Conor O’Clery: I forced myself to attend an execution in the US and came away sickened

The condemned man was truly evil but I found myself shaking after the experienceChrista Pike, now 50, and her boyfriend were convicted of the 1995 stabbing and beating of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville. Photograph: TDOC via AP Like half the population of Newry, Co Down, I saw the murderer, Robert McGladdery, as he walked freely around the Border town in February 1961 in the days after he stabbed and killed his girlfriend, Pearl Gamble. Everyone knew he had done it, and townspeople turned out to witness the spectacle of an RUC constable following a few paces behind McGladdery, as police searched for evidence to arrest him. He taunted his escort, once, according to legend, swimming across the Newry canal with the policeman a few breast-strokes behind. The evidence was eventually found – his bloodstained suit hidden in a septic tank – and McGladdery was tried and sentenced to death. He was hanged at Crumlin Road goal in Belfast five days before Christmas that year, by the English executioner Harry Allen, who wore his customary white bow tie. The Newry man was the last person to be executed in Northern Ireland. Capital punishment was abandoned in the Republic seven years earlier, after the hanging of Limerick man Michael Manning, for raping and killing 65-year-old nurse Catherine Cooper. Throughout Europe, state executions declined in the last half of the 20th century and were formally ended throughout the EU with the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009, on the grounds that they were an irreversible violation of human dignity and the right to life and ineffective as a deterrent. READ MOREI have always believed that capital punishment should be abolished because of the number of innocent people executed on the basis of ineffective defence, forced confessions and false testimonies, and most of all because it makes the state a killer. In 1993, when based in the United States, where cruel and inhuman punishment is prohibited by the US constitution, I forced myself to attend an execution so I could report precisely what this meant in practice. The condemned man was truly evil. His name was Michael Durocher, and he had gone on a killing spree in Florida, murdering his girlfriend, their infant son, her five-year-old daughter, a shopkeeper, and his flatmate. Before dawn on August 25th, 1993, at Florida State Prison near Jacksonville, I was relieved of belt and tape recorder, given a pencil and a sheet of paper, and escorted with a few other witnesses to a glass-fronted observation room. Durocher, who had consumed a breakfast of jumbo shrimp, chocolate ice cream and Coke, was strapped by his arms, chest and waist by two prison officers on to a three-legged electric chair, known to the guards there as “Old Sparkie”. They clamped a leather chin strap over his mouth and tied a black hood over his head. One rolled up Durocher’s right trouser leg and bound an electrode and sponge below the knee.At 7.06am a hidden executioner, who would receive a fee of $150, pulled a switch. A large puff of smoke rose from Durocher’s knee. At that moment his clenched right fist snapped inward, the thumb sticking out. Two doctors in white coats fussed around Durocher with stethoscopes. I learned afterwards that a person literally fries in the electric chair, and that in post-electrocution autopsies, the liver can be too hot to touch. It was six more minutes before they were able to pronounce him dead.[ ‘It’s very complicated’: The psychic impact of living in a town famous for executing prisonersOpens in new window ]Outside the prison I took a cigarette from one of the local reporters, though I didn’t then smoke. I found myself shaking. We talked about Durocher. “He’s a sweetheart,” spat out my colleague, who fully approved of what we had just seen. Another wisecracked that executions were “a way of life” in Florida. They still are. I came away from the experience sickened by what I had seen and convinced that capital punishment brutalises the state itself and everyone associated with it. The Irish Times Weekend Supplement, August 28th, 1993 This was never more evident than the botched attempt on September 30th in Tennessee to execute Christa Pike, who murdered her teenage friend Colleen Slemmer in 1995. Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has worked to preserve her daughter’s memory and described her, in an interview with the New York Times, as a vibrant, generous presence, who volunteered at the Special Olympics and loved bowling and computer games. What happened to Pike last month was a particular gruesome example of the many attempted executions by lethal injection in the US that were messed up because of the use of inferior killer drugs and fumbled attempts to find veins. May Martinez with a photograph of her daughter, Colleen Slemmer. Photograph: Zack Wittman for The New York Times In his famous nonfiction novel In Cold Blood, Truman Capote wrote about two home intruders, who killed a Kansas farmer and his wife and two children, and were hanged. He found the process of their execution morally troubling, drawing attention to the mental state of the two perpetrators, and questioning whether capital punishment offered justice or deterrence. As with the killers in Capote’s novel, Pike was a vulnerable person, just 18 at the time of the murder, who had a traumatic childhood and was dehumanised by her environment. We know little about the troubled lives of Durocher and McGladdery. In a supreme irony, state officials, having failed to kill Pike with two botched injections, rushed her to hospital and shackled her to a bed while she received life-saving care. On October 6th she regained consciousness and spoke to her lawyers. Now 50, she was on death row for 31 years and faces an uncertain future. The extraordinary long delay for prisoners on America’s death row is yet another form of cruel and unusual punishment, both for inmates and their relatives. The good news is that executions in the US have steadily declined this century. Of the 50 states, 23 have abolished the death penalty and five more have a moratorium on executions. The not-so-good news is that US president Donald Trump is urging more death sentences. Just this week he authorised the execution by firing squad of Nidal Malik Hassan, who killed 13 unarmed soldiers in Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009. In the past half-century, only six people have been executed by hanging in the US, three of them in South Carolina last year. [ Christa Pike is ‘angry and confused’ after failed execution, say lawyersOpens in new window ]Perhaps the publicity surrounding the attempt to kill Christa Pike, with its inherent cruelty, will fuel campaigns to end not just execution by lethal injection, firing squad, electric chair or hanging, but to the eventual abolition of capital punishment in all US states. At least for now, executions have been suspended in Tennessee. Conor O’Clery is a former Washington correspondent of The Irish TimesWhat will happen to Christa Pike, the Tennessee woman who survived the lethal injection?IN THIS SECTION