Real Crime Stories/Paranormal Hauntings

Public Executions & the Psychology of Watching Pain

What happens when you watch public executions?

Pamela Colloff in The Texas Monthly's story "The Witness" the writer talks of a powerful portrait of Michelle Lyons, who watched nearly 278 executions by lethal injections over 10 years. At first it part of her job as reporter on the prison, and then it escalated to spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Lyons recalls to Colloff, "that it did not come without a cost".

According to Lyons report on execution, the Huntsville Item, Texas put nearly 40 inmates to death. Lyons tells Colloff that she "always felt a duty to be dispassionate and objective," and in the beginning, it wasn't hard. But it did begin to take its toll on her as each year passed.

Lyons watched the executions from a room with either the inmates' family, or with family members of the inmates' victims. Feeling empathy for both sides – their grief as well as their disappointment when closure didn't come as they hoped. It was even harder to watch the executions if she allowed herself to befriend the inmates on death row.

Lyons, a supporter of capital punishment, found it conflicting when she began seeing the inmates' sides. Lyons states, "There is a difference between supporting the death penalty as a concept and being the person who actually watches its application." Lyons' boss in the communications department also shares his story watching public executions, "he has nightmares, and is haunted by the memories of the people he watched die on the gurney, and by those whose names he can no longer recall."

New York Times Houston-based reporter, Michael Graczyk, who witnessed over 300 executions while reporting for The Associated Press in Texas, says he has "a low-key, matter-of-fact lack of sentiment. He prefers to watch executions from the viewing room with the victim's family members in it, simply because he 'can get out faster and file the story faster.'"

Cynthia Bartlett, for the American Journalism Review, recounts: "The challenge for journalists covering executions as new events is to put personal feelings aside. Their job is to report what they see and hear – usually to turn it around quickly – and not focus on their own emotional reactions to the experience. But that very detachment from their feelings may exact a psychological price."

A clinical research study in the American Journal of Psychiatry (1994): "witnessing executions could cause symptoms of dissociative disorder in journalists in the weeks following. Many people answering a survey about their experience in the San Quentin Prison said they felt anxiety and 'felt estranged or detached from other people.' The researchers found that the journalists displayed short-term psychological trauma on levels equal to people who had experience another traumatic event a few years prior, the massive and fatal 'firestorm in Oakland and Berkeley' in 1991."

While reporters on the prison beat have a duty to report what they see, family members of the inmates' victims obviously have a different reason to be present at the execution, as well as a different experience—hoping that they will gain closure from the experience.

Annulla Linders, sociologist at the University of Cincinnati, in a paper for the American Sociologist Association's annual meeting, "victims' relatives expressed disappointment about the sterile and efficient process, or a sense of frustration over the anti-climax. 'It was so quick, or [he] should have gone through a little bit more pain.'"

Linders also explains: "...an inmate execution doesn't change those who witness it. The fat that it is being witnessed changes the execution process too. There is a disconnect at play here—the policy of capital punishment is presented and carried out rationally, but society also demands an emotional release for those who have been hurt and who will watch the punishment being carried out. Over our nation's history of executions, family members of victims became more a part of the process, conversations in the public debate about capital punishment shifted away from 'deterrence' and more toward 'retribution.'"

Linder goes on to explain the logistics of the execution process and how it has shifted to two separate viewing areas and entrances for family members of the inmate and of the victim as well as the execution narrative as well: "no longer is it enough that the death is swift and the arrangements are efficient, the execution must now also satisfy the psychological demands of long-suffering relatives and other inmates of murder victims."

The reporter on the prison beat must satisfy the demands of a disinterested pubic and get a quote from the family about 'closure' or describe the faces of the family watching.

What happens when the public can watch the execution? According to the journal, Criminal Justice and Behavior article in 1995, had an impact on how people thought about capital punishment. Psychologists from the University of Pacific explored the personal and political impact of televising prisoner executions, also debated for decades and fought in court: "They gauged people's views on capital punishment, and showed half of the group a videotape of two actual executions (the other half watched an unrelated nature video), surveying their attitudes toward capital punishment found that 'people who watched the executions were more likely to change their views of capital punishment, and were more likely to become less supportive of it; 57 percent of the people who watched the executions were less in favor of capital punishment than they had been before they saw them.'"

The study also concludes that "televising executions could indeed have an impact on death penalty policy—a large majority of voters who support the death penalty might question their support for capital punishment if they directly witnessed an execution, perhaps voting for a change."

What remains unknown is if the initial impact wears off the more viewers watch public executions, desensitizing them as having happened to Michelle Lyons and others, the impact of bearing witness gradually growing over time????