Can I Get a Witness? Thoughts on Witnessing Executions

Believing Is Seeing

Witnesses to executions are meant to be stand-ins for the larger society. Execution witnesses are the proverbial Everyman, ordinary citizens “called upon to represent the community and use their good offices to testify to the propriety of the execution” (Johnson, 1989, p. 13; see also Tullock, 2006, pp. 437-447). What should witnesses see if they are to bear witness to the proper administration of the death penalty? At what point has a witness seen an execution in its essentials, and by that seeing, held officials accountable for a punishment carried out in the name of the larger society? Remarkably, it is possible in contemporary America to observe an execution as a witness without seeing much at all. We contend that serving as an execution witness should entail a viewing experience that allows for a reasonably full appreciation of this profound exercise in state power.

Modern executions are hidden deep within prisons. They are performed before a small group of witnesses typically comprising three separate contingents of the public: Those invited by the prisoner, the relatives of the victim, and the state (Ross Meyer, 2011). For our purposes, each of these witnesses serves as a representative of the larger society. The executions they are invited to witness invariably lack the visual drama and overt violence of public executions of centuries past, which often were gory spectacles (Banner, 2002; Foucault, 1977; Gatrell, 1996; Johnson, 1998). That earlier executions were manifestations of raw power was plain to see, and people were encouraged to see them in full, with the suffering of the condemned on open display for the edification of the public (Banner, 2002; Conquergood, 2002; Foucault, l977; Johnson, 2003). Indeed, “audiences closely monitored the prisoner’s gesture, carriage, countenance, demeanour, deportment, vocal intonation, inflection, [and] timber” in an effort to understand the human experience unfolding before them (Conquergood, 2002, p. 349). Modern executions, and particularly those that employ the method of lethal injection, are comparatively tame killings that are expressly hidden from the general public and, as we shall see, largely hidden from the witnesses invited to observe them. Execution by lethal injection, by some reckonings, appears devoid of violence and suffering, let alone any deeper meaning that may be plumbed by close observation of the condemned in their final moments, even though a life is forcibly taken (Johnson, 1998; Sarat, 2001).

The muted drama and disguised violence of modern executions are products of carefully controlled, elaborate staging (Conquergood, 2002), together with a precise bureaucratic division of labor (Johnson, 1998; Trombley, 1993). When the modern execution process goes according to plan—whether in fictional representation or in reality, and whether by electrocution (the main method used for most of the 20th century) or lethal injection (the method of choice for contemporary executions)—there is “almost nothing to see” (Sarat, 2001, p. 241). Even the teams who perform modern executions do not so much inflict as administer death. Assigned discrete, mechanical tasks in the execution protocol, our very executioners, too, may feel disconnected from the deliberate taking of life. Hence one officer, when asked what he did on the execution team, which at that time used the electric chair, said simply, “the right leg” (Johnson, 1998, p. 132). Another execution team officer, this man a part of a team using lethal injection, saw the execution as a job and nothing more: “I viewed it as doing a job and doing it right, making sure it was done well and that’s the way that I approach it. It wasn’t that I was doing it to kill somebody, I was doing it to make sure it [the execution] went off without a hitch” (McGunigall-Smith, field notes, 1999). From the perspective of the execution team, humaneness means efficiency, which in turn leaves little human drama (Johnson, l998, p. 128).

For each jurisdiction and their execution teams, there is great concern that the execution go off smoothly, without errors or delays. Rehearsals are carried out so that the execution team will be “alright on the night,” to quote a member of Utah’s execution team, and, further, that witnesses will not be exposed to errors that may highlight the cruelty of the process (McGunigall-Smith, 2004). Comments regarding such concerns were made to McGunigall-Smith by a member of the tie-down team. In the words of one prison official,

So an execution itself is extremely involved and when you carry out an execution you want to make sure that it is well rehearsed so that you do not make any grievous blunders because that can happen so easily in a situation where so much stress and tension can be generated. [We] want . . . staff who are professional and staff who can function because this is going to be a stressful situation and they want to make sure that everything goes off without a hitch. (McGunigall-Smith, 1999, p. 163)

