Executions Keep Tight Grip on Public’s Imagination : Death penalty: The ritualized killing is riveting for some. For others, it brings a sense of order and justice.

What do Americans bring to an execution? Sparklers, frying pans, binoculars, lawn chairs, candles, coffee and doughnuts, electric chair lapel pins, even a life-size effigy of the killer strapped into a replica of the electric chair.

The scene outside Florida State Prison at the 1989 execution of serial killer Theodore Bundy was one of the wildest. Parents brought children, husbands brought wives. Hundreds of reporters camped out in a pasture. It was like a tailgate party, someone said. Or Mardi Gras.

Shortly after dawn, a white hearse pulled away from the prison. A cheer rose from the crowd. Then a man raced after the hearse--a weird throwback, in one person’s view, to the medieval practice of snatching a memento off the body of an executed man.

“There used to be a lot of folk belief that it would preserve you from sickness and serve as a good luck charm,” said Margaret Vandiver, a Northeastern University criminologist. “To see that in the late 20th Century in Florida was very, very bizarre.”

Executions hold a powerful grip on the public imagination. From the first spontaneous stonings to the scheduled gassing of Robert Alton Harris at San Quentin on Tuesday, state-sponsored killing has long been a complex ritual thick with social, cultural and psychological significance.

A Los Angeles Times Poll found in 1985 that nearly a third of all Californians said they would be willing to take part in an execution. Nearly half of all Americans closely followed the reports about the 1977 execution by a Utah firing squad of Gary Mark Gilmore, the Roper Organization found in a separate poll.

Why are people fascinated? For many reasons, experts say. Death is riveting and murder is our greatest horror. Execution is the final punishment, the ultimate assertion of state power over the individual. It is a brutal act--in the name of civilization.

People are also interested, experts say, because they are torn about the issue: The death penalty is meant to deter, but does it? Is it moral to take a life? Was the condemned person responsible, or a victim of society? An execution is an opportunity to sort such matters out.

But on a deeper level, experts say people see in an execution the possibility of order in a world they fear has lost its bearings. Making the condemned person the focus of everything they hate, they find satisfaction in the symbolic killing of evil.

“Society uses its occasional legal victim of the gas, the rope or the electric chair as a lightning rod to focus divine wrath upon a single offender,” wrote Dr. Louis J. West, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, “while at the same time magically insinuating the survivors into the good graces of the gods by the blood sacrifice.”

For most of history, executions took place in public. They evolved from stonings to informal hangings to more elaborate pageants. At first, their aim was religious--appeasing God, driving out evil. Later, executions became ceremonies, used to affirm community values.

Execution days were major holidays in early 19th-Century London. Shops closed and schoolchildren took field trips to the gallows. The condemned person was paraded through the city to the scaffold. A special calendar announced the dates, like a baseball schedule.

But such ceremonies got out of hand. They became an excuse for a drunken binge. Instead of a living lesson in morality and the law, they turned into a field day for criminals. Pickpockets, courting capital punishment if caught, fearlessly worked the crowd.

So executions began moving indoors after the mid-19th Century. The intention, historians say, was to “clean up” the process. Once held at midday in mid-town, they moved behind prison walls, into windowless rooms in the middle of the night.

Now, in this media age, executions have come back out into public view.

Driving home the day John Spenkelink was executed in 1979, listening to the wall-to-wall news coverage on the car radio, it occurred to Anthony Paredes, a Florida State University anthropologist, that the media have made executions a public spectacle again.

“We can now have the thrill of public executions in a sort of antiseptic way,” said Paredes, a professor at the university in Tallahassee. “We don’t have to actually see the person die; but through the media we can participate.”

Why people want to participate by devouring the media reports or standing outside prison walls is a complex question.

To some death penalty supporters, the explanation is simple. They say an execution is a signal that “the system is working.” For that reason, they say, people are interested to see it happen and feel a sense of satisfaction when it does.

“I think that most people in society feel relieved when an execution occurs . . . because it signals to them that justice is being accomplished,” said John Scully, counsel to the Washington Legal Foundation, which supports capital punishment.

“There are people that really have a very strong, individual sense of justice,” said Richard Moran, a sociologist at Mt. Holyoke College. “They feel strongly if someone does that, then that should be done to them. Their sense of justice involves retribution.”

But beneath that, researchers say, there lies much more.

