PRISON NATION USA
We covered the executioners’ toll and exposed SC execution secrecy.
The impact was immediate
Chiara Eisner
Sun, December 12, 2021
After The State Media Co. published a series of stories that revealed the hidden toll of execution work, unprecedented secrecy surrounding executions and firing squad preparations at the S.C. Department of Corrections and the state’s unique execution history over the past 300 years, government and readers reacted to the reporting immediately.
Two weeks after the Secrets of the Death Chamber series was published, Corrections provided the newspaper with execution records it had initially declined to share with the public. The new records show that since April, the agency has considered over 100 employees to be members of its execution team, though previous teams in South Carolina had consisted of fewer than 10 people, former execution workers said. The agency required each of those employees to sign restrictive confidentiality agreements that threatened law enforcement action for noncompliance, the documents show. Corrections shared additional records that revealed how it had spent over $23,000 on additional firing squad purchases, including orders for ballistic glass and armored plates.
The series also generated responses from lawmakers.
Sen. Dick Harpootlian, D-Richland, who proposed the state approve the firing squad as its newest execution method in May and prosecuted Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins, South Carolina’s infamous serial killer who was executed in 1991, said the newspaper had “probed it all” in the series.
“At the end of the day, the decision of whether or not we have a death penalty is obviously the primary question,” he said. “And then if you do have a death penalty, what is the most humane way to do that?”
Other state representatives and lawyers from Ohio to Kentucky mentioned the story about the hidden executioners’ toll had caused them to think about capital punishment in new ways, and that they would use the content to inform how they presented legislation or worked in the court room.
“Your article has the entire death penalty community thinking,” one said, after sharing that they had never before considered the toll taken on workers who have to do the job. “I believe this is evidence that a jury should have access to before they vote to take a life.”
And more than a hundred readers from Aiken to the United Kingdom reached out to express how the reporting on executioners had affected them.
One of those, Charles Taylor, called to say that the articles had sparked his memory of what it had been like to witness the last execution conducted in South Carolina before death sentences were temporarily banned nationwide. That was the electrocution of a Black man named Ray Young in 1962, who had been sentenced to die for killing a liquor store owner with an ice pick in Greenville during an attempted robbery.
A cousin of Taylor’s had a friend who worked at the South Carolina Penitentiary, what the Central Correctional Institute was then named and where executions used to be conducted near the Congaree River before they were continued at the Broad River Correctional Institution. That friend had helped secure Taylor a pass to view the execution, he said.. About 25 to 30 members of the public were there, too, Taylor remembered. In recent executions, no such passes were made available to the public, though select members of the press have been admitted to watch.
“It seemed like a dream or nightmare,” Taylor recalled about seeing Young die. Slowly, a metal cap was placed on Young’s shaved head, while the state electrician who would soon flip the switch on the electric chair stood nearby. Taylor, now 85, caught Young’s eye before the thousands of electric volts jolted his body up and the smell of burning flesh filled the chamber.
“I prayed, ‘God have mercy on you,’” he said, reading aloud from a description of the incident he had written.
Dr. David Dangerfield, an assistant professor of history at University of South Carolina Salkehatchie, emailed to note his interest in the series and to comment on the “truly medieval form” in which some of South Carolina’s executions had been conducted.
“Public execution by burning was sometimes used in the colonial era through 1830,” he wrote. “When this method was used, it was more often, though not always, meted out to enslaved individuals and free people of color.”
Since 1718, 11 people in South Carolina were burned to death after being sentenced to an execution. Three were gibbeted, their corpses left to dangle and rot inside a metal encasement, The State’s reporting showed, and executions issued in South Carolina for sexual assault have indicated racist sentencing patterns.
A photo dated April 6, 1961, first published in The State Newspaper, shows Everett Small, the new switchman for the electric chair at the State Penitentiary.
Many readers expressed compassion for the execution workers interviewed in the articles and gratitude to the reporters for providing a “powerful” and “chilling” story about the toll the employees suffered.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you for this important and rarely considered perspective,” said Mandy Halloran, on Twitter.
Some indicated they believed the newspaper should continue reporting on trauma related to death row, but focus next on the suffering of the victims of the condemned men.
“Why don’t you do a follow up on all those families who had their loved ones snatched away from them like a thief in the night?” Mark Sharp asked on the platform. “Those families were destroyed as well.”
A few readers called to offer to do executions for the state of South Carolina.
“I would volunteer to kill these people,” a veteran who served in Vietnam told a reporter, though he said he sympathized with the workers who suffered trauma after performing executions. Some of the bravest people the Fort Jackson resident said he ever met experienced similar consequences when they had to kill in combat, he remembered, but that didn’t happen to him.
“They’re wired different, they’re not better or worse,” he said.
Of the execution workers who were interviewed in the story, a couple shared that the reporting had positively impacted them or their families. One said he was proud that two of their relatives had been moved to change their stance on the death penalty after reading the story. Another indicated reading about other workers’ experiences made him feel less alone.
Nieman Storyboard, an outlet of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, reached out to Chiara Eisner, who reported the series, and invited her to discuss her process of interviewing and writing about those men. In the article the outlet published, Nieman reporter Trevor Pyle pointed out that until The State’s article was published, “little has been known about the functionaries who carry out society’s final edict.”
Journalists from The New York Times, WIRED, ProPublica, The Economist, The Marshall Project, the Associated Press and The News and Observer recommended the story to their followers on Twitter. When Jamelle Bouie, an opinion columnist at The New York Times, shared the work, his tweet that called the article “a remarkable story” was liked over 800 times.
“This is a nightmare,” one reader wrote in response.
“Honestly, I’ve thought of this before, but like the article said, no one really talks about it,” wrote another. “The traumatic experience of those made to enforce [the death penalty] needs to be added to the conversation.”