Another official added the following:

We want to limit the possibility of any mistakes because that can be sometimes pretty glaring and come back to haunt you and yet we are executing an individual and any blunders could possibly be viewed as cruel and unusual punishment, which is not what we want. We want to make the execution as clean and [quick] as possible. That it’s done without appearing to be cruel. (McGunigall-Smith, field notes, 1999)

That executions should be “done without appearing to be cruel,” as noted by McGunigall-Smith’s respondent, is a key point. The violence of modern executions is intentionally and systematically concealed from witnesses as part of an ongoing effort to square state killing with contemporary sensibilities, which proscribe violence and cruelty. “The structure of watching within the execution chamber,” states Sarat, (2001, p. 193) “reflects the effort of the state to minimize the fascination of looking by effecting death as mechanically and precisely as possible.” Such killings, and again lethal injections are the quintessential case, seem clean and precise, dispassionate and professional, tame and dignified. As a member of the Texas lethal-injection execution team observed:

One thing I am glad of is that we’re not using the electric chair. I don’t think I would want to be part of that. 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. (Willett, 2000; italics added)

The use of the terms “clinical” and “expired” rather than “violent” and “died” (or “killed”) is indicative of the passive way these events are routinely described, as well as how, it would seem, they are meant to be perceived. There is so little to see with modern executions, particularly when the method is lethal injection, that witnesses seem beside the point, which often is how they are treated.

Making Death Invisible

Lethal injection is far and away the predominant method used in modern executions. First used in an execution in Texas in 1982, lethal injection rapidly overtook other methods of execution. Today, virtually all executions are done by lethal injection (Death Penalty Information Center, 2012; Leonard, 2012). Most states sharply limit what witnesses can see prior to, during, and after the administration of the lethal chemicals. Typically, a curtain separating the witnesses from the prisoner is drawn closed to shield viewers from aspects of the process deemed unnecessarily upsetting or arguably inhumane by prison officials (see Pacific News v Tilton, 2007). Shielded activities include such procedures as administration of sedatives, the last walk, the attachment of the condemned to the gurney prior to the execution, the insertion of the intravenous (IV) lines to deliver the fatal chemicals, and the removal of the body after death. Even the restrained body of the prisoner on the gurney, held secure by straps and belts, is often hidden beneath a white sheet that covers the person from the neck down, as if the condemned were a medical subject and not an object of punishment. The sheet remains in place until the execution is completed and witnesses have been ushered out of the death chamber. In addition, the layout of the death chamber may facilitate or obscure a clear view of the execution process (McGunigall-Smith, 1999).

Texas is a death penalty bellwether state. This one state accounts for 482 executions—fully 37% of 1,296 executions undertaken in America since l976, when the death penalty came back on the books (Death Penalty Information Center, 2012). All of the executions carried out in Texas in the modern era have been by lethal injection; as a result, Texas alone accounts for close to half (43%) of all 1,122 lethal injections undertaken in the United States (Death Penalty Information Center, 2012). Texas is, then, the undisputed capital of capital punishment and, in particular, of execution by lethal injection. It is significant that witnesses to executions in Texas have a distinctly sterile experience. As a matter of policy, execution witnesses in Texas “shall be brought into the appropriate viewing area ONLY AFTER the saline IV has been started and is running properly” (emphasis in original; “Texas Execution Procedure,” May 2008, p. 7D). Thus, the offender is walked to the death chamber, strapped to the gurney, hooked up to properly running IV lines, and then—and only then—presented to the witnesses as a tame object of execution. ¹

