The Execution Protocol

"I think the title says it all. One thing that people don’t understand enough about executions in general is what the protocol is and why we have protocol. There’s a protocol to death everywhere, for the simple reason that we’re all, at some level, terribly ashamed of what we’re involved in. If you don’t have a step-by-step way to do it I don’t think people could go through with it. When you think about the Nuremberg Principles, the fourth Nuremberg Principle is that it’s no defence to a crime to say that your superior officer told you to do it. I always thought that’s a bit rough in a way because if someone ordered you to do something horrid and told you if you didn’t do it they’d shoot you then it takes a very courageous person not to do it. But it is the process that makes it palatable for people to be involved in an execution. You’ve got to see what that protocol is in order to see what’s going on. So when you have for example the electric chair and you strap someone in very tightly, you make them wear nappies and you put a flap over their face. You’re not doing that for the individual who’s being executed – it makes no difference to him. We do that so that the witnesses don’t see what we’re really doing. The same is true in every execution process – we do the protocol to make it acceptable to the viewers. That’s what Trombley’s book is all about. Six. This notion that there is a kinder, gentler way of killing people is pretty ludicrous. In 1987, the BBC made Fourteen Days in May about the execution of one of my clients [Edward Earl Johnson]. Viewers of that documentary saw the two weeks leading up to the execution – they didn’t actually see Edward being gassed to death in the gas chamber with the same gas that was used at Auschwitz . I dare say it would have added something to the documentary for people to see what really happened in the execution chamber. It sure horrified me. But people who watched saw all they needed to see in order to understand how horribly uncivilised it was. It’s the whole process of trying to pretend it’s civilised that really gives the lie to what we’re doing. Why do we have executions at night? Why don’t we have public executions? Everything we do is to try to cover up how ghastly what we’re doing is. I don’t mean for one second to take away the tragedy of the woman who was killed and the impact on her family because it’s horrible, but first we have to think: Tragedies happen. What we’ve got to figure out is how to best repair the damage. That’s all tied up in how we can best help victims and the victims’ families to deal with what they’ve been through. Second, what we’ve got to do is prevent these things from happening in the future. What we can try to do is create a society where there are fewer of those victims. The way you don’t make society better is to encourage everyone to be harsher and more unpleasant. What you don’t do if you want society to be a better place is encourage people to ignore complicated and difficult solutions to societal problems such as drugs, guns and violence by saying if we execute a few people that will solve the problem. That’s what politicians do – they tell lies the whole time as if we can solve society’s problems with a few executions. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter What we need to do instead is recognise the very causes of those problems, which generally involve a lack of education and a lack of opportunity and, in the US, too many guns, too many drugs not being dealt with in a sensible way. If we carry on taking the inane approach to the world that we currently are in the US then we’re going to carry on with endless innocent victims being killed. So I guess that would be my answer. Now coming back to what you said about how we should respond to Wilbert Rideau’s story, the problem is that he’s unique. There are 5,000 people facing effectively life without parole in Louisiana State Penitentiary. He’s one of the tiny group of people who ultimately had good lawyers and got what you might characterise as justice of some sort. But the other thing one needs to think about is this: If we judged everybody by the worst 15 minutes of their life we would all come out looking horrendous. We wouldn’t all come out as murderers, but we would all come out looking horrible. I think the key message I would hope that people take from reading Wilbert’s book is not that he’s a hero but that there’s an awful lot of decency in a person who committed a terrible act. If we could encourage people to look at others in that way – to look at others as they would look at people they love – the world would begin to be a gentler place."