Consider This from NPR - The Hidden Toll Of Working On Prison Executions

Episode Date: November 17, 2022

During the past 50 years, more than 1,550 death sentences have been carried out across the U.S.Many of the hundreds of people involved in carrying out those executions say their health has suffered because of their work. NPR's Chiara Eisner and the investigations team spoke with all kinds of current and former workers about their experiences.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu forward. Pretending to die is not typically part of a correctional officer's job, unless they're part of the team that has to carry out an execution. Before we continue, a warning that we're going to be describing how an execution is carried out, which might disturb some listeners. Catarino Escobar was a correctional officer for the Nevada State Prison System,

and he recalls taking part in a rehearsal ahead of a scheduled execution. So the last execution, I played the inmate. There was no badge, there was nothing. And I'm just playing along. And at first, Escobar says, he was handling it just fine. He wasn't even nervous when his colleagues handcuffed him and escorted him out of the holding cell. But then the other officers took him into the same gas chamber where 23 people had been put to death. And when I walked in there, something happened.

I started thinking of my mom. I started thinking of my brothers. That gas chamber is the size of a bathroom stall with huge windows on the sides. And when the team began to strap Escobar down to the gurney inside that small room, he says everything started to feel different. It was so real that the environment within the gas chamber changed.

I believed that I was being executed. I wasn't acting or playing no longer. 16 years later, he still thinks about how it changed him. It doesn't matter how you look at it. You participated in taking a human being's life. And that is not to be taken lightly. Consider this. Hundreds of people involved in executions

say their health has suffered because of it, and the government has done little to help them. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. During the past 50 years, more than 1,550 death sentences have been carried out across the U.S. The latest just this week, three as of this taping, with a fourth planned for late Thursday. Hundreds of people played a role in those executions, like Catarino Escobar, who we heard from earlier. He's never told his family what he did in the death chamber. We all knew to keep it silent. And nobody talked about it.

Few know who these workers are or what their jobs require. Laws require their anonymity. But for the first time, many people like Escobar are sharing their names and stories publicly. NPR investigative reporter Kiara Eisner spoke with current and former workers about their experiences. Over the course of four months, NPR spoke with 26 people who worked on more than 200 executions across 17 states. Most changed their minds about the death penalty after being involved. It wasn't always because they felt capital punishment was unfair to the prisoner. Often it was because they realized how hard it was on them. Workers said they were left with serious physical and mental consequences from

participating in executions. For several months there, I was pretty fragile. Staff have gone to alcoholism, drug addiction, considered suicide. Weight loss and weight gain, hair loss, irritability for sure. I went through this really long period of having insomnia. You realize that you're suffering from post-traumatic stress. That was Jeannie Woodford, a warden from California, Allison Miller, a Florida public defender, corrections superintendent Frank Thompson from Oregon,

and Bill Breeden, a religious minister. Breeden volunteered to be inside the chamber. But for most of the others NPR spoke with, execution work was a required and sometimes unexpected part of their jobs. There were a few who said their execution tasks didn't bother them much then and still don't bother them now. But many more told NPR that the time they spent on executions was not only the most stressful part of their work, but the most difficult part of their lives. They think about it again and again and again, and then over time, there's this profound sense of shame or guilt that begins to emerge for people.

Joseph Currier is a psychology professor at the University of South Alabama who studies people in the military. He says having to kill takes a toll on them. If you were to compare and contrast which events really haunt people the most after their war zone service, taking someone else's life is the highest predictor of most mental health problems. That veterans suffer from mental health issues like PTSD is well known. Since the September 11th attacks, more servicemen have died from suicide than combat. But although execution workers are also tasked with killing, there's a key difference between the two. Veterans receive lifelong free health care through Veterans Affairs.

Execution workers have no comparable support system. Craig Baxley understands the consequences of that. These are some of the oldest graves that are in the cemetery. These are some of the ones who have been executed. We're in the graveyard of the state penitentiary in Columbia, South Carolina. The few rusty metal posts that stick out of the grass don't even have names on them, just the five numbers that were assigned to the inmates when they were alive. Baxley used to lead a team that responded to emergencies in the prison that sent its dead here. But to get that role, he says he had to

agree to be one of the state's executioners. If you don't do this, you won't get the job. So most of us are not making that much money in South Carolina. So most of us go say, okay, you know, I'll try it. And then you try it and it's too late. With no medical training and no counseling beforehand, Baxley started executing people, most by lethal injection. I just basically said a prayer, and I went in there, and I had to do a couple of them all by myself and push all seven plungers. That plunger is the tool he used to send the drugs into people's veins.

Baxley served in the Marines, but he says the two kinds of jobs weren't the same. There's a difference in the killing of a person like this than shooting in a war because they're firing at you and you're firing back. Here, every single one of the death certificates says state-assisted homicide, and the state was me. Right away, it tore him apart. My stomach just felt so bad. It was just twisted and not. I felt like I had cancer. He pretended he was fine. But until recently, he considered suicide.