The technology of execution by lethal injection eliminates the drama from the actual moment of death, reduced in these state-sanctioned killings in Texas and elsewhere to a closing of the eyes and, in some instances, a few deep breaths or a fluttering of the eyelids (Segura, 2011). (There is more dramatic bodily evidence of death produced by botched lethal executions discussed below.) State and federal lethal injection protocols typically entail the IV administration of three drugs: sodium thiopental (an anesthetic), pancuronium bromide (a paralytic), and potassium chloride (which produces cardiac arrest). One reason there is little or no visible bodily evidence of death in lethal injections is due to the role of one of the lethal drugs used in most states that employ lethal injection, pancuronium bromide. Pancuronium bromide is a paralytic; the drug has no role in the process other than to paralyze the condemned prisoner. Since the prisoner cannot move or speak, the drug works as a “chemical curtain” preventing witnesses from seeing any bodily reaction to the lethal chemicals (Pacific News Service v Cate, 2006, p. 1).

There is evidence that lethal injections may, under some conditions, produce extreme pain, but since the body is paralyzed by pancuronium bromide, there is no way for witnesses to see any bodily signs of pain. In several jurisdictions, “lethal injection executions are frequently performed by non-medical personnel who,” it is argued, “lack the qualifications and training necessary to carry out humane executions that comport with the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment” (Segura, 2011). The concern is that nonmedical staff are not qualified to properly mix and deliver the anesthetic, creating a substantial risk of pain and suffering. This concern is not merely hypothetical. “For years, autopsies and witness descriptions have shown that the first drug, sodium thiopental, doesn’t always work; some prisoners have been conscious, paralyzed and slowly suffocating until the end” (Segura, 2011). (For a fictional rendering of how the pain of lethal injection may be experienced, see Johnson, 2008.)

Several states have switched or, as in Texas, have announced plans to switch to pentobarbital, used alone or as part of the three-drug cocktail, primarily due to a scarcity of sodium thiopental, the lead drug in the three-drug cocktail that has been the standard approach (Segura, 2011). Pentobarbital is a barbiturate commonly used for euthanizing animals. Prisoners subjected to pentobarbital are not paralyzed, but bodily reactions are dramatically muted, nonetheless. Historically, viewing bodily manifestations of pain in death was a central feature of the execution procedure (Banner, 2002; Johnson, 2008). This is difficult if not impossible with executions by lethal injection, whether carried out by the standard three-drug cocktail or by a one-drug approach using pentobarbital. Moreover, prisoners are often offered sedatives before lethal injections (LeGraw & Grodin, 2002, p. 408). Sedation, too, mutes reactions such as anxiety, and may also disguise bodily manifestations of any pain that may attend the execution process.

Recovering the Human Drama of Executions

However muted the appearance of death caused by lethal injection may be, it is nevertheless true that the events before and after death in the execution chamber retain varying degrees of dramatic power. These events are as follows: The bodily preparation of the prisoner for the execution apparatus, donning of a set of clean clothing, the last will and testament, the last meal, the last walk, the positioning and deployment of the execution team as the execution unfolds, the attachment of the prisoner to the execution apparatus, the insertion of the IV lines, the reading of the death warrant, the last words, and finally the removal of the body after death. The gravity and finality of the punishment are most fully conveyed by directly observing these critical activities. It is no coincidence that most of these events—excluding those specific to the logistics of lethal injections—were part of the viewing process when executions were public, and men, women and children were encouraged to watch the justice system in action as a kind of theatre of justice for all to see, right down to the smallest details (Banner, 2002; Bessler, 1997; Conquergood, 2002; Johnson, 1998; Tulloch, 2006).

Heretofore hidden parts of the modern execution process might be brought to light as a result of technology. Presently, witnesses in some states are shown orientation videos, which focus on execution mechanics and the proper deportment of witnesses (Mullane, 2010). Orientation videos can be tailored to provide information specific to the upcoming execution, which would better prepare witnesses to appreciate the human drama that is about to unfold before them. With the prisoner’s consent, official witnesses can be shown recordings of the stages preparatory to the person’s execution, such as the final meal and any ministrations to the body of the condemned to prepare the prisoner for execution (e.g., the shaving of the head for electrocutions, the shaving of the chest to allow for heart monitors in the case of lethal injection). These activities are turning points in the execution process that can be very affecting to persons on the scene of an execution (see Johnson, l998, Section II).

