Ultimate Reality

Growing national debate over the death penalty--coming when voyeurism is ever browning the television landscape in both news and entertainment--makes this an ideal occasion to revisit a related hot-button issue.

Lights! Cameras! Execution!

If the TV lens is to be our designated peeper this year and after--from “gotcha” footage on newscasts to “Survivor” and Wednesday’s coming “Big Brother” on CBS--then have it count for something beyond frivolous diversion. Keep the fluff. But have TV also witness what nearly 75% of U.S. states (including California) authorize and polls say more than 70% of Americans favor.

Capital punishment. The needle, the chair, the gas chamber, whatever.

Are we really a nation of voyeurs, as many claim these days, citing a pattern of public snooping whose most recent subjects range from the hanky-panky of President Clinton to the rat-eating thrills of fame-seeking survivalists on CBS. Or is “Survivor” a huge hit because, as “Politically Incorrect” host Bill Maher says, “people enjoy watching other people lose?”

Televising an execution would be a test. Welcome to a reality show that actually is real.

The purpose, to reiterate, would not be a media stunt or grisly titillation, but visual access to a policy (affirmed by Californians at the ballot box) whose full extent reaches the public now only through the thick filters of TV and movie drama (“Dead Man Walking”) and the handful of news media let in as eyewitnesses (“About two chest heaves, he turned purple, that was it.”).

Having it on TV in living purple would be too ghastly, you say?

The way news footage of fatal crashes at air shows, aerialists falling to their deaths and the possibility of a televised Robbie Knievel jump going bad are not too ghastly?

A little consistency, please.

If the multitudes could handle gruesome live pictures of a Los Angeles motorist blasting himself in the head with a shotgun a couple of years ago and Jack Kevorkian’s death-giving appearance on “60 Minutes,” they surely could handle prison officials imposing on condemned inmates a policy of state-performed legal killing that most Americans cheer.

After all, the 1998 audience for the since-imprisoned Kevorkian giving a lethal injection to a man with advanced Lou Gehrig’s disease almost matched the estimated 24 million who saw last week’s episode of “Survivor.” Advertised in advance, that “60 Minutes” segment aimed a piercing laser at the issue of so-called mercy killing. The footage of Kevorkian and his consenting subject got people talking, widening the debate beyond the abstract and theoretical.

Just as, especially now, televising an execution would sharpen the dialogue about the death penalty, which is increasingly in the news because of publicity about the potential of enhanced DNA and the many clemency appeals confronting Texas Gov. George W. Bush as he aims for the White House. Both Bush, a shoo-in for the Republican nomination, and his likely Democratic foe, Vice President Al Gore, favor the death penalty.

If they despise government in the shadows as much as they insist, they should not resist putting executions on TV, where everyone can see them. Just as, if there is nothing to hide, other Americans who endorse the death penalty should not oppose the camera’s presence in state killing rooms.

Nor should the pro-choice crowd, moreover, oppose televising legal abortions (the video technology is available), however emotional the impact.

To review once more, these telecasts would occur on a state-by-state basis and require the subject’s permission (which might preclude abortions). They would be videotaped, tightly structured and presented in context. When it comes to executions, no romanticized eulogies or metaphorical walks into a sunset for the doomed inmate. Instead, there would be a review of the case with ample material about the crime or crimes, the victim or victims, and no exclusion of brutality, terror and suffering.

Here’s betting the audience would be larger than you might expect. The purpose would be knowledge, though, not ratings. Whether an execution or an abortion, in other words: You asked for it, you got it. If you’re a true believer who can stomach what you see, so be it.

There’s no question of TV’s power to influence. The Independent Film Channel last year ran Randy Benson’s devastating short film about a rudimentary animal shelter in rural North Carolina where up to 40 dogs a week, many of them pets given up by locals, were euthanized after just one day’s grace. Killed not by relatively humane lethal injection, but by locking them into a bin (often atop dogs killed earlier) and turning on poison gas.

The squeals of the dying dogs were unbearable but important to hear to understand the agony of their deaths. Since that film aired, creating a stir, the shelter has been replaced by a modern facility where animals are killed by injection.

These were innocent dogs, though, accused of nothing but being dogs, in contrast to humans condemned to death for heinous slayings.

George W. Bush has presided over 135 executions in Texas, more than any governor in history. His latest denial of a stay went against Jessy San Miguel, a confessed murderer who Thursday became the fifth inmate there to die of lethal injection in June.

His death closely followed the much higher-profile execution of Gary Graham, who drew wide support while maintaining his innocence to the end. Would televising his execution have changed opinions about the death penalty, pro or con?

And what of Karla Faye Tucker, who attracted enormous public sympathy while claiming on death row in 1998 that she had been reborn long since taking part in a grisly pickax murder years earlier? What would have been the impact had this soft-speaking Texan--looking as demure as the girl next door after claiming to have found Christ--received her needle on TV instead of out of public view, after on-camera interviews with CNN’s Larry King and others had attached to her name a haunting face and dark soft curls?

How much earlier, moreover, would Florida have switched to lethal injections (as it did this year under Gov. Jeb Bush) if its ancient electric chair, nicknamed “Old Sparky,” had been televised torching condemned men as it killed them?

Who would want to watch this macabre reality other than sick voyeurs? Who wouldn’t, if the goal is public awareness?

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be contacted by e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.