The ‘Why?’ Behind American Executions

In 1923, an Irishman named Charles Duff published a savagely ironic polemic against capital punishment, “A Handbook on Hanging,” in which he noted that “killing is killing, and constant familiarity with it breeds contempt or an immunity of feeling for killing.”

In 1995, journalist Ivan Solotaroff began work on a book about the death penalty. He focused his efforts on the so-called Death Belt, a 900-mile stretch from Florida to Texas where most executions are performed in this country.

Unlike Duff, Solotaroff was not interested in probing the morality of the issue or in making a case for or against it. Instead, he simply wished to understand why we do it. “I wanted to know who carried out executions, where, when, and how, and what it had been like for them to do it,” Solotaroff writes. Polls show that a majority of Americans support capital punishment--but does the death penalty satisfy our desire for justice or simply for revenge?

After spending five years among executioners and prisoners on death row, the author found that the answer was far more complex than he expected.

The author of the nonfiction collection about lost souls, “No Success Like Failure,” in his latest work Solotaroff studies failure within the American penal system: by states to deter violent crimes through the death penalty and by executioners to be at peace with their vocation. The scenes that depict a longing for redemption by executioners and prisoners alike offer some of the book’s most heartbreaking moments, and he recounts a chilling quote from Sophocles: “Who is the victim? Who is the slayer? Speak!”

It’s reasonable to expect that a book about executions would stir feelings of revulsion, fear, anger and disbelief, and this one does not disappoint. Solotaroff’s graphic, lengthy depictions of the gas chamber are nightmare-inducing.

The book takes its title from a quote by a crass New Orleans prosecutor named Jim Williams, one of many outsized characters encountered by Solotaroff. Williams’ office features morbid execution-themed cartoons and gag gifts of large syringes. Williams tells Solotaroff, “If I get you condemned, it’s personal....I want to be the last face you’ll ever see.” Williams’ colleague, a man named Ronnie Boddenheimer, gleefully tells the author that sometimes during pretrial hearings, he enjoys sidling up next to defendants, leaning over and exclaiming: “Bzzzzzzz!!!”

Despite having been convicted of sickening crimes, some of the convicts interviewed by the author come across as gentle, intelligent and perhaps even innocent. These sympathetic traits are not lost on executioners, who often suffer deep ambivalence over having to put inmates to death. Donald Hocutt, the state executioner of Mississippi, struggles to articulate the sensation he experiences at the penitentiary after 20 years of service: “I could say it’s like a noise,” he says. “Like a radio stuck in between stations. But it’s really more of a feeling, like I was living under power lines or something. It’s not pleasant.”

Hocutt is unwilling to concede that his litany of health problems--insomnia, gout, depression among them--were caused by his line of work, which include preparing cyanide solutions and engaging in “death rehearsals” with his colleagues to test the equipment just before a sentence is carried out. There are, of course, those who don’t feel conflicted by what they do, such as the warden of the Louisiana State Prison at Angola, who blithely says: “I prefer a simple hanging, on a tree or a gallows right in the middle of town, at high noon.”

“The Last Face You’ll Ever See” reveals many facets of capital punishment, from the reason executioners choose the job (the money can be quite good, and they believe they are performing a public service) to the moment-by-moment devastation the body suffers when it is put to death. (Contrary to what most people think, death by legal injection is in no way just like being put to sleep.) Death row, it turns out, even has a media day in which reporters are given tours and fact sheets, “similar to the handouts in sports-event press rooms.”

Solotaroff’s writing is vivid and his tone compassionate throughout. A self-described “agnostic” on the death penalty, he succeeds in giving us a better idea of why we support or oppose capital punishment--perhaps more than we wished to know, since ignorance is far less troubling.