Two more stories about executions have made headlines in recent days for different reasons.
The story of the botched execution in Tennessee reminds us of a botched execution in Missouri. The other story is about plans for a public execution—the livestreaming of a firing squad carrying out a federal death sentence.
Before we get to the story of a botched Missouri execution, I have to get something off my chest about Pete Hegseth’s plans for a public firing squad for Fort Hood killer Nidal Hasan who murdered 13 people and wounded thirty others in the 2009 Fort Hood shootings. If Hegseth gets his way, the internet will show the public the firing squad execution at 1 p.m., our time, on December 3. Something to watch while we’re having lunch. President Trump has okayed the first military firing squad execution since the execution of Private Eddie Slovick in 1945 for desertion.
I cringe even at giving you the time and date of Hegseth’s planned public spectacle.
I covered 22 executions. All were accomplished with heavy overdoses of three drugs. Missouri now uses one giant overdose of just one drug, as has been used in recent botched executions in other states. It seems to have worked here.
It should be no surprise that Hegseth, an oily testosterone waving narcissist, wants a public execution. Apparently he thinks his self-righteous outrage about a man who killed thirteen members of the military should be displayed by letting ghoulish viewers see a man be shot to death.
It smacks of the old-time executions in the counties when large crowds gathered—some executions even sold tickets to them—with children to watch someone drop through a scaffold floor. It was a social occasion, presumably an object lesson particularly for the children in the audience.
That’s what Hegseth wants with his sordid plan. He said on a television show last week that people need to see the execution because they have to understand serious crimes merit “serious consequences.” Is there anybody who does not understand that if you kill someone, you will not face “serious consequences?”
We suspect Hegseth wants a public execution to show how tough HE is. It’s an execution that is more about him than it is about the man who will die and his victims. Death by testosterone.
If he’s so hot to have this done, why doesn’t he be part of the squad? If our president thinks it’s such a great idea, why doesn’t he join him. After all, one is the commander in chief of all of our military forces and the other head the department that oversees all of them?
And just think how impressive President Trump’s weapon would look in his presidential iebrary.
Former Labor Secretary, now blogger and podcaster Robert Reich asks whether the firing squad will teach any watchers a lesson or will it “just degrade our sense of being human beings.?” He refers to Hegseth’s plan as “cruel,” and “public sadism” and “barbarism.”
How excited do you think they would have been if they’d watched Christa Pike’s execution. Firing squad executions are over in an explosive second. Her struggle would have been a much better show.
Ultimately, public revulsion of public hanging carnivals led to Missouri and other states taking over executions from local jurisdictions and holding them within prison walls with only the media, prison officials, and some friends of the person in the gas chamber or in the electric chair or on the gurney in the drug-execution chamber looking on.
The last public execution in this country is believed to have been a hanging in Kentucky in 1936.
Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber who murdered 167 people and injured 684 more with the 1995 blast at the Murrah Office Building died on a gurney at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana in 2001. Ten members of the media looked on as did some people he had invited to watch. Some survivors of the bombing saw it on closed circuit TV inside the prison because there wasn’t enough room in the citizen witness area.
McVeigh killed more than ten times more people than Hasan did yet died with as much dignity as an executed mass murderer could expect.
There are those who think Hasan’s public execution will put this country in the same category of two countries we consider cruel, barbaric, and cradles of terrorism. Amnesty International counted seventeen public executions last year. Eleven were in Iran. Six more were Taliban events in Afghanistan. Trump and Hegseth want to lower our nation to that level.
Death is not a circus. Executions are double tragedies. The first is the death of the victim(s) and the grief of their families and friends, memories and longings that never completely disappear. The second is the death of the killer, a recognition that a person threw away their life long before they threw away their future.
I sometimes caught myself wondering as I watched the drugs flow into the veins of those 22 men what turned that person on the gurney into what he became. When did he or she make the choice to live a life that turned out to be wasted, a life most remembered for its end than for its worth.
And then I watched them die and sometimes I wondered where they went at that instant.
In the end, they died alone. And no matter how awful their crimes, their death was not some kind of public spectacle nor should it ever be. Justice is too precious to be cheapened by people like Hegseth and Trump. It is not a game show. It is not an ultimate firing.
Having seen as many executions as I have, do I believe in capital punishment? I am not alone in thinking some crimes are so heinous that the perpetrator forfeits his or her own right to life. But I also sometimes think spending every day waking up to the smell of Lysol or some similar disinfectant used in institutions, living among many who have nothing more to lose, going to a menial job every day, hearing a steel door lock behind you every night, never walking down a street, never having a beer with friends or seeing your grandson play a football game or your granddaughter being a bride, never seeing anything beyond an electrified fence, and eventually knowing the few family members you ever see all have died is better.
Christa Peck spent ninety percent of her thirty years in solitary confinement. Death was to be her only relief, her only escape.
I was interested in what my reaction would be when I watched my first execution. My reaction was no reaction at all. I watched a man go to sleep, went back to my motel and filed my stories for the next morning’s newscasts, and then I went to sleep, too, and I did not dream. The next morning I came back to my newsroom and went on with my life as if I had not been up most of the night in Potosi.
Reporters often report on things they wish they didn’t have to report about. Sometimes it’s the events of a life. Sometimes it’s the event of death. The plans of Trump and Hegseth might be the most despicable things this administration has thought up—-and that’s saying a great deal.
I think we’ll save the botched Missouri execution story for another entry. I’m not feeling too well after telling you these stories.