Washington Post

By DAVID SPIEGEL 

With his deci­sion to allow closed-cir­cuit TV cov­er­age of Timothy McVeigh’s May 16 exe­cu­tion in Terre Haute, Ind., Attorney General John Ashcroft has acced­ed to the wish­es of more than 250 sur­vivors and rel­a­tives of the vic­tims, who will gath­er at an Oklahoma pen­i­ten­tiary to wit­ness the exe­cu­tion live in a bid, as Ashcroft put it, to ​“close this chap­ter in their lives.”

These peo­ple have said that wit­ness­ing the death of this mass mur­der­er will help them move on. Commentators have rein­forced that notion, bor­row­ing a word from pop psy­chol­o­gy — ​“clo­sure” — and bandy­ing it about as though watch­ing McVeigh die could some­how end the dai­ly pain of grief, the con­stant reminders of loved ones lost, futures robbed, joys that might have been and nev­er will be.

I doubt it. Not only is it unlike­ly that McVeigh’s sur­viv­ing vic­tims will ben­e­fit, but the impact of wit­ness­ing an exe­cu­tion can be sur­pris­ing­ly dam­ag­ing — even for wit­ness­es who have no emo­tion­al con­nec­tion with the con­demned or the vic­tims. That’s what I dis­cov­ered with my col­leagues Andrew Freinkel and Cheryl Koopman when we exam­ined the effects on jour­nal­ists who wit­nessed the exe­cu­tion of Robert Alton Harris, the con­vict­ed mur­der­er of two teenage boys, in the San Quentin Prison gas cham­ber on April 21, 1992.

I’m not try­ing to com­pare sur­vivors of the Oklahoma City bomb­ing and rel­a­tives of the vic­tims with those reporters. Their moti­va­tions are very dif­fer­ent: Those who want to see McVeigh die think the pun­ish­ment is appro­pri­ate revenge; reporters some­times apply to cov­er exe­cu­tions because of their oppo­si­tion to the death penal­ty. Nor do I intend to draw a close par­al­lel between Harris’s death in a gas cham­ber and McVeigh’s by lethal injec­tion. My aim is sim­ply to point out some­thing that peo­ple often under­es­ti­mate — that wit­ness­ing trau­ma is not far removed from experiencing it. 



Fifteen of the 18 reporters who cov­ered Harris’s exe­cu­tion agreed to par­tic­i­pate in our study, the results of which were pub­lished in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1994. It was a small but sig­nif­i­cant sam­ple: The reporters had been cho­sen by lot­tery and were thus ran­dom rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the much larg­er group that had applied to cov­er Harris’s execution.

We found that these pro­fes­sion­al jour­nal­ists suf­fered severe after-effects, at least in the short term. One was tear­ful for weeks after­ward; sev­er­al told us they felt list­less and had dif­fi­cul­ty con­cen­trat­ing; a num­ber report­ed night­mares. Several sought coun­sel­ing, and one quite ambi­tious reporter unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly declined to cov­er the Los Angeles riot­ing that occurred short­ly after the execution.

These men and women were dis­play­ing many of the reac­tions usu­al­ly asso­ci­at­ed with acute stress. They had dif­fi­cul­ty man­ag­ing the emo­tions that the exe­cu­tion aroused. More than half of our sam­ple said they felt dis­tant from their own emo­tions, a third report­ed that they felt ​“con­fused and dis­ori­ent­ed,” 60 per­cent were ​“estranged or detached from oth­er peo­ple,” and more than half said they tried to ​“avoid thoughts or feel­ings about the exe­cu­tion.” One-third report­ed feel­ing ​“despair or hope­less­ness,” and 20 per­cent felt ​“uncon­trol­lable and exces­sive grief.” I hap­pened to speak to the wife of one of them some six months lat­er. When I asked how her hus­band was doing, she replied: ​“He is a bas­ket case. If he ever cov­ers anoth­er exe­cu­tion, we’re get­ting a divorce.”

