DEATH PENALTY

The ‘Hidden’ Third Parties as Victims
come to feel a sense of community with them. Parting with prisoners
one has come to know can be at once touching and depressing. One
officer, supervising a prisoner’s last visit with his family before he was
transferred to the death house, reacted in a revealingly human way.
The reality of that last family visit really made me feel bad.
His daughter didn’t even know him. It was depressing to be
there. It’s supposed to be part of the job, like being a doctor
or something. You lose a patient and that’s just it, but it’s not
that easy. You never forget this type of thing, but you can put
it behind you. 30
For this officer, one “loses” a prisoner to execution. Like any genuine
loss, it doesn’t come easily. 31
Be that as it may, human connections between death row officers and
prisoners are not common or deep, and certainly are not the norm. No
officer mourns the loss of condemned prisoners. When bonds form
between officers and inmates they are likely to be tenuous, stress-producing,
and directly in conflict with the distance and impersonality sought
in death row regimes, where something approaching a combat duty
mentality is meant to prevail. 32 The jobs of officers on execution teams
are arranged in ways that minimize contact and virtually eliminate any
human connections between the prisoners and the officers. It is assumed
that execution is a job for which it is better, if not essential, to have no
personal knowledge of, or relationship with, the condemned prisoner.
Since death row officers have had extensive contact with condemned
prisoners, these officers are typically excluded from execution teams. 33
30 Johnson, 2005, p. 115.
31 Ibid.
32 See, generally, Johnson, 1989.
33 McGunigall-Smith, reporting on her study of Utah’s execution team, indicated that some death
row officers “expressed feelings of kinship” with some condemned prisoners and “volunteered to
be part of the execution team” for them to ensure that the prisoner was not alone and friendless
at the end. (Personal Communication, email dated June 24, 2016.) This is by no means the
norm, but does fit with the unusual characteristics of death row in Utah, at least at the time of
McGunigall-Smith’s study—a small solitary confinement death row run by a stable cohort of
professional officers led by a charismatic and humane captain, since retired, carrying out executions
with prisoners some of them have guarded on death row for years, even a decade or more.
See McGunigall-Smith, Sandra, Men of a Thousand Days: Death-sentenced inmates at Utah state prison
(Unpublished doctoral thesis). Bangor: University of Wales.
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