For every execution, there is a team of executioners. They are the ones who watch the inmate in his or her final days, who strap the inmate to the gurney, who insert and reinsert the needles, and who remove the inmate from the gurney following the execution. They are the ones who deal with botched executions, who struggle with inmates fighting to stay alive, and who pull inmates away from their families when it is time for their final goodbyes.
The New Hampshire Death Penalty Study Commission recently held its fourth public hearing on the death penalty. It was the first time they heard from the people whose job it is to carry out executions.
Corrections officers speak out
Ron McAndrew, who helped perform three electrocutions in Florida and oversaw five lethal injections in Texas, was the first to testify. He told commissioners that he had thought he would have no trouble carrying out the death penalty.
“I felt that murderers and rapists and barbaric people really didn’t deserve to be on this earth.”
But the reality, said Ron, was quite different.
After the executions, Ron said, he was haunted by the men he executed: “I would wake up in the middle of the night to find them lurking at the foot of my bed.” And he wasn’t the only one scarred by the experiences. Ron described officers who “fought tears, cowering in corners so as not to be seen.” He said some turned to drugs and alcohol. “These aren’t weak men,” Ron said. “These are good ol’ country boys who spent their life in careers that forced them to be hard. And yet we suffer now, crying through the pain and the intense guilt.”
Dr. Allen Ault, who spent over 30 years working in corrections in Georgia and Mississippi, was also affected by his experiences in the execution chamber. He was also part of the hearing. “You were very up-close and personal on all of them,” he said. “You talked to the inmates before they were executed. You gave them an opportunity to say their last words. I remember one tried to make a filibuster out of it and I had to stop him and proceed with the execution…it is extremely difficult for somebody with a conscience, somebody [sic] has some ethics.”
Dr. Ault emphasized that these experiences were widespread amongst the corrections officers involved in executions, saying, “as far as I could tell, everybody suffered. And I still get flashbacks.”
But are we listening?
“What corrections officers go through so that we can have a death penalty is usually hidden,” said Katherine Cooper of the New Hampshire Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NHCADP). “You could feel the unpleasant reality of the situation start to settle on everyone in the room.”
But one man was oblivious to the poignant testimony: New York Law School professor Robert Blecker.
Blecker followed the corrections officers’ testimony with his own in support of the death penalty. He argued that a sentence of life without parole was not a viable alternative to the death penalty because prison amenities like televisions and pool tables make life too comfortable for inmates.
Ron McAndrew politely interjected. He noted that there is often only one corrections officer supervising anywhere between 125 and 200 inmates all by him or herself.
“The television set is a working tool,” he said. “It occupies the inmates. It keeps them under control so that this one uniform person, who is unarmed and willing to step inside of a state prison to do this really tough job for you everyday, he has few tools to work with. A tool is a ping pong table. A tool is a television set. A tool is anything that will occupy time.”
“The exchange between Blecker and McAndrew reminded everyone that if we want safe prisons, we need to listen to corrections officers,” said Katherine Cooper. “They are telling us what they need and what they don’t need. The death penalty is something they don’t need. What they do need is a budget that will provide adequate staffing levels, not a multi-million dollar execution that will require trauma counseling for the staff who have to participate. The death penalty just makes things worse for them.”
Equal opportunity flaws
It was not the first time Blecker offered testimony that offended a constituency on the front lines of the death penalty process. In 2006 he told the victims advocate on the New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission that the suffering of victims’ families was not a problem to be solved, but rather an unfortunate price families had to pay so that society at large could keep the death penalty.
Ostensibly, Blecker was representing the pro-death penalty perspective, but he did not seem to do it any favors. His set of rules for who fits the “worst of the worst” was remarkably specific. Blecker would remove the death penalty for people who hired someone to kill but keep it for the people who did the killing. He’d apply the death penalty to those who killed police officers because they were police officers, but not to people who killed police officers to escape capture.
That last scenario describes precisely what happened in New Hampshire’s only current death penalty case. In other words, one of the Commission’s few pro-death penalty witnesses testified that New Hampshire should not apply the death penalty to the one case in which they have used it.
This part of Blecker’s testimony served to highlight one of the most problematic aspects of a death penalty. Everyone has their own opinions on what constitutes “worst of the worst” and there is no one way to codify these emotional responses into law.
The New Hampshire Commission to Study the Death Penalty will issue its final report in December. Out of the dozens of witnesses they have heard so far, only six have testified against repeal. Last year the New Hampshire House of Representatives voted to repeal the death penalty, so momentum is already strong. And if the people of New Hampshire continue to confront the death penalty’s grim inner workings, we could see repeal become reality the next time around.
