The Death Chamber

 My home state of Florida executed two people yesterday—reportedly the first time that has happened in the state since 1964. 

The first of these two state-sponsored killings made it easy to see the futility and inhumanity of the death penalty in all its barbarism. 

The executed man, Dominick Occhicone, was 83 years old. He was killed for a crime that occurred forty years ago. And in his last hours, he was still trying to make amends. "Sorry for all the hurt I caused," he told the family of the victims; "I know it don’t mean much, but I’m sorry."

As Albert Camus writes in his Reflections on the Guillotine: "a right to live, which allows a chance to make amends, is the natural right of every man, even the worst man." 

The state had no right to take Mr. Occhicone's life from him. But it did anyway. 

That much is clear. 

But then one reads on in the article and gets to the second execution. In this case, the man who was killed had been convicted of raping and murdering a child. 

This is the point at which many people swing around again, and start thinking well, maybe for a crime like that, the death penalty makes a bit more sense. 

No one can make amends for a crime of that scale and brutality, right? (Let us leave aside the fatal uncertainty over guilt and innocence that hangs over any irreversible sentence.) Maybe there are a truly "dangerous few" for which it is the only answer? 

I know, I know / You have no choice [...] What can you do? [...] A man like that as Ralph Hodgson wrings his hands in his poem "To Hang a Man." But then he adds: But still it seems— / I don't know what / To hang a man!

And that is really the crux of it. The question of capital punishment is really not what we make of the original crime—but of what we think of the state claiming for itself the right to kill someone for it.

Camus opens his essay with an anecdote from his childhood in French Algiers. "[A]n assassin whose crime was particularly repulsive (he had slaughtered a family of farmers, including the children) was condemned to death." (O'Brien trans. throughout). 

Camus's father had been outraged by the reports, "especially [...] by the murder of the children," as anyone would be. And so he went to go witness the execution, and would have gladly dispatched the villain himself. 

But after he watched the guillotine blade fall, he rushed home "refused to talk, lay down for a moment on the bed, and suddenly began to vomit. He had just discovered the reality hidden under the noble phrases with which it was masked," Camus writes. 

Camus observes that one of the principal justifications often put forward for capital punishment is its "deterrent" effect. But if we really believed that, he notes, we would advertise spectacular killings to the public. 

If the goal were really to make an "example" of the prisoner as a warning to other would-be murderers, we would ensure every execution was televised and broadcast through every medium of mass communication, in its most gruesome details. 

But we don't do that. Instead, we hide our state-sponsored killings under a cloak of decorous euphemism and discreet privacy—making the viewing area available only to a few licensed reporters and family members of the victims. 

Is this perhaps because we know that, if the public saw the reality of killing a person, they would stop thinking about the decades-old crimes for which they were charged, and all they would be able to see was the human being in agony before them? 

Is it because—if the public actually watched what our government is doing to people behind closed doors—they would see that this execution "is obviously no less repulsive than the crime," Camus writes, and that "this new murder, far from making amends [...] adds a new blot to the first one"?

This is why, when it comes to capital punishment, it is necessary above all "to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak." 

Few have shown that obscenity as well as Christopher Logue, in his poem "Lullaby": Here is the trapdoor / here is the rope, here is the convict [...] And be it a man / or a woman they shit / and they come / as they swing / and the soul goes adrift.

Many will indeed protest that dwelling on such details is obscene. They may even denounce it as a dishonor to the dead. 

But if we turn up our noses in disgust at a poet for pointing out that people in the throes of execution in the death chamber void their bowels—what are we to say of a state that inflicts this on them? Where is the obscenity: in the poet who describes an execution, or a government that imposes it? 

"Those who say nothing but leave a little pool on the spot from which they are taken—who would dare say they died as cowards?" asks Camus. "And how can we describe the men who reduced them to such cowardice? After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except advancement." 

That is certainly all that Governor Ron DeSantis risked in making his state's death chamber the most active in the nation—personally signing the death warrants for 19 people in 2025 alone (an estimated 40% of executions in the whole country). 

The Trump administration had made clear that this is a fast track to put a state in the president's good graces. 

One of the new administration's first acts upon taking office was to encourage states to seek the death penalty more frequently—including by bringing new capital cases against federal death row inmates whose sentences the outgoing Biden administration had commuted. 

"Advancement" does indeed seem to be in the offing, then, for governors willing to dip their pens in blood. 

But they will have their reward. 

For worse than the anger of the wronged,

The curses of the poor,

Was to lie speechless, yet with vision clear,

Seeing that even Hod Putt, the murderer,

Hanged by my sentence,

Was innocent in soul compared with me. (Edgar Lee Masters, "The Circuit Judge")