an increase in violence. "Televising an execution may make the point even better," he warns. "We've got to be very careful. The best-intentioned policies can produce a boomerang effect."

Levin makes a good point. But, again, the brutalization effect would be more thoroughly avoided by ending the death penalty than by keeping TV cameras out of the death chamber.

NOT EVERY execution is boring. The Death Penalty Information Center, whose Web site (www.deathpenaltyinfo. org) is an invaluable source of anti-capital-punishment data, has posted a compilation by University of Florida professor Michael Radelet of so-called botched executions. Most of them involve the electric chair, which is rarely used these days. But lethal injection and other allegedly humane methods do not always work as intended.

Take, for instance, the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, put down in 1992 by then-Arkansas governor Bill Clinton just in time to boost his tough-on-crime credentials in the presidential primaries. According to Radelet, it took more than 50 minutes to find a suitable vein in Rector's arm. Witnesses reportedly could hear the brain-damaged Rector, whose veins had been damaged by his use of antipsychotic medication, moan loudly eight times. Or take Pedro Medina, electrocuted in Florida just four years ago. Writes Radelet: "A crown of foot-high flames shot from the headpiece during the execution, filling the execution chamber with a stench of thick smoke and gagging the two dozen official witnesses." And the electric chair is still used in Florida, although the condemned may choose lethal injection instead.

This is what is being done in our name. This is what our government doesn't want us to see.

Before the 20th century, executions were always carried out in public, and their purpose was very different from that of today's invisible deaths. In Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776-1865 (Oxford University Press, 1989), historian Louis P. Masur writes that hanging day was an opportunity for civil and religious leaders to join together "to display their authority and to convey the values they believed most fundamental to the preservation of the moral and social order of the community." The role of the condemned, Masur notes, was to "perform the role of the true penitent at the gallows." He adds: "For observers, this was perhaps the most dramatic episode in the theater of executions. How would the prisoner act at the gallows? What sort of moral vessel would the prisoner become?"

Such a public ritual of death may strike us as repellant today, but at least the participants understood what was happening, and did not shrink from their moral complicity in it. Contrast that with the execution of Jerome Bowden in Georgia in 1986. Just before his death, he delivered a rambling final statement in which he spoke mainly of his love of God, his sorrow for his acts (he'd murdered two women), and, incredibly, his thanks for the kindness of prison officials. "The old creature was destroyed and I became a new creature," he said. "I know that the Lord is with me no matter what may happen."

Bowden had an IQ of 59. And the people of Georgia, to their credit, were so appalled that a law was passed just two years later exempting the mentally retarded from the death penalty. Yet Bowden's last words were not heard by anyone other than a handful of witnesses until two weeks ago, when WNYC Radio, in conjunction with the documentary production company Sound Portraits, broadcast "The Execution Tapes" -- audio tapes from death row that had come into the possession of a Georgia lawyer. (The tapes can be heard at www.soundportraits.org.)

Most of the tapes consist of prison officials describing executions. There is, for instance, this moment-by-moment narration of the execution of Ivon Ray Stanley, IQ of 62, who was electrocuted for the murder of an insurance salesman despite evidence that he was merely a bystander.

"By a count of three, press your button. One, two, three," intones an anonymous official. An echoey clanging sound can be heard. Then: "The execution is now in progress. When the first surge entered his body, he stiffened and I heard a pop, as if one of the straps broke, but I can't tell from this vantage point. He is still at this time sitting there with clenched fists but no other movement. He's slowly relaxin' at this time."

Civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate, a Phoenix contributor, says "The Execution Tapes" remind him of Shoah, the nine-and-a-half-hour 1985 Holocaust documentary, in the way that the "emotionless bureaucracy" of Georgia's killing machine is captured for all to hear. "They're no more evil in a lot of ways than the people who work at the post office, or General Motors," Silverglate says of the executioners.

Silverglate, like Emily Rooney, favors televising executions on First Amendment grounds. Though he fears that such a step might well lead to a coarsening or brutalization of the culture, he says, "We have a certain faith that in the long run it's better to have an open society than a closed society. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that people have to know what's going on in the name of the government."

IN A very real sense, Timothy McVeigh makes it too easy to talk about the death penalty, whether we should see it, and why. More than any well-known condemned prisoner -- more than John Wayne Gacy, more than Ted Bundy -- McVeigh represents the face of pure evil. "I can't speak for all death-penalty opponents, but I don't think a majority are going to be shedding a tear for Mr. McVeigh," Joshua Rubenstein, Northeast regional director of Amnesty International USA, told the Phoenix last week. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once observed that "hard cases make bad law." McVeigh is proof that, sometimes, easy cases make bad law too.

As for whether McVeigh should be executed on television, in public, his demise will take place amid such heavy media scrutiny that it hardly seems to matter.

Yet McVeigh's death will mark another step down the road to a more brutalized culture. It is, for the federal government, the perfect execution, and one chosen almost as if by design: McVeigh will be the first inmate to be executed under the 1994 restoration of the federal death penalty because Bill Clinton, before leaving office, granted a six-month stay of execution to Juan Garza, a Hispanic drug dealer from Texas.

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, calls McVeigh's upcoming execution "a free ride for the federal death penalty." A white man who had a good lawyer will die for unspeakable acts of which he is unquestionably guilty -- thus giving a boost, Dieter notes, to "a system that is as unfair and biased or worse than that used by any of the states." This is McVeigh as human sacrifice, dying for the black, the marginalized, the retarded, the poor, the lawyers both conscious and unconscious, both sober and drunk.

And, of course, the system will be administered for the next four years by George W. Bush, who presided over the nation's most fearsome killing machine as governor of Texas, and who is so callous that he once mocked Karla Faye Tucker, an ax-murderer-turned-born-again-Christian who was put down on his watch.

Put down, that is, like a dog on her last trip to the vet's.

Our current system of death has evolved as the perfect response to a culture closely divided between Blue and Red, between those who oppose the death penalty and those who favor it. It's a system designed to produce complacency. Neither side has to think about it too much. No one has to look.

But being able to watch the government mete out the ultimate penalty is a constitutional necessity. It is our right. And, whether the immediate effect would be for good or for ill, it would shake us out of a complacency that we should never be allowed to feel for what is being done in our name, behind our backs, out of view and out of mind.

Additional reporting and research by Susan Ryan-Vollmar. Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.