Let’s Bring Cameras to Death’s Door

Dead issue walking?

Thumbing through the files of Apparent Lost Causes, it’s time again to call for televising executions. Oh, nohhhhh! Oh, yes! The catalyst this time is the on-again, off-again scheduled execution in California of convicted killer Thomas M. Thompson. He was to be executed Tuesday after his bid for clemency was denied by Gov. Pete Wilson. However, the execution was blocked Sunday by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

But if Thompson is ultimately executed, pool cameras--offering coverage to any station or network interested--absolutely should be inside the killing room.

Why televise something so inevitably grisly? Because capital punishment is the will of the vast majority of Americans, say the polls. And because it is public policy in California, affirmed at the ballot box.

Thus, the public should have the opportunity to view the full extent of that severe policy instead of being able to experience it only through movies, as in Sean Penn getting strapped in and bowing out vividly in “Dead Man Walking.” Or through the accounts of reporters who are among the designated observers, as in those checking in on newscasts after freeway killer William G. Bonin died by lethal injection in San Quentin last year: “About two chest heaves, he turned purple, that was it.”

On the other hand, you may argue, there are lots of things we sanction, if only tacitly, without desiring to witness them. We approve surgery, for example, but may be too queasy to watch it being done. Also, most people eat meat, but haven’t the stomach to peek inside a slaughterhouse, even through a TV lens.

Yes, but the difference is that cameras are not banned by government regulation from those venues, which have been televised on occasion. Cameras are banned from executions of convicted killers.

This wouldn’t foster a return to an earlier age of public hangings or beheadings, when you brought the family and made an outing of it. Once again, details would have to be worked out, and there would be strict ground rules. The condemned person’s approval would be mandatory (although you could make a good case against that), and the telecast would have to provide context. No romanticized eulogies for the condemned or metaphorical walks into the sunset.

That is, the telecast should not only review the legal aspects of the case and show the condemned person’s death but also must stress the full heinousness of the crime resulting in execution and the suffering of the victim or victims and their loved ones. In the case of Thompson, who continues to claim innocence, the victim was Ginger Fleischli, whose 1981 rape and murder landed him on death row.

Wouldn’t this be, well, tasteless? Get serious.

It’s not as if televised executions would be blemishing a pristine medium, not as if TV is exactly squeamish about showing viewers or exploiting things violent, ghastly or bloody. On the contrary, increasingly these days, anything goes, to the extent that public criticism received by some newscasts several years ago, after airing tape of a woman being shot to death by her estranged husband in a Florida cemetery, now seems almost old world.

You had the impression, for example, that several Los Angeles TV stations were hoping for a shootout with cops (although they’d never admit it) when they aimed their live cameras at a fugitive motorist for more than half an hour Wednesday as he sat like a stone inside his truck with a reportedly loaded spear gun at his side after a long pursuit.

And really now, didn’t some stations here revel in and make serial murderer Bonin’s demise serve their own brand of pageantry, with one newscast, for example, titling it “Date With Death” and captioning both foes (“Dreading the Moment”) and supporters (“Awaiting the Moment”) of capital punishment?

The issue of media appetites and human wreckage as an abstraction is not new: Witness Haskell Wexler’s stunningly wise 1969 film, “Medium Cool.” It opens with a Chicago TV crew being first on the scene at a serious freeway accident and being so emotionally detached from a moaning, semiconscious woman sprawled half outside her car that they first get their shots and then call an ambulance.

But watching someone who is dying go through contortions and turn purple like a lab specimen? Well, televised executions perhaps would be just the jolt to make even the firmest capital punishment advocates change their positions.

Or just as likely, such telecasts would further desensitize viewers, just as the “Medium Cool” crew was inured, and have no impact on the status quo. After all, TV is already so deep in spectacle and boorish excess, there’s not much that shocks us anymore.