I watched 7 men get killed while working as a reporter.
Their deaths happened at the execution chamber at Florida State Prison near Starke. From 2006 until 2010, I witnessed most of the executions held there.
Sadly, I had to look up my old stories to figure out the exact number that I had seen. Most of the deaths blended into one another, other than a botched execution that led to an 18-month halt in the state holding executions.
The mundane nature of the proceedings was the point. Florida held some pretty awful executions to witness when the state used an electric chair, known as Old Sparky. Flames shot out of two different prisoner's heads, before the use of the chair was ended.
The lethal injection process was designed to be less dramatic. In most cases, it just looks like someone getting drugs for an operation and losing consciousness — except for the execution of Ángel Díaz in 2006, which was botched so badly that he writhed in pain and took 30 minutes to die.
Ángel Díaz was convicted of the 1979 murder of a nightclub manager. He died by lethal injection on Dec.13, 2006, in an execution that was botched by the state. Díaz maintained his innocence until his death.
The state made changes to the procedure before resuming executions, but other problems have surfaced with lethal injections. Pharmaceutical companies blocked their drugs from being used in executions, causing some states to turn to alternative methods.
Earlier this month, South Carolina approved allowing a firing squad to be an execution option if lethal injection drugs are unavailable. Even though I oppose the death penalty, I find value in the idea of using firing squads for states continuing to hold executions. Maybe that way, death penalty supporters will be forced to face the barbarity of the act.
Or maybe not. Executions were long a public spectacle no matter how brutal. The last public execution in the U.S. was a hanging in Kentucky in 1936, which attracted more than 20,000 onlookers.
A new book I just finished, “Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty” by Maurice Chammah, connects our country’s dark history of racially motivated lynchings with the death penalty. Black people are over-represented on death row — in fact, while death sentences have decreased in recent years, an even larger proportion of those sentences are now being given to people of color.
The book focuses on Texas, which executes far more people than any other state. Florida ranks 4th, conducting 99 executions since 1976. But Florida leads the country in death-sentence exonerations, with 30 people freed from death row due to wrongful convictions over that period.
The possibility of executing an innocent person should be enough to do away with the death penalty. Or the expense: The Palm Beach Post estimated in 2000 that the death penalty costs Florida taxpayers about $50 million a year more than sentencing all 1st-degree murderers to life in prison.
Yet, while states are slowly getting rid of the death penalty, executions seem entrenched where it remains. Hopefully South Carolina’s shift to a firing squad marks a turning point.
While watching inmates get injected with chemicals is designed to be unmemorable, seeing someone shot to death by the state should be hard to forget.
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
