by Mark McClain Taylor
Princeton Theological Seminary
8/13/96
Stephen Trombley, in his book, The Execution Protocol: Inside America'S Capital Punishment Industry (New York: Crown Pub., 1992), provides illuminating details into the way many sectors of our society have to organize around death-making, in order to carry out executions.
Fred Leuchter is a man who invented, "refined" and has built electric chairs and also the currently used lethal injection machine. He heads Fred A. Leuchter, Associates, Inc. in Boston Massachusetts, servicing the execution needs of many states. A "typical sales letter" to the Department of Corrections in Virginia included a reference to New Jersey:
"Specifically, we can supply any hardware, design, modification, or complete systems needed, and further, back-up said system and equipment prior to its use and be present during its use to ensure proper function.
We have a successful track record in the field and a complete, computerized lethal injection system in place in the New Jersey state prison in Trenton." (p. 26).
Although New Jersey's "state of the art" lethal injection system has yet to be used, apparently our state officials, with NJ tax dollars at work, provide counseling to other states about how to kill more efficiently.
Texas, for example, was having trouble administering the correct dosages to men being executed. The result was a lot of coughing, spasms, and writhing in pain. So, Fred Leuchter, always in search of a more efficient execution, had a test of lethal dosages done on a pig (the animal, that is), who died in experiment at an undisclosed location. He then forwarded the results of his test to officials in New Jersey. New Jersey doctors then duplicated the tests to confirm Leuchter's numbers on what constituted a lethal dosage.
"The dosage amounts were passed to Texas, and it eliminated eighty percent of their problems. Before, they [Texas executioners] were just pumping as much as they could get into the syringe. And the executees were coughing and spasming. When New Jersey communicated the proper dosages, Texas tried them. They worked better. They still had coughing and choking and spasming, but not as much." (p. 77)
The author of the book couldn't help noting, as he listened to Leuchter, that "We're talking about killing human beings, but being secretive about 'executing' a pig. Fred admitted that he was worried about an adverse reaction from the NSPCA if word got out." (p. 78)
So, citizens of the State, it would seem that while NJ has yet to start up the executions, our officials may already be playing roles in the death machine at work throughout the nation.
By the way, Leuchter got the job of building the lethal injection machine for New Jersey, when he impressed an unnamed NJ "deputy commissioner" during the course of a sales meeting where doctors and state officials were gathered. The deputy commissioner was very bored with the whole meeting, says Leuchter, until one of the doctors (?!) piped up.
"Commissioner," the doctor noted approvingly, "Fred was the one that made the [electric chair] helmet for South Carolina."
"You made the helmet?" awoke the commissioner. "The one that they just used?"
"Yes," said Fred.
"Okay." The commissioner concluded, turning to the doctor and saying, "I don't care what it costs, give Fred the contract. He builds the equipment." (as reported by Fred Leuchter himself, in Trombley, pp. 76-77)
Anybody out there got more details on this? Who would this deputy commisioner be? In our "Corrections" department? Remember, we are all public witnesses to execution in today's United States. Activist, Jackie Austin in Indiana was able to "witness" only a comatose "executee," Ziyon Yisrayah. The State powers want us to think that execution is a neat, contained, sanitized affair. It is not. It is a grisly web of decisions, discussions, business-deals, tests on animals, and an enlistment of doctors who have to think about how to help life go "backwards" (not toward healing, but toward destruction). Of all this we are witnesses, whether we get into the execution visitor/witness rooms or not.
There is a whole grisly protocol that constitutes any given execution. The Indiana 10 (Shaka Shakur, et al), at the great cost to themselves of solitary confinement and additional sentence time, interrupted (through peaceful fasting and self-imposed silence) that protocol by not being docile and compliant "good inmates" when the system was ending Ziyon Yisrayah's life on July 18, 1996. We ALL have to be about the business of "breaking protocol!"
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