Bear in mind that this was a men­tal­ly healthy, sea­soned group of reporters who had earnest­ly sought the oppor­tu­ni­ty to cov­er the exe­cu­tion. They were in no dan­ger, had a job to do, could look to one anoth­er for sup­port, and had no emo­tion­al tie to Harris or his vic­tims. Yet in our inter­views with them, we found lev­els of post-trau­mat­ic symp­toms com­pa­ra­ble to those we found among employ­ees at 101 California Street in San Francisco, where eight peo­ple were fatal­ly shot on July 1, 1993, by a dis­grun­tled law-firm client who entered the build­ing armed with high-pow­ered assault weapons. The Harris exe­cu­tion wit­ness­es were just as trou­bled by intru­sive thoughts, night­mares, uncon­trolled emo­tions, detach­ment from oth­ers and a desire to avoid remem­ber­ing as were the office work­ers who not only heard shots fired but eas­i­ly could have been killed themselves.

I have devot­ed my career to study­ing ways to help peo­ple cope with stress — from com­bat, nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, crime, sex­u­al abuse and ill­ness­es such as can­cer and HIV infec­tion. Trauma experts have found that it helps to face stress direct­ly, with strong social and emo­tion­al sup­port. This means con­fronting the feel­ings caused by trau­ma and ill­ness, and doing so with the guid­ance of pro­fes­sion­als and oth­ers who suf­fer sim­i­lar prob­lems. Finding an active way to respond reduces the sense of help­less­ness, even if that means accept­ing loss and griev­ing it. The pow­er­ful way the com­mu­ni­ty in Oklahoma City has come togeth­er is just such a heal­ing force, as are the shared and open­ly expressed emo­tions of its cit­i­zens. But while I have no doubt that fac­ing stress can help, I do not believe that watch­ing an exe­cu­tion will aid in this process.

Let me make it clear that I have no sym­pa­thy for McVeigh. A vis­it I made to Oklahoma City short­ly after the bomb­ing as a con­sul­tant to the Oklahoma Psychiatric Association was proof enough of the depth of pain and suf­fer­ing he inflict­ed on the entire com­mu­ni­ty with his mur­der­ous bomb­ing. These cit­i­zens have faced ter­ri­ble loss­es. But wit­ness­ing the killing of this killer will inflict a new trau­ma on top of the old one — and lead to more pain rather than so-called closure.

I once inter­viewed a brave and ethe­re­al­ly calm woman who had been repeat­ed­ly raped and tor­tured by the Chilean secret police dur­ing the Pinochet regime. I asked her how she had sur­vived the hor­rif­ic expe­ri­ences. ​“I felt sor­ry for them,” she replied sim­ply. In doing so, she had suc­cess­ful­ly dis­tanced her­self from her tor­men­tors by reflect­ing on the kind of per­son who would do such things.

It mat­ters enor­mous­ly to vic­tims of crime that they and their loved ones are dif­fer­ent from their vic­tim­iz­ers. Sadists such as McVeigh enjoy induc­ing and watch­ing the suf­fer­ing of oth­ers. The decent peo­ple who have been irre­versibly harmed by him may feel some oblig­a­tion to watch him die, or expect some final act of con­tri­tion. They should­n’t bank on it. When the mur­der­er of Polly Klaas, the 12-year-old California girl abduct­ed from her home in 1993, was con­vict­ed, he out­raged the court by sug­gest­ing that Polly had accused her father of sex­u­al abuse before he killed her — thus rub­bing salt into an open wound. It would not be out of char­ac­ter for McVeigh to do some­thing sim­i­lar; just think of his chill­ing ref­er­ence to the 19 chil­dren who died as ​“col­lat­er­al damage.”

While some fam­i­ly mem­bers cer­tain­ly want revenge, and many, though not all, undoubt­ed­ly feel jus­tice is being served by the death sen­tence, they should be wary of allow­ing McVeigh the oppor­tu­ni­ty to do more dam­age than he has already done, to cause them more trau­ma and to sap more of our col­lec­tive atten­tion. One fam­i­ly mem­ber of a vic­tim of the Oklahoma City bomb­ing put it best when she snapped at a reporter: ​“The only ​‘clo­sure’ I’m ever going to have is when they close the lid on my coffin.”


David Spiegel is a pro­fes­sor of psy­chi­a­try and behav­ioral sci­ences at Stanford University School of Medicine