West, the UCLA psychiatry professor, became curious about the fascination with executions in the summer of 1952 when he agreed to assist a fellow physician at a hanging in Iowa. His role was to help certify the moment of death. It came, West said, 12 1/2 minutes after the man was hanged.

“So as I stood there taking turns with my colleague listening to the man’s heart, I had time to look at the spectators,” he recalled. The sight stunned him: “They were all fascinated, absorbed. No one was turning away.

“There was a kind of glitter in their eyes that I found strange, some of them, as though this was a fascinating kind of entertainment,” West said. He said his “wonderment” turned him into a student of the history and practice of the death penalty.

West and sociologists, anthropologists and criminologists suggest several subconscious reasons why supporters as well as opponents of the death penalty find hangings, gassings and electrocutions gripping.

Above all, they say, people are interested in death. Death is frightening and dramatic, a fundamental but poorly understood part of life. The sight of it can also inspire in others what West calls “a primitive satisfaction that it’s you, not me.”

Compounding that is what UC Berkeley law professor Franklin Zimring described as “a kind of wax museum fascination with the mechanisms” of executions--a lurid interest in the antiquated equipment, shaved heads, last meals, reports of smoke emerging from corpses’ ears.

“In a sense, it’s terribly easy to explain,” Zimring said.

“This is about the only area in which government really is operating with some of the same mechanics and intentions that ordinarily are the stuff of antiquity and fiction: The deliberate and ritualized extinction of life.”

But more than that, many experts suggest that people are drawn to executions for what they choose to believe executions symbolize--the promise, or perhaps illusion, of a restoration of order in a world they fear is spinning out of control.

“There is a kind of frustration about not knowing where to turn to make things right, and sometimes that right may be more an imagined past than a real one,” said Paredes of Florida State. In such situations, he said, “human beings everywhere turn to ritual.”

In a detailed comparison of executions in Florida to certain forms of human sacrifice practiced by 16th-Century Aztecs, Paredes and Elizabeth D. Purdum found what they call startling similarities in organization, procedures and purpose.

Take the treatment of the condemned: Aztec war captives were handled with great care, their guards under strict orders to keep them alive--just as in Florida condemned men are moved to a special cell and fed a special meal, while every effort is made to keep them healthy.

During the ceremony, Aztec nobles filled decorated booths. In Florida, official witnesses have a designated witness room. Aztec prisoners wore ceremonial clothes and makeup; Florida’s condemned get new burial clothes and have their head and right calf shaved for electrocution.

As for the justification, Aztec sacrifices aimed to placate the gods “to keep the crops growing, the sun high, and the universe in healthy order,” Paredes and Purdum found. Deterrence, the argument used in the United States, may not be that different, they suggest.

“We suspect that beneath more sophisticated explanations for capital punishment there is, if not an outright appeal to the supernatural, the same deep-seated set of nameless fears and anxieties that motivate humans everywhere to commit ceremonial acts,” the researchers wrote.

On a personal level, psychiatrists see a similar process at work.

Dr. Robert S. Wallerstein, a San Francisco psychoanalyst, points to “the capacity some people have to put all their hurtful and dangerous impulses into others” and to see that others get punished for getting away with things that they themselves elected not to do.

“We all would like to stretch the law, take advantage of others,” Wallerstein said. But we stop ourselves, he said. When someone gets away with something, we want them punished--both because we were unable to do it and to make sure we are not tempted in the future, he said.

Key to public acceptance of executions is the “demonization” of the condemned, said Michael Mello, a professor at Vermont Law School. He has argued that society “imprints” on the condemned person everything it hates, including everything it hates about itself.

“By turning him into something different from us, something we’re able to hate totally, I think we’re able to deny the similarities,” Mello has said. “The similarities make him a mirror to our worst fears . . . about ourselves and, to some extent, our worst desires.”

But why is it, some researchers have wondered, that executions persist in the United States while they are rarely or no longer practiced in other Western industrialized countries. Some cite the high level of violence in the United States; others suggest the answer is race, and point to the prevalence of executions in the South and the racist signs displayed outside some executions.

In the end, researchers say, executions produce a strange sort of release.

“On the most basic level, people turned out at (the Bundy execution) because it was an excuse to drink a lot of beer and throw firecrackers and be bad,” Mello said. “But on a more fundamental level, what was going on was more the catharsis, the killing of the image of evil.

“It’s such a symbolic act, a statement about who we want to be killing, who we think we’re killing, what we think we’re getting rid of,” he said. “Whether it’s more than that, I think, is problematic.”