The last meal, for example, can serve as a dramatic statement of the condemned prisoner’s individuality and vulnerability on the threshold of execution, and of the complicity of those around him in the death house. Last meals allow the condemned man to order a meal more or less of his choosing (depending on what the prison kitchen can muster). These meals tend to be “comfort food” that connect in some way to the preprison life of the prisoner (Ross Meyer, 2011, p. 195; for a fictional version of this phenomenon, see Johnson, 2008). Some jurisdictions do not allow the prisoner to order special last meals of his or her choosing (notably Maryland), but all jurisdictions offer the prisoner a last meal. Historically, last meals have been private and shielded from public view, even when executions were public spectacles. They should remain private today. For official witnesses today to view last meals in real time would no doubt be a violation of the person’s dignity, in effect treating the prisoner as if he were a zoo animal on display at feeding time.

A video recording of that last meal with the prisoner’s consent, however, can be an exercise in autonomy for the prisoner, allowing him to share a fuller understanding of his final hours with others on his own terms, and exposing, in our view, what amounts to an otherwise hidden cruelty of the execution process. As Ross Meyer (2011) has observed, “the symbolism of the last meal may often be deeply ironic” because these seemingly generous offerings express none of the generous sentiments normally brought into play when a meal is offered to someone, namely, “forgiveness, hospitality, reconciliation, protection, friendship and nourishment,” all of which indeed are explicitly denied to prisoners taking their last meals in the death house (p. 182). Here, for example, is one rendering of a last meal served to a prisoner in Virginia, who was electrocuted later that evening, on schedule. There is, we believe, a quiet horror to this endeavor that bears examination and consideration by witnesses.

He eats alone with a plastic fork–

no knives for the condemned,

no dinner companions for the condemned–

chewing carefully, kneeling by his bed, as if in

genuflection before the raw power of the state,

his meager meal placed carefully on the steel gray metal bed,

sitting precariously on the top sheet, drawn tight

like a sail battened down for heavy weather.

–

We look at each other tentatively, almost furtively,

lawyers, chaplains, even officers speaking in low tones,

words directed toward the ground,

as if we are greasy, dirty, our mouths dry,

tongues swollen, sticking to our teeth,

our noses stinging from the scent of corruption,

the bittersweet stink of fear in the air,

in our hair, on our skin, in our clothes.

–

We are guests at a living wake

where the dead live,

where the dead see,

look you in the eye and see nothing,

see no one will save them,

see they are utterly alone.

–

The condemned man finishes his meal,

says “thank you” to the officers who fed him dinner,

later walks with them to his execution, on schedule,

dead before the stroke of midnight. We go home,

stomachs empty, hungry for sleep. (Johnson, 2010, pp. 148-149)

One man told the execution team that he was saving part of his pecan pie, ordered as part of his last meal, “for later,” a statement that dramatically brought home to the officers the man’s limited capacity to understand the execution slated to take place in the coming hours and the hollow claim that his last meal was in any way a humane gesture (Banner, 2002, p. 276). A sadder, more touching commentary on the cruelty of the execution process would be hard to imagine and revealing to record and observe (see Rosenbaum, 1998).

Members of the execution team could be asked, with their consent, to introduce an individualized (if not personal) element to the process by describing, on the record, who they are and what they do. Something akin to this is done when Special Operations Response Teams are deployed to use force on recalcitrant prisoners. The staff members come before a video camera one by one, announcing their names and their often highly specific responsibilities. An example might be: “Smith, Adam; right side restraints.” Or “Jones, William; left side restraints.” More ambitiously, officers might be called upon to note the experience and demeanor of the individual awaiting execution. We know that execution team members have much to say about the process, if given the chance to speak. Here are several examples of execution team officers commenting insightfully on condemned men as executions approach:

