When President Joe Biden last week spared the lives of 37 prisoners on federal death row, I thought of the men and women who guard the condemned, who administer the lethal dose of drugs, who remove the body from the execution chamber, who complete tasks many of us could not do.
As a reporter who covered the death penalty in Indiana in the 1990s, I interviewed many people who worked in the state prison system and on death row. Many more declined to talk because they were prohibited from doing news media interviews.
Of those who shared their experiences — often reluctantly — there were stories of pain, sorrow and trauma. One man described the nightmares that wakened him, another relied on alcohol to get to sleep. And one, a strong proponent of the death penalty, said he was unaffected, but the way he talked about little else suggested otherwise.
Since 1983, attorney Monica Foster has represented dozens of men and women sentenced to death. As the chief federal defender for southern Indiana, her jurisdiction was ground zero for the 13 federal executions carried out in Terre Haute during the final months of Donald Trump’s last administration.
“What I saw firsthand was trauma inflicted on everyone who touched these cases, whether they were judges, clerks, court clerks, deputies, marshals,” she said. “For people who are just normal people trying to do their job — someone who stamps the pleadings when you file them — it was very traumatizing.”
The family and friends of those murdered also experience harm. They endure years of hearings, trials, sentencing and appeals before their loved one’s killer is executed. Even then, they might not find relief.
One woman told me she felt just as bad after the execution as she had before; the peace she had longed for didn’t come. In another case, family members couldn’t agree on whether the death penalty should be carried out, creating division and strife.
Death penalty’s vast toll
I can attest to the toll the death penalty exacts on those on the periphery — journalists who witness an execution. After serving as witnesses, two of my colleagues at The Indianapolis Star died prematurely. Though I cannot say seeing someone die caused their untimely deaths, it was clear from conversations I had with both that what they saw irrevocably changed them.
Foster was part of the legal team representing convicted cop killer Gregory Resnover in 1994 that asked Lynn Ford, a columnist and editor at The Star, to be a witness.
Ford agreed, he later told me, without realizing how hard it would be on him mentally. There was no escaping the sight and smell of Resnover being electrocuted — the last time the electric chair was used in Indiana. Lynn died eight years later at the age of 43.
Longtime reporter Diana Penner was chosen by lottery to witness Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh’s execution, held in Terre Haute in 2001. She and I talked in the days leading up to McVeigh’s lethal injection about whether she wanted to be a witness, what impact it could have on her, how Lynn had been affected.
And we discussed what I had experienced since watching cop killer Tommie J. Smith die by lethal injection five years earlier — fitful sleeping, occasional nightmares, hard-to-predict weepiness and agitation during thunderstorms (Smith was executed during a fierce storm). And why a year after witnessing Smith’s execution, I declined to watch another man be put to death.
Despite her trepidation, Penner decided she had to do her job as a journalist, to bear witness and document McVeigh’s death. Seventeen years later, at the age of 59, she died.
A year before McVeigh’s execution, then-Gov. George Ryan instituted a statewide moratorium on executions here in Illinois, saying he had “grave concerns about our state’s shameful record of convicting innocent people.”
Three years later, as he left office, Ryan commuted the death sentences of all 167 death row prisoners, noting the system was “fraught with error” and he had “deep concerns about both the administration and the penalty of death.” Illinois abolished the death penalty in 2011.
While I’m grateful to live in a state that no longer executes its citizens, 27 other states and the federal government still sentence people to death. It’s hard to fathom the ripple effect of the 25 executions carried out so far this year across the U.S. — let alone the 1,607 men and women executed since 1976 when the death penalty was reinstituted.
“The cyclical nature of the trauma … people don’t know about it,” said Foster, who represents one of the 37 individuals whose death sentence was commuted to life in prison. “What Biden did was really courageous.”
What courageous acts can the rest of us take? Let’s lobby our federal lawmakers to do away with a costly and broken system that does not keep us safe or deter murder. Let’s find a more effective and just way to hold people accountable for their crimes. Let’s stop the government from killing in our name.
Suzanne McBride is an editor at the Chicago Sun-Times and dean of faculty affairs at Columbia College Chicago.
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