The audiotape, 11 minutes long, was broadcast last week by National Public Radio and ABC’s “Nightline” and got heavy news play nationwide. Part of a trove of 23 execution tapes made by Georgia officials to document their policies for legal reasons, it is a chillingly detailed narrative of a procedure few Americans ever encounter. Though first broadcast on radio and TV in Georgia, it was brought to NPR by Dave Isay, an independent producer who said he wanted to “get people to talk” about capital punishment in America. The timing–two weeks before the scheduled execution of Timothy McVeigh–was no accident, although Isay won’t state his view on the death penalty. The Georgia tapes sound “like mission control,” he said. “It’s a countdown. It’s totally bizarre.”
One of the more bizarre moments is a matter-of-fact discussion about the source of a mysterious popping sound heard during Ivon Ray Stanley’s execution. “I don’t think any strap broke [or] anything,” Marable says. “He just jerked real hard and caused the electricity to arc.” A state official then compliments warden Ralph Kemp on a “very smooth job.” “OK, we appreciate it,” Kemp replies. “Just give us another one.”
But another execution went very wrong. In December 1984, prison officials were surprised to see that an inmate named Alpha Otis Stephens was still breathing after the prescribed three jolts of electricity. After a pause, Marable notes routinely that “the execution is initiated again.” But Stephens still didn’t die. “You gonna have to have them check… their connections. There’s something they don’t have connected right, Willis,” a prison official says. Finally–after some 13 agonizing minutes in the chair–Stephens succumbs.
Although support has declined in recent years, new polling shows that most Americans still support the death penalty. McVeigh’s execution, scheduled for May 16, is virtually guaranteed to reignite the national debate. It will be shown on closed-circuit television to several hundred victims of the Oklahoma City bombing and their families–the biggest crowd to watch an execution since the 1930s. That poses the same disturbing question as the Georgia tapes. Criminals are put to death as an expression of the public will. But just how much of that grisly process is the American public willing to confront?