When you get to the point of shaving the man’s head, that usually will take just about all the strength a man has out of him. It’s not long before he actually becomes a walking dead man. Because he knows that there is no more hope after that point. I’ve done six executions, and it’s the same way for all of them. I have seen no change in it. Like when Delilah cut Samson’s hair, that was it. It took all of his strength. There was nothing left. (Johnson, l998, p. 153)

–

We talked a lot among ourselves about this, and we think that when he realized that, that he’s had it, is when we cut his hair off and put him in this other cell. We strip the cell [across from his old cell] and put him in this cell [the death cell]. He don’t have any personal things over there or anything. Just a sheet and so forth, a mattress in it. And I think that’s when he definitely thinks he’s had it. . . . [He’s] just calm, he just kinda accepts that this is it. I think it would be like, like almost being in a trance. (Johnson, l998, p. 155)

McGunigall-Smith, in her role as observer, noted a distinctively passive demeanor as well, information of value to those trying to understand the execution.

I watched the tie-down team come in. They said something like “It’s time.” He had been put into a clean jumpsuit so he knew it was for real. He knew what time it would take place. There was nothing to keep him in suspense. It was like he had been waiting for a bus. His mind was made up. This was the day, the hour, the time. There was no emotion on his part. (McGunigall-Smith, field notes, 1999)

Officers might comment directly on their personal reactions—or lack of same—to the execution process. How do they respond to the apparent passivity of men on the threshold of execution? Recordings of the behind-the-scenes observations of execution team officers can be provided to witnesses to give them a fuller appreciation of the execution process. Allowing execution teams to function as a kind of penal Greek chorus may also diminish the mechanized nature of the officers’ participation in the process.

In particular, the drama and symbolism of the last walk should be restored. Prior to the advent of lethal injection, official witnesses routinely saw the prisoner make his last walk to the death chamber, a key element in the human drama of execution (Johnson, 1998). An execution by lethal injection, by contrast, typically is a sterile and self-contained event that begins and ends with an inert figure on a gurney. In earlier centuries, the behavior of the condemned during the last walk—prisoners shaking with fear or numb with terror—conveyed a vivid and undeniable message about the power of the state over its citizens and the character of the condemned under great adversity (Banner, 2002; Foucault, 1977; Johnson, 2003). The same message of power and its effect on the condemned, though less raw these days, should be communicated to contemporary viewers by allowing them to view the prisoner’s last walk to the gurney. Anecdotal evidence suggests that when witnesses to lethal injections are permitted to see the prisoner’s last walk, the experience is quite affecting, even when the curtain is closed after the prisoner is secured to the gurney, as in Virginia, so that the IVs can be discretely established, after which the curtain is drawn back, showing the prisoner poised for execution. Byrd (1999) provides a revealing account of a Virginia execution in which the last walk, though separated from the starting of the IV lines, was in and of itself a moving feature of the experience for the official witnesses.

There is no doubt, for example, that the prisoner’s last walk to the electric chair, though embedded in a comparatively tame modern execution process, is marked by great drama. Something as simple and human as a slip or stumble drives home the fact that a man is walking to his death, that the person is alive now, seemingly healthy and visibly human, but will soon be dead, reduced by force to inert matter. The last walk culminates in the prisoner being strapped into the electric chair, in the full view of the witnesses, a process that involves human contact between the officers and the condemned and gives rise to human reactions that afford the witnesses a vivid sense of the human drama at play:

