Join us on Twitter and Facebook. Tune in to watch an execution? More Videos The death penalty in America Story highlights Austin Sarat: Arkansas is having trouble finding witnesses to all its planned executions -- what if a solution were to televise them? Televising executions forces us to consider the meaning and significance of the public's own instinct to turn away when the state takes a human life, he writes. So serious is this problem that the director of the Arkansas Department of Correction, Wendy Kelley, has tried to solicit volunteers.
According to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette , she made a personal plea in a speech to the Little Rock Rotary Club to take on this unusual civic role. So if you are interested in serving in that area, in this serious role, just call my office. This problem is itself a symptom of the troubling secrecy of what is in fact a public event.
One solution to the problem is all too telling: television broadcasts of executions. I oppose the death penalty and if televised executions bring it to an end sooner than would otherwise happen, that would be great. But even if executions go on indefinitely, there's a strong argument to be made for televising them.
Austin Sarat. Whether televised or not, executions are always public by their very nature. The death of a condemned person is in no sense just his own death; it is a killing carried out in our name. The seemingly bureaucratic act of a few state officials is our deed as well. Hiding the deed does not change this fact. McVeigh himself has said he wants his execution broadcast, which has fueled arguments by those who believe it should not be televised. McVeigh lawyer Rob Nigh Jr.
Attorney General John Ashcroft ruled last month that 10 relatives of victims of the Oklahoma City bombing would be allowed to view McVeigh's execution firsthand, while another would be given the chance to see it on closed circuit television.
But he said there would be no wider public viewing. Anti-death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean called for the event to be aired, saying that is the best way to put an end to executions. But some opponents of the death penalty, such as Amaju Baraka of Amnesty International, say their opposition to capital punishment does not allow them to condone even one execution — even if public viewing of the event would galvanize opposition.
Supporters of capital punishment are equally divided, between those who maintain that widespread viewing of executions would increase the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent to crime and help heal the emotional wounds of the family of a killer's victims, and those who feel the public is already exposed to too much fictional death in movies and television without being offered the real thing.
Executions in the United States have been held behind closed doors since the s, with only a small number of witnesses allowed. Members of the media allowed to attend have been denied the right to record the event in any way — tape recorders, video cameras and even pens, pencils and notebooks are not allowed. Opponents of the death penalty, and even some scholars who say they are at least academically neutral on the matter, say there is a contradiction in the policy.
There is, for example, a stark difference between the images of the hanging of Saddam Hussein that were screened by mainstream western broadcasters and the images available online, and a similar distinction applies in the case of film of hostage murders released by terrorist organisations. And when, last year, Chinese state TV broadcast a special programme featuring the final hours of drug traffickers who had been condemned to death, the actual moment of death was not shown, possibly due to international protests when the nature of the programme became known.
There is one morbid sequence in Executed, in which a prison historian walks and talks us through the procedure for a hanging, but these moments seem designed to illustrate a barbarism that should never be resumed.
Chris Malone's documentary, timed to mark this week's 50th anniversary of the final state executions in most of the UK capital punishment remained in force in Northern Ireland until , visits the elderly relatives of a succession of those, including Derek Bentley and Timothy Evans, who were killed for crimes that they had not committed.
Even five or six decades on, the descendants of the executed still weep when they recall the final morning. One of the incidental details in Executed is that hangings generally took place at 9am. If television had gone in the direction that some feared, it would have been 9pm to hit peak time.
But, thankfully, what we have ended up with in that slot in is an intelligent documentary that, while acknowledging some public hunger for the restoration of capital punishment, shows why, apart from any moral argument, the risk of irredeemable mistakes makes the practice untenable.
From anatomy to execution: the problems of portraying death on TV.
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