An NPR reporter interviewed workers who carried out more than 200 death row executions in various capacities. A lot of them are traumatized by the experience. We don’t consider the actual people who have to do the killing, or are part of the bureaucracy when we think about the death penalty. The reporter did an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit last week. Here’s one of the best quotes:
There were quite a few who had military or law enforcement experience before becoming corrections officers. But almost all of them who did have that previous experience made it very clear to me that carrying out executions was totally different. I talked to someone who was a marine before he became an executioner in South Carolina.
Let me share a direct quote from one of our conversations: "If you're in the military, you're fighting a war. And when you're fighting a war, you have soldiers shooting at you and you are shooting back at the soldier. There's a difference in the killing of a person like this than shooting in a war. Because they're firing at you and you're firing back. Here, every single one of the death certificates says 'state assisted homicide.' And the state was me."