Audio Resources

The Execution Tapes

Recorded in Jackson, Georgia.

Since this country's last public execution in 1936, all U.S. executions have been carried out solely in front of state-selected witnesses. Alongside the controversy over the morality of capital punishment has raged a parallel debate: Should the state's ultimate act against an individual be enacted in secret? Many in the media have tried to bring their cameras and tape recorders into the execution chamber, but courts have consistently ruled that, although the media do have a place in witnessing executions, they have no right to record the scene.

In 1998, however, audio tapes of 22 Georgia executions -- tapes recorded by members of the state's Department of Corrections for their own records -- entered the court record when criminal defense lawyer Mike Mears subpoenaed the tapes in a lawsuit he brought challenging the state's use of the electric chair. Sound Portraits acquired the recordings, and, in conjunction with WNYC, produced The Execution Tapes.

Last public execution in 1936

The 1936 hanging of Rainey Bethea in Owensboro, Kentucky -- the last public execution in the United States. (Courtesy: The Last Public Execution in America)

The Execution Tapes is an hour-long public radio special hosted by Ray Suarez featuring excerpts of recordings made in Georgia's death house during state electrocutions. This broadcast is the first time a national audience is able to hear what takes place during a state-sponsored execution.

In addition to audio of the 1984 execution of Ivon Ray Stanley, the program features audio of an execution that had to be "reinitiated" -- that is, an execution in which the inmate is still alive after being electrocuted for two minutes, requiring that he be electrocuted again. There is also a selection of inmates' final statements, recorded immediately before their execution.

Excerpts of the tapes are followed by two roundtable discussions about the implications of the tapes' broadcast. Participants include 60 Minutes co-editor Mike Wallace, First-Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus, former Georgia Attorney General Michael Bowers, professor of psychiatry and psychology Robert Jay Lifton, and Diane Clements, president of the victims' rights organization Justice for All.

Next Page | Execution of Ivon Ray Stanley »

Reporter: Brooke Gladstone / Host: Ray Suarez / Producers: Gary Covino and John Keefe / Editor: Gary Covino / Associate Producer: David Miller / Studio Engineer: Scott Stickland / Production Assistance: Stacy Abramson, Greta Byrum, Mike Ellcessor, David Isay, Kathy Lohr, Judith Osofsky, and Jamie York / Photographs: Andrew Lichtenstein/Aurora / Audio provided by WNYC.

Making Deadly Decisions

by Alan Berlow

Whether or not one supports the death penalty, we like to assume that when the state is trying to take a person's life, that individual will get a fair trial by a jury. What the Capital Jury Project's research and my own interviews with capital jurors suggest is that this is often not the case.

Assume for a moment that you are responsible for deciding whether or not another person is to be put to death by the state. How do you go about it? How much time would you like to decide? How much evidence will you need? How many "authorities" would you like to consult?

Making a decision over an execution is a burden that falls on a relatively small number of ordinary Americans each year. Those people are jurors. It is also a burden most of our state laws shift at the eleventh hour to governors who have the unique power to grant clemency.

I first began thinking seriously about this unique power over another human life during the presidential campaign of 1990. At the time, Texas Governor George W. Bush had signed off on more than 140 executions and was campaigning strongly on the "character issue." It occurred to me that making a decision over even a single human life might be an extraordinary test of character. It certainly was for Hamlet. He went crazy trying to sort out just a single murder. The idea of signing off on 152 executions as Bush would eventually do is hard to imagine. When I asked Bush's close friend, now White House Counsel, Alberto Gonzales, how much time the governor spent reviewing each death sentence, he told me it was about a half-hour.

Governors are not required to spend any time considering alternatives to death. Nor are they required to apply any particular standards or rules. That's the way juries in this country worked until 1972: they had unlimited discretion. And the consequences were horrific. To cite just one example, between 1930 and 1972, 455 men were executed in the United States for rape. Nine out of ten of them were black. And it wasn't because blacks were committing 90% of the rapes.

By 1972, a majority of the Supreme Court came to the undeniable conclusion that the way the death penalty was administered by the states was "arbitrary," "capricious" and unprincipled. In a case called Furman v. Georgia, the Court struck down hundreds of state death penalty laws. But four years later the death penalty was resurrected by another Supreme Court decision, Gregg v. Georgia. The thinking behind Gregg was that if jurors were given "clear and objective standards," a sort of roadmap that would guide their decision-making, the death penalty would be fairer. Unlimited discretion was replaced by "guided discretion." The laws now in place in the 38 death penalty states are the legacy of the Gregg decision. The question, of course, is whether those laws and standards have eliminated arbitrariness, racial prejudice and the other ills identified by the Furman Court, and whether jury sentencing today is any fairer than it was before 1972.

When I began investigating that question a little over a year ago, I found I was repeatedly crossing paths with a research scholar at Northeastern University's College of Criminal Justice named William Bowers. In 1990, Bowers created something called the Capital Jury Project to scientifically examine whether death sentences have become more rational and less arbitrary in the past quarter century. Working under a grant from the National Science Foundation, Bowers pulled together a diverse collection of prominent academics who interviewed more than 1200 capital jurors. Their findings, many of which are cited in Deadly Decisions, will be deeply disturbing to anyone who cares about the fairness of our justice system.

Whether or not one supports the death penalty, we like to assume that when the state is trying to take a person's life, that individual will get a fair trial by a jury. What the jury project's research and my own interviews with capital jurors suggest is that this is often not the case. Jurors frequently don't understand the laws or the standards they are supposed to apply. Often, they don't understand some of the most basic concepts that apply to death penalty cases such as "reasonable doubt" and "mitigation." They don't understand what will happen if they fail to agree on a sentence. They are confused by overly complex legal language. And when they try to do their jobs honestly and ask judges to clarify what they don't understand, too often they are given no help at all. The result is that people are executed whom jurors really didn't want to see die, or they're executed because jurors mistakenly believed they were required to sentence them to death, or because jurors erroneously believed they would be released if they didn't sentence them to death. That's obviously not fair to the defendant. But it's also not fair to jurors, who are forced to make these extraordinarily difficult decisions in the name of the rest of us.