I've also thought many times of killing myself. But I've got grandkids now. I met Baxley last year when I first started reporting on executions. And I thought I wouldn't find anyone as marked by the work as him. What I expected was that the more people's jobs removed them from handling the plungers, the physical tools of executions, the better off they'd be. But that's not what the workers told me. I spoke with wardens, religious ministers, journalists, public defenders, and the family of a nurse who also witnessed executions. They weren't the executioner, but they had similar consequences.

Ron McAnger was the warden in Florida who told the electrician to keep the machine going after the head of a man on the electric chair caught fire. The witnesses were aghast. They could not believe they were watching the burning of a human being like that. He said the stress from coordinating that execution and seven others like it was so intense it made his fingers and heels crack. He drank a bottle of scotch a day and was later diagnosed with PTSD. It's been 25 years since he watched that man burn. He still hasn't fully recovered. Did you feel responsible in that

moment? Of course, I still do. Bill Breeden, the minister, wasn't on the prison's payroll like McAndrew, but he also felt complicit. He was in the federal death chamber in Indiana during Corey Johnson's execution last year. So I prayed for Corey and for all of us, and then I entered a prayer by saying, I believe Corey, if he could, would say the same that Jesus said, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Johnson was then injected with the drug that was supposed to kill him.

But minutes later, Breeden heard the prisoner speak up from the gurney. He was still alive. He said, I feel like my mouth and my hands are on fire. He said that. For months afterwards, Breeden became claustrophobic and would start sobbing in the middle of conversations. He still can't escape the execution, even in his sleep. Sometimes I wake up in the death chamber, in a sense.

All of a sudden you can see it again, and you can feel it again, and you can't do anything to stop it. And so in a sense, you kind of get this feel, well, I'm validating this process. And to be standing there totally incapable of doing anything while this man is murdered was just the most painful thing I've ever had in my life. Execution work affected even those who didn't have to see people die. I spoke with the son of an engineer who designed gas chambers, a radiologist who took MRI and CT scans of an executed body, and lawyers like Allison Miller. Miller represents people charged with murder in Florida's courtrooms. I cannot underscore what it feels like to stand there and ask 12 people to not kill somebody. Only once has a jury sentenced a client of hers to be executed. That was a man named Markeith Lloyd. Miller still can't forget how her toddler wished her luck when she left for work that day. She said, I hope you save

Mr. Markeith. And then I just remember thinking, I didn't. I failed him. I failed her. I failed in this godly task that I was given. It broke me a little, broke me a lot. Katerina Spinaris is a psychologist who focuses on correctional officers. She says you can get full-blown PTSD from repeated or extreme indirect exposure to traumatic events. So for an occupational hazard as serious as taking a life, even remotely involved workers should be counseled in advance. Afterwards, everyone should have months of support, she says. Think of radiation, you know, like you wouldn't send people to deal with radiation without appropriate suits on.

But only one of the dozens of people I spoke with who worked on executions before said they received counseling from the government. Five states are planning to execute people before the end of 2022. Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Missouri. None of those states offer workers the kind of long-term support Spinaris recommended. If you're specifically referring to those that work executions, then EAP is what we have available. That's Amanda Hernandez from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The short-term counseling service she's talking about there is the same EAP,

or Employee Assistance Program, available to other state employees. That means, from what they told us, Texas doesn't give any more support to its executioners than it does its tax auditors. Hernandez says the state does offer extra help after some high-stress moments in its prisons. But that's not execution-related. So execution would not be considered that kind of crisis? Not in the sense of providing those services. The other four states planning executions also have basic EAP programs. None help any of the many execution workers who aren't state employees. And all of them are optional. A spokeswoman from Missouri said officers there can also use peer support groups and see trauma specialists. But I talked to a current member of Missouri's execution team.

Because none of that was mandatory, he's never sought it out. Frank Thompson, the superintendent who oversaw executions in Oregon, says that's part of the problem. You have to understand, correctional officers want to be viewed as not being weak. Some workers think it would help if the government offered more counseling and required everyone to go. But Thompson thinks they would still suffer too much. To continue conducting executions expands the number of victims, i.e. the staff people and their families. That bothered me to the extent that I changed my position on the death penalty. All but two of the people NPR spoke with who used to support executions changed their minds after they had to help carry them out.

Today, Thompson's on the board of Death Penalty Action. The nonprofit organized a protest at the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court in June. What do we want? Now! What do we want? Now! What do we want? Now! With the white columns of the court right behind them, dozens of activists from around the country held hands and grabbed each other's shoulders as they began to sing.

Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on. The prize they had their eyes on was an end to executions. A goal now shared by many who used to carry them out. Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on. NPR investigative reporter Kiara Eisner. Hold on.