At 10:58, Jones entered the death chamber. He walked quickly and silently toward the chair, his escort of officers in tow. Three officers maintained contact with Jones at all times, offering him physical support. Two were stationed at his elbows; a third brought up the rear, holding Jones’s back pockets. The officers waiting at the chair described the approaching Jones as “staring off in a trance, with no meaning in his stares. It was like he didn’t want to think about it.” His eyes were cast downward. His expression was glazed, but worry and apprehension were apparent in the tightly creased lines that ran across his forehead. He did not shake with nerves, nor did he crack under pressure. One could say, as did a fellow witness, “Anybody who writes anything will have to say he took it like a man.” But a scared and defeated man, surely. His shaven head and haggard face added to the impression of vulnerability, even frailty. . . . En route to the chair Jones stumbled slightly, as if the momentum of the event had overtaken him, causing him to lose control. Were he not held secure by the three officers, he might have fallen. Were the routine to be broken in this or any other way, the officers believe, the prisoner might faint or panic or become violent, and have to be forcibly restrained. Perhaps as a precaution, when Jones reached the chair, he did not turn on his own but rather was turned, firmly but without malice, by the officers in his escort. Once Jones was seated, again with help, the officers strapped him in.

The execution team worked with machine precision. Like a disciplined swarm, they enveloped Jones, strapping and then buckling down his forearms, elbows, ankles, waist, and chest in a matter of seconds. Once his body was secured, with the electrode connected to Jones’s exposed right leg, the two officers stationed behind the chair went to work. One of them attached the cap to the man’s head, then connected the cap to an electrode located above the chair. The other secured the face mask. This was buckled behind the chair, so that Jones’s head, like the rest of his body, was rendered immobile.

Only one officer on the team made eye contact with Jones (as he was affixing the face mask), and he came to regret it. The others attended to their tasks with a most narrow focus. Before the mask was secured, Jones asked if the electrocution would hurt. Several of the officers mumbled “no” or simply shook their heads, neither pausing nor looking up. Each officer left the death chamber after he finished his task. One officer, by assignment, stayed behind for a moment to check the straps. He mopped Jones’s brow, then touched his hand in a gesture of farewell . . .

During the brief procession to the electric chair, Jones was attended by a chaplain from a local church, not the prison. The chaplain, upset, leaned over Jones as he was being strapped in the chair. As the execution team worked feverishly to secure Jones’s body, the chaplain put his forehead against Jones’s, whispering urgently. The priest might have been praying, but I had the impression he was consoling Jones, perhaps assuring him that a forgiving God awaited him in the next life. If Jones heard the chaplain, I doubt that he comprehended his message. At least, he didn’t seem comforted. Rather, he looked stricken and appeared to be in shock. Perhaps the priest’s urgent ministrations betrayed his doubts that Jones could hold himself together. The chaplain then withdrew at the warden’s request, allowing the officers to affix the mask.

The strapped and masked figure sat before us, utterly alone, waiting to be killed . . . . (Johnson, 1998, pp. 175-176)

Were the execution just described to have been performed in the manner of most lethal injections, where the curtain is drawn back to show the prisoners strapped in place, minutes from death, almost all of the human drama that makes an execution a momentous event would have been lost. Executions that are voluntary, in the sense that the prisoner drops his appeals and expedites the process, may have a distinctive drama associated with the subject’s willingness to die, but that, too, is lost on witnesses who see only the culmination of the execution process (McGunigall-Smith, 2004).

Last Words in Context

Once the prisoner is affixed to the gurney, he is allowed to make a final statement. Last words are vestigial features of the execution process before it became the private, highly impersonal, and dehumanizing procedure that it is today (LaChance, 2007). Last words offer a moment of autonomy and even spontaneity in a process that is otherwise designed to reduce the offender to an object of efficient execution on a rigid schedule that permits no departures from routine (LaChance, 2007; Ross Meyer, 2011).

Last words are by definition meant to be heard by others, and should be heard by witnesses at the time of the impending execution. (Regrettably, some states proscribe last words in the death house, instead allowing the warden to convey or even summarize the prisoner’s last words after the execution; see O’Neill, 2001). When executions were public, last words often were spoken before sizeable audiences. Indeed, the last words of the condemned on the public scaffold were a central element of the execution ritual. “All of the dramaturgy at the foot of the gallows was designed to anticipate, draw out, and heighten the spellbinding moment when the prisoner climbed the ladder and, precariously perched, delivered a speech to the rapt audience thronged below” (Conquergood, 2002, p. 345). Not all offenders on the gallows offered up last words, since many were paralyzed with fear (Johnson, 2003), and perhaps few spoke eloquently, but there is no doubt that people on the threshold of death have been, from time immemorial, afforded the privilege of speaking their minds. (Remarkably, there is evidence of lynching victims being afforded the opportunity to say their last words; see O’Neill, 2001.) Some of the condemned spoke at great length, history reports, sometimes upstaging the executioner, with the prisoner becoming a “master of ceremonies” at the ceremony of his execution, using the scaffold as a stage on which to give a particular and personal meaning to his death.

