It was complicated, messy. But the tapes never hint at that. Here, crime and punishment is not so much a set of values to be weighed but a series of steps to be followed. The tapes were conceived as a legal defense. Fearing lawsuits from capital punishment critics, Georgia wanted its own record of what happens when a prisoner is sent to the electric chair.
Procedure is an understatement.
What the tapes show is the dark side of bureaucracy, of procedure supplanting humanity, of how even an execution can be routinized. You do not hear the clang of shackles, the buckling of straps on the electric chair, the hiss of electricity when the fatal buttons are pushed. Aside from a mantra-like voice, the most notable sound is the hollowness of steel doors closing. But in a tape of another 1984 execution, you hear what a botched execution sounds like when it is reduced to this sort of rote. It's a strange word.