This major's miserable little job after each execution was to take a paper bag, go to the condemned man's cell, and collect his soap, his toothbrush, and personal belonging s to send to his family. I can't keep doing this anymore. I'm killing a fellow human being who has been rendered defenseless. This man, Major Kendall Coody, was the only man I know who, because of his conscience, quit his job at the penitentiary. I heard that six months later he died of a heart attack.
Death is a very stressful thing for everybody.
And my rhetoric is that we need to come closer to what it means when we give the state the power to condemn human beings to death and then kill them. In many of the debates over the death penalty, words are bandied about with little or no regard for their meaning. The practice of the death penalty is the practice of torture. And by the time the people I have been with finally climb into the chair to be killed, they have died a thousand times already because of their anticipation of the final horror. It's got nothing to do with being tough on crime.