Execution witnesses should observe the prisoners as they enter the death house, are affixed to the gurney, and speak to assembled witnesses. Witnesses should listen to last words of prisoners today for the same reason people always have listed to last words: Because doing so affirms the prisoner’s humanity, gives personal significance to his death, and imparts meaning to the execution beyond the obvious and immutable fact of death. In this sense, the propriety of the execution, a theme on which this article opened, includes allowing the offender the opportunity to transcend, if only for a brief moment, the relentless and impersonal momentum of the modern execution process, giving it larger human significance.

However, the importance of last words may be reduced by the way they must be delivered in the death house: By a man visibly strapped in a supine position to an imposing gurney. We take this for granted, but the context is surreal, as if the condemned prisoner were some sort of specimen presented for inspection. Thus, instead of standing to face and make eye contact with the witnesses, as most speeches are delivered, the condemned prisoner is lying on his back, strapped down, and awkwardly craning his head to face and engage the witnesses, his audience. In Texas and in several other states, the prisoner typically strains to get closer to the microphone, which hangs from the ceiling a foot or more above his head, adding to the unnatural quality of the interaction and likely amplifying the witnesses’ perception of him as a powerless and insubstantial person whose words are of limited value.

This scene, which surely alters the witnesses’ perspective of the condemned, can in fact distort their understanding of what they are witnessing and the words they are hearing. The impact of words can be reduced or altered when ineffectively communicated, and there are few other positions as compromising as lying down strapped on one’s back. Clearly, observing a speech in this setting, from the vantage point of the witness room, is unlike any other. It is therefore essential for witnesses to understand that these last words, despite their weakened mode of delivery, are the embodiment of the offender’s final effort to reconnect with society and give meaning to his life. This message might be conveyed in an orientation given to execution witnesses, in which they are helped to understand the context in which last words are given. Alternatively, the prisoner can be allowed to give his last words after he enters the execution chamber, while he is still on his feet, before he is affixed to the gurney. Execution team officers are fully in control of the prisoner at this juncture, and can readily accommodate this simple but profound change in the death house routine, one that holds out the prospect of giving an element of dignity to the execution process at its denouement.

An execution is a tragic ending to a life that might have been different. Indeed, the ways the life of the condemned might have been different are arguably the subject of all last words. In our assessment, borrowing from TS Elliot’s The Wasteland (1922), last words in the death house mix memory and desire in a last-ditch effort to transform a life that was a wasteland of loss and violence into a life worth having lived and, perhaps more importantly, a life worth remembering after the offender is gone. ² The death house offers a very particular stage for the condemned prisoner to effect this transformation of his life, a kind of public death bed. As such, the death house fuses intimacy, gravitas or solemnity, and a presumption of veracity. Who would lie about one’s life to the only people that matter in one’s life as the executioner looms? Accordingly, last words, like all dying declarations, are accorded great weight (Ross Meyer, 2011). Whether such declarations and the reimagined lives they convey in the death house are objectively truthful or fanciful or even filled with outright lies (topics worthy of study), it is fair to suppose that last words faithfully portray the offender’s understanding of the meaning of the execution as an end to his life. If all of life is a stage, the stage that is the death house is the setting of the last act, the rendering of the last script. Execution witnesses bear witness to the meaning of these final acts, and by so doing, mark the execution as a human undertaking, at least in part, at least at the end.

