Reviving Argument for Televised Executions

It’s been 10 days since a man was put to death on television, and the republic is still intact.

“What’s next?” asked a teed-off caller to CNN’s “Larry King, Live” Monday night. King didn’t know. Nor did his guests, “60 Minutes” correspondent Mike Wallace and that show’s executive producer, Don Hewitt.

What’s next? Here’s for having TV cameras at the next appearance of “Old Sparky.” That’s what they call Florida’s notorious electric chair, which made headlines last year when flames shot from the head of a strapped-in murderer as the switch was thrown, filling the death chamber with so much smoke a window had to be opened.

The Florida State Prison presenting a human bonfire? That should have been televised.

One of the lessons of Jack Kevorkian’s recent death-giving appearance on “60 Minutes” is that more killing should be public. State-performed legal killing, that is.

As in death row executions.

The chair, the needle, the gas, the firing squad or the gallows, whichever a state authorizes.

What? And turn executions into circuses?

And they’re now what, dignified funeral masses?

But doesn’t advocating televised executions conflict with hisses aimed at Los Angeles stations for their live coverage of the fugitive motorist who last April drew a rifle from his truck and blew his brains to soup on a freeway overpass?

Not at all. That was Russian roulette, a reckless, high-risk spin of the chamber by TV news that just happened to end violently. On the other hand, capital punishment is, well, orderly and rather predictable for the most part, notwithstanding the likes of “Old Sparky.” Viewers would know, broadly, what they were getting. And what the condemned were getting.

Although numbers of death row inmates freed after being found innocent are on the rise, so are executions, and polls say 75% of Americans are for them. Televising executions would reinforce proponents or build opposition. Are they too ghastly to watch on TV? If so, then arguably they’re too ghastly to support.

In any case, much of the public appears ready for the test--judging by how many caught Kevorkian on Nov. 22--even if officials of California and the 37 other states with capital punishment are not.

CBS estimates that more than 22 million viewers witnessed that now-famous videotape of Kevorkian giving a lethal injection to a weakened Michigan man who sought it because of his advanced Lou Gehrig’s disease and his expectation of an agonizing death.

“60 Minutes” has always been a sort of wonderful pain in the butt, at once irresistible and irritating. On this night, it was its own Kevorkian, for one shimmering moment releasing TV from torturous conventionality--a timid existence within indelible lines--to a finer place that challenged viewers with alternatives and shaped a healthy national debate about so-called mercy killing. And the irony was that those held accountable by Monday’s outraged callers to the King show were not young Turks who habitually cross lines, but Wallace and Hewitt, a pair of veterans fairly deep into geezerhood.

To hear some of the slaps at them by callers and others (“It’s really grotesque,” sniffed pundit Bill Kristol on ABC Sunday), you would have thought they’d put on 15 grisly minutes of John Wayne Gacy, instead of Kervorkian supplying tranquil death to a willing Thomas Youk, 52, with cool, bureaucratic detachment.

Given the Kevorkian segment’s advance buzz, the vast bulk of those tuning in surely knew what they were getting.

And according to a CBS News survey, 57% of those watching--that’s more than 12 million--approved telecasting the killing by Kevorkian. The “no” vote totaled just 31%, with the remaining 12% apparently blase about it.

So here is the pitch:

If that many tuned to “60 Minutes” expecting an illegal killing (Kevorkian was later charged with murder and using a controlled substance) without being repulsed, imagine how many would watch a killing that was lawful.

That belies the argument that executions are necessarily too gruesome for mainstream TV. In fact, there should be no resistance at all to televising them.

Hewitt told King that he wouldn’t do it, though, because that “would disturb me.” He didn’t explain why showing a killing that was presumably illegal would disturb him less than showing one--an execution--that was legal.

Perhaps a late-night telecast is required instead.

As a neon-lit, music-scored media stunt, fulfilling Paddy Chayefsky’s prophecy of TV becoming a ratings-driven slaughterhouse?

No, media stunts are Kevorkian’s line. He admits he taped his killing of terminally ill Youk to promote his crusade for assisted suicide and, it now seems, euthanasia. And Youk’s life undoubtedly was ended in service of Kervorkian’s goal as well as his own wish to die painlessly and with dignity.

As previously declared from this soapbox, however, televised executions, if forced to operate with integrity, would not be media stunts or cheap come-ons to titillate viewers. You would not get “The World’s Wildest Lethal Injections” on Fox.

Although details would have to be worked out, in general executions would be videotaped, and televised only with the permission of the condemned. They would be tightly controlled, structured and presented in context with ample material about the crime or crimes and victim or victims. For example, the guy torched in 1997 by “Old Sparky” was convicted of stabbing to death a 52-year-old woman as she lay on the floor with a piece of terry cloth in her mouth to stifle her screams. Accounts of his brutality and her terror and suffering would have been mandatory in a telecast of his execution.

The purpose here would be knowledge, not ratings.

There would be one goal: To expose members of the public to a policy--capital punishment--that they have endorsed (in California, at the ballot box), but one that presently is carried out beyond their view, as if to shield them from the reality.

They should be able to see this policy performed, not through the filter of media witnesses (“About two chest heaves, he turned purple, that was it”), but in living purple right there on the TV screen.

Said Wallace, who did the “60 Minutes” segment with Kevorkian and also favors showing executions: “It’s a matter of public policy. Let them see what they are voting for.”

You wouldn’t be commanded to watch, of course. Just as no one was ordered to watch Kervorkian kill Youk. But many millions did anyway, sending a message that they didn’t fear witnessing death.