Dead End

Dramatic, instant. Excellent! (But bloody.)

Gas?

1924's brainchild! Used in 1960 for Caryl Chessman, best-selling prison author and worldwide sensation for death-penalty opponents! One could not help thinking about that pause between the gas pellets dropping and the first whiff of lethal fumes. And wondering about just how long human beings can hold their breath.

Lethal injection?

What could be better?

Oh. Wait.

* * *

Stanley "Tookie" Williams did not die well.

The "execution team" at San Quentin didn't set the intravenous line in his arm properly in 2005 when the Crips co-founder lay strapped to the gurney. This meant he may have been conscious to feel the deadly potassium chloride pour into his veins.

"It would be a cruel way to die: awake, paralyzed, unable to move, to breathe, while potassium burned through your veins," said the Lancet.

Nobody really knows if Williams died in pain, but the process didn't look good. When a federal judge questioned the executioners about the errors, one team member said the crew wasn't exactly broken up about it:

"[Expletive] does happen," the witness said.

It turned out the executioners had no training in mixing the lethal drugs. Also, one member had been disciplined for smuggling illegal drugs into prison. Also, the team leader had received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. Also, a bunch of sodium thiopental -- an addictive controlled substance -- was taken from the prison pharmacy by execution team members and, um, not used or returned. (At least somebody out at San Quentin was feeling no pain.)

Four hundred years of execution in this country (the first one was at Jamestown, 1607, firing squad), and this is where we are.

Then, in 2006, Angel Nieves Diaz in Florida took twice as long to die as the 15-minute procedure usually takes, because the technicians had put the needle all the way through his vein, delivering the mix into the tissue of his arm, not the bloodstream. He had chemical burns on his arm at autopsy. Some 24 minutes into the procedure, technicians reported he was blinking, licking his lips. It led to a halt of all executions in Florida.

This, coupled with the judge's hold on executions in California, became national headlines. Now all lethal injections across the country are pretty much on hold while the courts sort it all out.

Shocking! Lethal injection errors! People act like this is new.

Did everyone forget John Wayne Gacy?

Chicago's killer clown, strangler of 33 teenage boys and young men, was due for lethal injection in 1994. Gacy ate a last meal of fried chicken, said he was innocent, said, "Kiss my ass," and lay down on the table for his lethal injection.

The intravenous tubes clogged. The drugs wouldn't go through.

Prison officials had to close the blinds to the execution chamber, reset the IV, then open the blinds. Then they killed him.

Nobody really cried, because nobody really liked John Wayne Gacy, anyway, though he could paint a nice clown picture.

* * *

People forget, Gary, they do.

They forget what you knew, as soon as you shot those men out in Utah: Killing a man is easy.

The living with it after. That's what's hard.

That's what maybe this country has learned: We are a society that kills certain prisoners. We kill more in some years, less in others. It comes and goes. But there is no perfect, painless, fair way to do it. It turns out there is no absolution for the living. It turns out the dead haunt us. It is a thought as disturbing as the bodies of Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, the killers in Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood," dying the old-fashioned way, swinging at the end of a rope in the middle of the Kansas night.

The images do not lie easy on us, not in our sleep, not in yours, and it seems they never will.

Perhaps that is as it should be.