NPR Investigation: The Death Penalty’s Second Casualty — the Execution Staff

Corrections per­son­nel who par­tic­i­pate in exe­cut­ing pris­on­ers expe­ri­ence emo­tion­al trau­ma so pro­found that it changes their views about cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, a National Public Radio (NPR) inves­ti­ga­tion has found. 

For sto­ries broad­cast on All Things Considered and post­ed on NPR’s web­site, reporter Chiara Eisner (pic­tured) inter­viewed 26 cur­rent or for­mer cor­rec­tions work­ers and oth­ers who had been involved in exe­cu­tions car­ried out by sev­en­teen states and the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. ​“Most of the work­ers NPR inter­viewed report­ed suf­fer­ing seri­ous men­tal and phys­i­cal reper­cus­sions,” Eisner wrote. ​“But only one per­son said they received any psy­cho­log­i­cal sup­port from the gov­ern­ment to help them cope.” 

“There was more than one casu­al­ty,” Oregon Department of Corrections spokes­woman Perrin Damon, who helped coor­di­nate two exe­cu­tions in the state, told NPR. ​“More peo­ple are involved than any­one under­stands,” she said.

The peo­ple Eisner inter­viewed includ­ed ​“exe­cu­tion­ers, lawyers, cor­rec­tion­al offi­cers, prison spokes­peo­ple, war­dens, cor­rec­tions lead­ers, a researcher, a doc­tor, an engi­neer, a jour­nal­ist, and a nurse.” Most, she said, report­ed expe­ri­enc­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal and phys­i­cal effects from their jobs. 

The expe­ri­ence of par­tic­i­pat­ing in an exe­cu­tion, Eisner wrote, ​“was enough to shift many of [the prison work­ers’] per­spec­tives on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment.” After hav­ing worked on exe­cu­tions, 20 of the 26 peo­ple Eisner spoke with, said they now oppose them, includ­ing 13 who had pre­vi­ous­ly sup­port­ed the death penal­ty. None of the 16 peo­ple who had per­son­al­ly wit­nessed an exe­cu­tion ​“expressed sup­port for the death penal­ty after­ward,” she wrote, ​“includ­ing those who went into the cham­ber supporting it.

Catarino Escobar, a for­mer cor­rec­tion­al offi­cer on the exe­cu­tion team for Nevada State Prison, was asked to play the role of the con­demned pris­on­er in a prac­tice run or a gas-cham­ber. Strapped to a gur­ney alone inside the cramped cham­ber, the exe­cu­tion sud­den­ly felt real. ​“I was­n’t act­ing or play­ing. I believed that I was being exe­cut­ed,” he said.

Ron McAndrew, a for­mer war­den at the Florida State Prison, recount­ed wit­ness­ing the botched elec­tric chair exe­cu­tion of Pedro Medina from inside the death cham­ber in 1997. During the exe­cu­tion, Medina’s head caught fire. Although McAndrew could not stop the exe­cu­tion, he feels respon­si­ble for what occurred. ​“After I was able to step away from it and look back at it, that’s when things got pret­ty solemn for me. It caused me to reex­am­ine who I was as a human being,” said McAndrew. 

Allison Miller, a pub­lic defend­er who rep­re­sents clients charged with mur­der in Florida, described the trau­ma she still expe­ri­ences as a result of hav­ing a client sen­tenced to death. When her client, Markieth Lloyd, was sen­tenced to death, she felt that she had failed him and failed her tod­dler daugh­ter who had said ​“I hope you save Mr. Markeith.” She suf­fered hair loss, insom­nia, irri­tabil­i­ty, anx­i­ety, and dis­so­ci­a­tion from dai­ly expe­ri­ences. ​“I can­not under­score what it feels like to stand there and ask 12 peo­ple to not kill some­body. It broke me a lot,” Miller said. ​“I failed in this god­ly task that I was given.”

What Frank Thompson, a for­mer super­in­ten­dent at Oregon State Penitentiary, noticed about the neg­a­tive impact exe­cu­tions had on his staff shift­ed his view of the death penal­ty. Thompson ini­tial­ly was a pro­po­nent of the death penal­ty. Growing up in the seg­re­gat­ed South, he remem­bered hear­ing the news of Emmett Till’s lynch­ing in Mississippi and believed that peo­ple who com­mit­ted mur­der deserved to die. However, when he observed the toll exe­cu­tions took on his staff, his changed his views. ​“It does no more than increase the num­ber of vic­tims while pro­duc­ing no pos­i­tive out­comes,” Thompson said.

Eisner’s inves­ti­ga­tion draws on pri­or report­ing she had done in South Carolina for the news­pa­per, The State. There, she report­ed on the life-alter­ing trau­ma involve­ment in exe­cu­tions pro­duced for exe­cu­tion team mem­bers, a pris­on­er war­den, and the death-row doc­tor. The ​“cul­ture of secre­cy,” as Eisner describes it in her new report, ​“tends to keep [exe­cu­tion work­ers] qui­et long after they leave their posts,” she wrote. 

“Nobody talked about it,” Escobar told Eisner. Not even his fam­i­ly knew what he did in putting pris­on­ers to death ​“We all knew to keep it silent,” he said.

In a November 21, 2022 com­men­tary in the jour­nal Verdict Justia, Amherst College Associate Dean Austin Sarat not­ed that ​“the more the American pub­lic learns about [the prob­lems with the death penal­ty] the less it likes what it sees.” Eisner’s report­ing, he says, ​“con­firms … that those who are clos­est to the death penal­ty sys­tem have a similar reaction.”

“The more that the veil of secre­cy is pulled back, the less like­ly any­one is to regard cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment as appro­pri­ate or humane,” Sarat wrote. ​“The more Americans know, the more like­ly we are to feel con­tempt for a cru­el pun­ish­ment that itself deserves to die.”