sherman and i am your host and my guest today is frank thompson a retired correctional professional who has experiences in the state of arkansas and oregon in oregon he was responsible for the daily operations of eleven of the states then thirteen presence during the years nine hundred ninety six and nine hundred ninety seven while serving as the superintendent of the oregon state penitentiary frank was called upon to administer the death penalty on two occasions frank now works with other oregonians who wish to see the public policy of capital punishment repealed as he says no one can speak personally about conducting and big personally responsible for killing people in the name of society better than i can when he interviewed for the job in one thousand nine hundred four he was asked if he would be able to conduct executions and at the time he supported capital punishment and said yes he had served in korea and was a good soldier i was familiar with the need to take a life under certain circumstances eighteen months later he just like to start with a little background because you went into the prison system supporting the death penalty thinking it was appropriate in certain cases and then something shifted along the way and it was i gather the process of rewriting the protocol can you tell us about that campaign trail to come to arkansas saw to be sure that this execution went through really well but so that was at his execution as a result of that is as to who ship that was a staff person who was so negatively impacted by it that person resigned fast forward now i am being asked to conduct my first execution in oregon in the back of my mind i'm acutely aware of the impact that executing someone could have on staff and with this being the first execution in thirty two years the first time by lethal inject and having to rewrite all of the protocols i became very concerned that there be only one fifth i was concerned about my status and so as i was going through the process of the death penalty and how it might expose staff persons to posttraumatic stress and that began my looking at as a death penalty  detail parsing all bases i had to come to grips with wear out personally still with it at that point yeah you know again most people don't think in terms of the collateral damage so not only are you putting someone to death and you write a protocol for it and you're dotting the i's and crossing the t's about how to kill a person who is currently already incarcerated but then there's the staff there are the family members of the victim the family members of the person being put to death and even as you mentioned in one interview the press so the collateral damage is just as significant as the act of exit q should absolutely all of these are human beings who are psychologically all of all emotionally vulnerable we have a habit in this country of thinking only of the execution team or the person who at minister the looked a little slow it's all the lethal injections that are people who suffer a lifetime stress all you really have to do is just get on google and correctional officer execution p t s d and you just fine i'm a number of instances where people who've been involved with the crime but you are impacted for the rest of your life like a life sentence yes well many people don't understand that killing someone a correctional officer a correctional officer skins an thousand of its time killing people they go in with no anticipation they really aren't trained i was far better trained to go into that activity then all of my staff none of them had ever been asked to kill a new one before and correctional officers are in one of the most stressful careers and the country if you do research has a lot of research out there right now that indicates upward of thirty three percent o and then pulling out a team of people to go and kill someone much less like what happened in arkansas you come pounding the stress quotient on staff just by training them on a  not it's repeatedly having to make that decision to go deeper and more frequently into this very daunting test and then you take this home to your family some of that dysfunctional  families alcoholism google all correctional officer execution suicides you'd be surprised at all of the number of correctional officers who contemplated and carrots through now the accompanying movie and she said something that i thought was pretty cool she said most people most americans don't wholeheartedly embrace the death penalty they don't think about it and as you're talking you know like you're saying go on google and it's all there the impact and the cost but most of us on a day to day basis we're not thinking about it it's about a huge segment of the population is being negatively impacted and so what needs to happen in order to shift this because we keep having more and more people in prison and you know this whole concept of you know the perpetrator of a particular crime and because of our lack of awareness we don't appreciate the collateral negativities that are taking place in our communities capital punishment is a public policy and if we can't take our emotions get away from my emotions and look at capital punishment as a public policy and ask ourselves individual it whether or not this public policy is accomplishing what it's supposed to do and that is to make our communities safer then this increased awareness will get people to rethink it it's more than about punishing a person it's about whether or not punishing this person by death makes our communities safer and however we are now hell or a human being and by all of these criteria capital punishment fails dissimilarly it does none of these things is exorbitantly costly and it just has all types of negative net negative outcomes so it's as you question more directly if we could get into a sustained consciousness raising education process where the public realizes this just doesn't work and  then we all start get actually taken some ways that is beginning to happen because if you'll notice there are fewer deaths sentences being meted out by our court systems there are fewer executions for various comfortable in folding that inner tension that they feel about it yes and i think also people are not aware that it actually cost more and having people on death row than to have them in prison for life i think it's as you say a visceral reaction you know it's going to make us safer it does not it's going to deter crime it does not some years back i interviewed someone who had been part of a crime someone got shot he didn't pull the trigger but he got sent to prison for eighteen years at that time that was considered what the sentence was and so he was young when he was doing all of this and i said to him did you ever think of the consequences and he said oh my god that was like the furthest thing from my mind i was just out there being a gangster you know absolutely never thought of the consequences no relationship to the likelihood that they will be out for it and that nobody thinks of being killed as a result of a rhyme but most criminal intent has with trying to figure out the odds of even being seen in a car if we could create a fabric in our community where people or willing to testify about what they see these video cameras the cell phones are doing great things all our streets nowadays because many of our criminal behavior in the club like are