Book Review

Donald A. Cabana, Death at Midnight: The Confession of an Executioner, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996. Pp. xii + 200. Price $37.50 hardcover; 15.95 paper (ISBN 1-55553-264-0; 1-55553-356-6).

In the expanding modern literature calling for abolition of capital punishment in the United States, comparatively little attention has been given to the actual infliction of the death penalty. Such, however, is the focus of the two books under review. In his volume John D. Bessler provides a detailed history of the movement in the nineteenth century that transformed capital punishment from a public spectacle (sometimes solemn, more often raucous) to a procedure performed behind prison walls from which the general population is excluded. The infliction of death has been rendered even more remote by legal requirements that executions be carried out in the early hours of the morning--the "midnight assassination" laws, as they were dubbed in Minnesota (99–100). Bessler deplores these developments because, he argues, the enforced remoteness of executions from public view deprives the citizenry of knowledge and insights important to penal policy and, more specifically, because he believes that public witnessing of official homicides may bring about abolition of the death penalty. He concludes his argument with a considered plea for the televising of executions in the United States.	1
The movement that led to transfer of executions from public squares to prison cell blocks has been characterized by oddities and ambiguities. These measures may be viewed, in their origins, as products of antebellum humanitarian reform. Many responsible citizens saw public inflictions of death as contributing to social disorder and the brutalization of popular attitudes. No doubt many such persons hoped and expected that elimination of public execution would soon be followed by total abolition of capital punishment. Other reformers, however, sensed that removing executions from public gaze, and thus diverting public attention from the actual infliction of death by prison officials, would weaken the impulse toward eventual abandonment of the death penalty. Subsequent history suggests that these latter fears may have had substantial basis.	2
The movement to "privatize" officially administered death, once launched, was avidly embraced by law makers and prison officials. Remarkable legislation, clearly invalid by modern constitutional standards, not only barred reporters from attending executions, but also provided fines for newspapers that published any accounts of executions going beyond mere announcements of their occurrence. Even today the sensitivity of officials to close media scrutiny of the conduct of executions is often acute, sometimes bordering on the paranoid. Opponents of capital punishment and other "trouble-makers" have on occasion been excluded from lists of official witnesses to the proceedings (13). In one instance a prison official resisted the televising of an execution on the ground that the cameraman might in an excess of abolitionist fervor hurl his heavy equipment through the class enclosure of the gas chamber (15).	3
It is the writer's view that there has developed in this country a system sometimes consciously calculated to foster ignorance of the realities of capital punishment, an ignorance upon which widespread public support of the death penalty rests. For Bessler, correcting the situation requires the televising of executions as they occur, thereby making members of the public witnesses to the killings. The proposal, while interesting and worthy of discussion, presents several areas of difficulty.	4
The first argument is one of constitutional mandate: the protections of free speech and press guarantee access of television news media to execution chambers so that the proceedings may be communicated to the viewing public. A central purpose of press freedom, it is said, is to ensure that citizens have unobstructed opportunities to acquire the kinds of knowledge and insights essential to informed judgments on important issues; and in weighing the merits of capital punishment, direct knowledge of what transpires in execution chambers is essential to informed judgments. A practical difficulty with the argument is that it is supported by virtually no judicial authority (164–66). It is true that many state jurisdictions in recent years have permitted televising of court proceedings, subject to such limits and regulations as seem required (203–4). But despite the constitutional requirement of "public trial," it has not been suggested that the jurisdiction is required to provide television access to the courtroom; and, indeed, the federal courts have not admitted television cameras to judicial proceedings.	5
Given that judicial implementation of the writer's proposal is not likely to occur in any near future, other issues assume more immediate practical interest. First, what is the constituency likely to support the televising of executions? It cannot be assumed that opponents of the death penalty will rally to Bessler's cause. Indeed abolitionists may be among the most repelled by the proposal. The writer relates that when in the late 1970s a public television station in California attempted to obtain authority to televise the first execution in that state after many years, it was confronted by a storm of protest from its regular viewers, many of whom withheld their customary financial support of the station's operations (16–17). It seems likely that among the protestors was a considerable number of death-penalty opponents, perhaps a larger faction than in the population as a whole. On the other hand, it may be wise not to assume general resistance to the writer's proposal. Repugnance did not deprive televising the tape of Dr. Kervorkian's "mercy killing" of a large national audience--an observation, however, that may not be entirely reassuring.	6
The most problematic area of speculation relates to the possible consequences of widespread televising of death-penalty executions. One can anticipate that the results would be varied. It is indeed possible, as Bessler hopes, that the consequences might include a general revulsion against capital punishment leading to its abolition or, at the least, to universal substitution of lethal injections for the more brutal electrocutions and asphyxiations by gas. Revulsion to public witnessing, however, might launch a debate, not on the abandonment of the death penalty, but on a return to the relative privacy of the present regime. It is possible, also, that the televising would produce responses in some segments of American society of the sort that disturbed the nineteenth-century reformers and led to current practices. It is no secret that there are currents of sadism and violence in American society made overt through the administration of capital punishment, as exemplified by the celebratory revels that sometimes occur outside prison walls while officials inflict death within. There may be legitimate fears that the writer's proposal, among other things, may nourish and enlarge such propensities. The observation of columnist George Will, that the primary contribution of television in this area of penal administration will be a further coarsening of American society, may be entitled to more serious consideration than Bessler is disposed to afford it (186).	7
The value of the book may reside less in the proposals advanced than in the detailed and conscientious examination of the "privatizing" movement over the last century and a half. This exercise in legislative and administrative history constitutes a substantial contribution to capital punishment scholarship. Bessler has avoided facile psychologizing even though the materials he explores seem vulnerable to such attempts. For this we can be grateful.	8
The second book under consideration is of an entirely different character. Donald A. Cabana was for a period warden of the Mississippi State Prison at Parchman. He is one of several prison wardens in the century just ending whose participation in the infliction of death have moved them publicly to oppose capital punishment. Cabana's personal memoirs center on his close personal relationship with a prisoner on death row whom he was eventually required to lead to the gas chamber. The discussion includes a detailed and disturbing description of the procedures and fallibilities surrounding this sort of official killing.	9
Cabana also relates his experiences as a junior staff officer at Parchman and presents a vivid picture of the deplorable conditions that prevailed there as recently as the 1970s. Parchman was a prison that armed some prisoners to guard other prisoners. The inevitable result was injustice, abuse, and waste of life. The book, although chiefly focused on the death penalty, gives evidence that not all the dark pages of American prison history are concerned with capital punishment.	10
Francis A. Allen University of Florida

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