Last words establish the personal meaning of an execution. It is the prisoner’s death, after all; last words allow this death to take place at least partly on his terms, and to have those terms ratified by the witnesses who hear, and by their silence acquiescence, accept those words at face value. Thus the condemned prisoner has, in a manner of speaking, the last word in the matter of his execution. We as observers have only to listen and bear witness to what is said.

Botched Executions as Object Lessons in Violence

When an execution is botched, there is a visibly painful and sometimes bloody departure from the lethal injection protocol that should not be hidden but rather viewed as part of the execution process—as risks attendant to these executions, and more importantly, as unplanned exposures to the underlying violence of the execution process. Botched executions are not common, but, depending on one’s definition, they happen today with regularity due to the intricacies of finding suitable veins in which to implant IVs, and to the limited medical training or expertise available to lethal injection teams. Given these exigencies, some offenders may receive too strong a dose of drugs, others too weak, either outcome potentially producing violent bodily reactions to pain. Whatever the cause or degree, a botched execution shines a bright light on the violence of lethal injection, a violence that is otherwise effectively hidden from view.

Many condemned prisoners, like prisoners generally, have extensive drug histories and chronically poor health that become paramount considerations as they age (Marquart, Merianos, & Doucet, 2000). As a result, many have veins that are small or otherwise compromised, and hence hard to find and use for IV implants. When repeated efforts are needed to find a vein for IV injections, or, in some instances, when a venous cut-down is needed to expose a usable vein—a process that is in itself a minor surgery—the sheer violence of the lethal injection process comes into focus. Glimpses of the violence revealed in botched executions, when afforded to witnesses, appear to produce shock and even horror, normal human reactions to violence that are otherwise averted by the sterile lethal injection process (for an historical account of botched executions, see Sarat et al., 2012). Two contemporary examples drawn from a catalog of botched executions provided by Radelet (2010) suffice to make this point:

Texas. Stephen McCoy. Lethal Injection. He had such a violent physical reaction to the drugs (heaving chest, gasping, choking, back arching off the gurney, etc.) that one of the witnesses (male) fainted, crashing into and knocking over another witness. Houston attorney Karen Zellars, who represented McCoy and witnessed the execution, thought the fainting would catalyze a chain reaction. The Texas Attorney General admitted the inmate “seemed to have a somewhat stronger reaction,” adding “The drugs might have been administered in a heavier dose or more rapidly.”

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Oklahoma. Robyn Lee Parks. Lethal Injection. Parks had a violent reaction to the drugs used in the lethal injection. Two minutes after the drugs were dispensed, the muscles in his jaw, neck, and abdomen began to react spasmodically for approximately 45 seconds. Parks continued to gasp and violently gag until death came, some eleven minutes after the drugs were first administered. Tulsa World reporter Wayne Greene wrote that the execution looked “painful and ugly,” and “scary.” “It was overwhelming, stunning, disturbing—an intrusion into a moment so personal that reporters, taught for years that intrusion is their business, had trouble looking each other in the eyes after it was over.” (Radelet, 2010)

Less dramatically, executions that are complicated by difficulties finding a suitable vein can go on for an hour or more. These, too, are botched executions. In such instances, it is likely that the curtain in the execution chamber will be drawn to shield the witnesses from this ugly reality.

Botched executions are horrible, but it is important to remember that even when executions go smoothly, it takes several minutes for the IV lines to be established, and this can no doubt seem a long and trying time for everyone involved. A Texas death house chaplain observed that, once the IVs are in place, “You can feel the heart surging, you know. You can see it pounding through their shirt” (quoted in Willett, 2000). Any struggle to establish an IV connection, however short-lived, only adds to stress and to the various bodily reactions that reveal, to quote the death house chaplain again, “the fear that’s there, the anxiety that’s there” in all executions (quoted in Willett, 2000). In most states, as we have indicated, the routine drama of ordinary lethal injections is hidden from official witnesses by a curtain, which is opened when the prisoner has, in effect, settled in and settled down, a process sometimes aided by sedatives.