diminishing because people realize a thing and get caught on camera i hope i'm not depressing but  terrance is all resting in the mind of the perpetrator the likelihood that they could prevail with a crime that they're going to be successful with it right right killing killing them later on just too late yeah yeah so i wanted to ask you a couple of other things the i saw an interview with new and with the former governor who had to as he describes it he was  he had been a physician and the physicians mandate is do no harm and there is sitting at the other end of the phone line when somebody is getting ready to be executed and he only one who can free them yeah and commute that and if he has to go by what his agreement was what his mandate was and instantly that he's been traumatized for life in some way  p n i'll never forget the day i went over to his office to train him and what he was to me hey you know there's this sort of gold thing you witness when a person has a motional going permanently yes i can imagine one of the things you also said in a while was you were preparing your staff for to be trained with lethal injection that once you finally shared with them your internal struggle they've them some relief because they thought they just had to soldier up and not have any inner conflict about it we didn't talk an awful lot about it but i i did six through a couple of my staff that were close to me they indicated that that was a rel from them that i was sort of human like them we had a contract with the state just as a soldier to put on legal form to goes to war and not popular aerial conflict they don't want to be there they've got to do their job they've got to have their comrades back they've got to do their in order to so that the team will prevail there is a kind of camaraderie among correctional professionals police officers  firemen and put happy and that was this relaxation let's get together let's get this thing done just get it out of the way let's get it done with dignity and there's no need of either of us feeling as if we  wrestling with some tensions and looks forward to execution i can imagine so your first exit q ssion do you have to be in the room standing right there  yes i have to be in the room i ask to ask the inmate the person to be executed do they have any last words i stand there and give the nod or the signal or the lethal chemical zte to start flowing yes i am a mediately i was at arm's reach of the person being executed and what was that like for here you know that's asked me often but i think i was being prepared for that moment from the time i started worrying about how well my staff was to fare at that moment believe it or not my most providing a motion was less gets this thing over with i want that to be only one casualty i want that to be only one victim and that was my dictate of our that state constitution it was a determination because i knew things could go rock as we now know all across the country with botched execution i could never i'll never forget the morning i woke up and read about the botched execution in oklahoma which it happened it's took place years after my first almost straight up in my bed because that was my worst nightmare on the night of my first execution that that inmate would suffer or that bear some staff person would collapse from having to kill someone for the first time in their lives so after that moment i was so to mission driver saw mission driven that i wanted to get this thing over let now the details of what i was going through at that moment sort of came to bear a little bit later in rector of a retro suspect and deep briefing and probably one of the most most of most of all moments for me if you will indicated that his hand was hurting and without thinking about it i knew that i was not there to hurt anyone i've never really thought about hurting anyone in the strange you never think about hurting someone to go in and with premeditation and take the life of another human being in the name of a public policy that cannot be shown to work to put someone in a position of having i mean can you imagine the premeditation except you know we convict people every day based upon the level of premeditation yeah ared must after our practice weeks out of a murder so we carry innocent men and women through all of these exercises to take the life of him and at that point those people who are killing the sport then not thinking about the crimes that person committed fifteen years ago they are taking the life of a human being and society needs to know that if you're going to send somebody to war if there's a reasonable chance that doing so is going to bring about a good to the country if you go on a sentence or have a minute women to go into a small room and kill someone so sorry to collectively needs to have high confidence levels that asking these men and women are going to produce an outcome that makes our communities safer that's a no no i think we actually have no right to ask that i mean and again most of us don't think about it on a day to day basis and that's why i think it's so important to go around the country and educate people and create that level of awareness i wanted to ask you so what is the debriefing process is there some process that then has people talk about it or some way to incorporate it there are there is the statutory rape tori deep grief to go all for a government all exercise to see how well thanks went but that's by that's required in the process we do make staff aware that there are mental health counseling services that are available to them and that if anyone feels the need to take advantage of those that they certainly should in fact we we re required to attend at least three mandatory sessions after the executions so that we could overcome the the fear or the embar what would you like to say to the world that large to help raise their consciousness about this and perhaps even to motivate them into action the world in the appreciation for the fact that the death penalty is a public policy just as the health care program that we are wrestling with back and forth across the nation but it is a public policy as much as the policies supporting our school system and after a while we collectively as a community need to take a look to into a productive future is it worth the cost and energy and sacrifice we now know it takes and if it fails those objective criteria we need to come about  kind of results to say we need to change it we need to find out what's wrong and fix it all we need to get rid of it this experiment of killing people we've gone through the experiment for many many years we have states in the country that don't have the death penalty and they are not clamoring to initiate it they are doing just fine and their crime rate has not gone up it has not go that many of them they are less in states where that it there is is an execution process i think that is what i would challenge the community the country at large step back you're promoting the public policy tax dollars and committing the lives of emotions of your sons and daughters and neighbors decent men and women to a lifetime yeah thank you and i don't think it's necessarily going to take that much said nobody has to take it up as their cause but they can educate themselves they can start sending letters they could let their you know congressman know natasha sherman thank you for joining us