Should Television Be a Witness for the Execution?

At 6:30 a.m. Tuesday, media members who witnessed the execution of murderer Robert Alton Harris began speaking to television cameras and describing in detail what they had seen minutes earlier.

“His head jerked. He looked to the left, he looked to the right . . . there was a series of what appeared to be convulsions and gasps.”

“He seemed to be making a great effort to die well.”

“He had a worried look in his eyes.”

“It wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be.”

“There was a point when his face turned kind of red and a vein stood out on his forehead . . . and his cheeks puffed out.”

On a personal level, what was it like watching Harris die in the gas chamber at San Quentin state prison? Said media witness Michael Tuck, a news anchor at KCBS-TV Channel 2 in Los Angeles: “You’re a part of it, yet you’re detached.”

Much less detached, surely, than non-witnesses, for whom Harris’ on-again, off-again, on-again death must have been somewhat of an abstraction, despite the vast accompanying TV coverage. It shouldn’t be an abstraction.

The gruesome event spotlights anew the question of whether to televise executions.

Although no state allows it, showing executions on television is logical and essential, provided that it’s done very late at night, only with the permission of the condemned and with attention given to the crime or crimes that precipitated the execution.

Polls indicate that the vast majority of Americans endorse capital punishment. It is public policy in California and the 35 other states where executions are authorized. Thus, reason dictates that the public should have the opportunity to view for itself the consequences of its policy and not have to experience executions solely through the various prisms of media eyewitnesses.

You want it, here’s your chance to watch it.

It’s only because of a 1991 ruling by U.S. District Judge Robert H. Schnacke, which struck down that year’s ban of news personnel at California executions, that even 18 members of the media were allowed to watch Harris die Tuesday. Bucking a long California tradition of reporters being allowed to witness executions, San Quentin Warden Daniel B. Vasquez imposed the total ban after San Francisco public-TV station KQED sought in a suit to overturn his decision excluding its TV cameras from the Harris execution, California’s first since 1967.

KQED said it wanted to use the execution footage in a documentary. Vasquez argued against the cameras, saying executions should be “carried out with tactfulness and precision.” What planet is he living on?

Although wisely overturning the total media ban, Schnacke unfortunately let stand Vasquez’s prohibition of cameras, saying their presence could undermine prison security. Frankly, that sounds a bit lame.

At times, so is the thinking of many Americans.

We’re a society with multiple minds when it comes to crime, at once fearing and condemning it while enthusiastically watching its infinite gory depictions on tabloid and prime-time programs. As our paranoia grows, so do the number of violent crime accounts on TV--witness the expanded lineup of sensational murder movies awaiting network viewers in the May ratings sweeps.

TV executives do not schedule these dramatized slaughters arbitrarily. They do so because history indicates that viewers want them. And, after all, weren’t cannibalism and bloody serial slayings the central themes of this year’s Academy Award winner “The Silence of the Lambs”?

But confronting violent death as a concept--embellished by professional actors and suspenseful music scores--is much more palatable for most Americans than facing the reality. Thus, the number of citizens who advocate capital punishment is likely matched by the number who would oppose the televising of it.

Some argue that televised executions inevitably would become circuses.

And the Harris execution wasn’t--with TV crews and other media galore camped outside San Quentin, giving second-by-second live reports and hoping to capture every nuance of the legal process that was twisting so unpredictably?

Some argue that televising executions would diminish support for them.

Possibly. So be it--the purpose of information being enlightenment. Just as likely, however, the exposure would further desensitize the public to executions, making them even more tolerant of these grisly affairs. It was not that many years ago, after all, that hangings and public executions were widely regarded as entertainment, a time to pack a lunch and bring the kids.

If capital punishment is indeed a deterrent, as some insist, it stands to reason that showing executions in graphic detail would only strengthen that deterrent.

Not that any of the above is directly relevant. What’s relevant in this case is the public’s right to view public policy, regardless of the results.

An anti-abortion rights congressional candidate from Indiana is now running a controversial series of TV ads that includes one cutting from live babies to a lingering shot of dead fetuses. Although the ad is hideous and distorting, its spoken message has a universality that some would apply to the issue of televised executions:

“When something is so horrifying we can’t stand to look at it, why are we tolerating it?”