Chiara Eisner
Sun, December 12, 2021
After The State Media Co. published a series of stories that revealed the hidden toll of execution work, unprecedented secrecy surrounding executions and firing squad preparations at the S.C. Department of Corrections and the state’s unique execution history over the past 300 years, government and readers reacted to the reporting immediately.
Two weeks after the Secrets of the Death Chamber series was published, Corrections provided the newspaper with execution records it had initially declined to share with the public. The new records show that since April, the agency has considered over 100 employees to be members of its execution team, though previous teams in South Carolina had consisted of fewer than 10 people, former execution workers said. The agency required each of those employees to sign restrictive confidentiality agreements that threatened law enforcement action for noncompliance, the documents show. Corrections shared additional records that revealed how it had spent over $23,000 on additional firing squad purchases, including orders for ballistic glass and armored plates.
The series also generated responses from lawmakers.
Sen. Dick Harpootlian, D-Richland, who proposed the state approve the firing squad as its newest execution method in May and prosecuted Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins, South Carolina’s infamous serial killer who was executed in 1991, said the newspaper had “probed it all” in the series.
“At the end of the day, the decision of whether or not we have a death penalty is obviously the primary question,” he said. “And then if you do have a death penalty, what is the most humane way to do that?”
Other state representatives and lawyers from Ohio to Kentucky mentioned the story about the hidden executioners’ toll had caused them to think about capital punishment in new ways, and that they would use the content to inform how they presented legislation or worked in the court room.
“Your article has the entire death penalty community thinking,” one said, after sharing that they had never before considered the toll taken on workers who have to do the job. “I believe this is evidence that a jury should have access to before they vote to take a life.”
And more than a hundred readers from Aiken to the United Kingdom reached out to express how the reporting on executioners had affected them.
One of those, Charles Taylor, called to say that the articles had sparked his memory of what it had been like to witness the last execution conducted in South Carolina before death sentences were temporarily banned nationwide. That was the electrocution of a Black man named Ray Young in 1962, who had been sentenced to die for killing a liquor store owner with an ice pick in Greenville during an attempted robbery.
A cousin of Taylor’s had a friend who worked at the South Carolina Penitentiary, what the Central Correctional Institute was then named and where executions used to be conducted near the Congaree River before they were continued at the Broad River Correctional Institution. That friend had helped secure Taylor a pass to view the execution, he said.. About 25 to 30 members of the public were there, too, Taylor remembered. In recent executions, no such passes were made available to the public, though select members of the press have been admitted to watch.
“It seemed like a dream or nightmare,” Taylor recalled about seeing Young die. Slowly, a metal cap was placed on Young’s shaved head, while the state electrician who would soon flip the switch on the electric chair stood nearby. Taylor, now 85, caught Young’s eye before the thousands of electric volts jolted his body up and the smell of burning flesh filled the chamber.
“I prayed, ‘God have mercy on you,’” he said, reading aloud from a description of the incident he had written.
Dr. David Dangerfield, an assistant professor of history at University of South Carolina Salkehatchie, emailed to note his interest in the series and to comment on the “truly medieval form” in which some of South Carolina’s executions had been conducted.
“Public execution by burning was sometimes used in the colonial era through 1830,” he wrote. “When this method was used, it was more often, though not always, meted out to enslaved individuals and free people of color.”
Since 1718, 11 people in South Carolina were burned to death after being sentenced to an execution. Three were gibbeted, their corpses left to dangle and rot inside a metal encasement, The State’s reporting showed, and executions issued in South Carolina for sexual assault have indicated racist sentencing patterns.
A photo dated April 6, 1961, first published in The State Newspaper, shows Everett Small, the new switchman for the electric chair at the State Penitentiary.
Many readers expressed compassion for the execution workers interviewed in the articles and gratitude to the reporters for providing a “powerful” and “chilling” story about the toll the employees suffered.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you for this important and rarely considered perspective,” said Mandy Halloran, on Twitter.
Some indicated they believed the newspaper should continue reporting on trauma related to death row, but focus next on the suffering of the victims of the condemned men.
“Why don’t you do a follow up on all those families who had their loved ones snatched away from them like a thief in the night?” Mark Sharp asked on the platform. “Those families were destroyed as well.”
A few readers called to offer to do executions for the state of South Carolina.
“I would volunteer to kill these people,” a veteran who served in Vietnam told a reporter, though he said he sympathized with the workers who suffered trauma after performing executions. Some of the bravest people the Fort Jackson resident said he ever met experienced similar consequences when they had to kill in combat, he remembered, but that didn’t happen to him.
“They’re wired different, they’re not better or worse,” he said.
Of the execution workers who were interviewed in the story, a couple shared that the reporting had positively impacted them or their families. One said he was proud that two of their relatives had been moved to change their stance on the death penalty after reading the story. Another indicated reading about other workers’ experiences made him feel less alone.
Nieman Storyboard, an outlet of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, reached out to Chiara Eisner, who reported the series, and invited her to discuss her process of interviewing and writing about those men. In the article the outlet published, Nieman reporter Trevor Pyle pointed out that until The State’s article was published, “little has been known about the functionaries who carry out society’s final edict.”
Journalists from The New York Times, WIRED, ProPublica, The Economist, The Marshall Project, the Associated Press and The News and Observer recommended the story to their followers on Twitter. When Jamelle Bouie, an opinion columnist at The New York Times, shared the work, his tweet that called the article “a remarkable story” was liked over 800 times.
“This is a nightmare,” one reader wrote in response.
“Honestly, I’ve thought of this before, but like the article said, no one really talks about it,” wrote another. “The traumatic experience of those made to enforce [the death penalty] needs to be added to the conversation.”
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