Tell Me, Executioner--
Why Did You Hide From Your Prey?
It's been more than five months---five months since you filled that first srynge and injected sodium pentathol into the viens of 33-year-old Timothy James McVeigh. Five months since you pushed down the plunger and administered a nasty drug that first paralyzed your victim's muscles and the collapsed his lungs as if they were punctured balloons. What were you thinking when the last portion of your cocktail of death, the potassium chloride that forever stopped the beating of a heart who'd once held such warmth and so much love. What went through your mind as you, hidden away behind a wall of plaster, annonymously killed Timothy McVeigh. You possessed not the guts to either watch him die at your cold hands, to see as he struggled to remain conscious, to no avail, as he suddenly felt the shock and agony of his lungs caving in, the air escaping in a few short puffs, or to look hard at the heart monitor as it finally went flat. Did you here the constant whine of that machine that told the world the "most hated man in America" was finally dead? Just what did you think as you became, yourself, a cold-blooded killer?
I am not sitting here in judgment of you, sir. You were simply "following orders." Yes, I've heard those words spoken before, Herr Executioner. They did not hold water then and they most assuredly do not now. What you did at exactly 8:14 AM on the morning of June 11th, 2001, was terminate a life. The fact that he was a condemned prisoner earmarked for execution is irrelevent when you wipe away all the camouflage that masks the violence of your actions and puts them in a pristine picture frame entitled, "Justifiable Death." What gives you the right to carry out orders handed down by people who still, in this new millennium, believe that "some deaths are necessary. Some deaths are well-deserved. Some deaths can be labelled, "Justice Being Served."
But I say to you, oh brandisher of the needle of doom, that you are no better than the young, healthy man you killed that dark morning in late spring. Yes, spring, a time of rebirth and regrowth, should not be a forum for death. I look at pictures of the imposing, stiff gurney, I gaze at the bright floor tiles and take special note of the fact that there is no window in this death chamber.
You reapers are really just too much. I read that technicians fitted Tim McVeigh with a catheter and an anal plug so that he wouldn't urinate or defecate in the chamber. Oh, heaven forbid that he dare to make a mess as the life is forced out of his body. You can wash the damned floor but you will never wash the bloodstains from your hands. Don't coddle yourself by assessing that putting McVeigh to death was a positive act. Just what did it accomplish, anyway, Mr. Executioner? Just what lives were saved or made better now that he no longer had breath in his body? I dare you to approach Tim's father and try explaining to him why it was necessary to kill his young son. But you'd never venture to do that, would you? No, just as you stood hidden in that chemical perparation room and mixed your lethal potion, you stay far away from anyone who might think that perhaps you aren't so damned virtuous after all.
I realize that you are but one cog in the machine of execution. You are, in some ways, the fall guy, or patsy, who has to shoulder the responsibility of taking a life before its time. Tim was not dying in that chamber--he was being murdered.
I scorn at those who cheered when Tim's end came. I wondered how they think it will somehow improve their lives and give them meaning. Our society is in serious decline when we celebrate violent actions. If the Oklahoma City bombing was such a violent act, then what was shooting poisons into a man's veins and destroying his liver, lungs and heart?
I hope that you are able to sleep at night. It is my belief that you'll most likely be the designated executioner for other death row imates at that prison. Two of them may be other condemned prisoners two whom I regularly correspond: David Paul Hammer and Jeffery William Paul. The latter is only 25 years old. How will you feel about snuffing his life out before it's really began?
God help me, I don't hate you for what you did. But I DID despise your deadly actions. I work and lobby for the day when your job becomes obsolete. May it be sooner, rather than later.
There. That's the end of my rant, except to post a picture that, to myself anyhow, shows a man who has has seemingly yearned for "a state-assisted suicide." That is exactly what his execution became---a welcome release from a world out of which he desperately, at times anyway, wanted out of---permanently. Here is a rather powerful graphic, a capture to which I will be bringing up from time to time, because it is the quintessential symbol of a man who wished a spiritual release and eternal redemption:
