In the decades he spent filing stories from Jacksonville after visits to Florida’s execution chamber, former AP reporter Ron Word saw a lot that still lingers in the back of his mind. There are the images from the old days of the electric chair: The executioner’s black hood, only visible through a slit in the wall; or the electrician’s thick rubber gloves, worn in the event of mechanical problems. And there are the dramatic episodes:
the execution of Ted Bundy;
electrocutions in which “there were flames coming off the inmates’ heads”;
the botched, bloody death of Allen Lee “Tiny” Davis in 1999, in a special electric chair built for his 344-pound body, then never used again.
There were the times the Florida Department of Corrections (DOC) tried to alter the narrative. Once, Word remembers, in the early days of lethal injection, he got a call from prison officials telling him, “You’re gonna’ have to change the times in your story. They don’t agree with our times.” Word refused. Another time, after the agonizing 34-minute death of Angel Diaz — executioners pushed the IV needles into his flesh instead of his veins — Word says the DOC “pretty much lied to us that night.” Prison officials claimed Diaz had some sort of liver problem, “but as it turned out there was nothing wrong with his liver. It was because of the procedure they used.”
That happened around Christmas of 2006. Afterward, Florida temporarily halted executions and revised its protocol. And that’s when they brought in the moon suits.
“At all Florida lethal injections, a man in a purple moon suit leans over the dying inmate to listen for a heartbeat and feel for a pulse,” Word
reported in the summer of 2007. “After a few seconds, he nods, and the witnesses are informed that the death sentence has been duly carried out. The man is a doctor, and the gear shields his identity — not just from the prisoner’s family and friends, but from the American Medical Association, whose code of ethics bars members from participating in executions.”
The moon suits still stick out in Word’s memories. “It kind of surprised me when they first showed up. It was kind of bizarre.” Regardless, he says, “after two or three executions they quit using them.” The moon suits appeared to attract rather than deflect attention. Other states had developed less theatrical ways of hiding the identities of doctors who helped them kill prisoners.
Source: The Washington Post, Liliana Segura, March 19, 2014
