(October 25, 2016 at 10:39 pm)LadyForCamus Wrote: I have no qualms about the death penalty, personally.
If you were the one administering it, I think that you would feel differently. Lethal injection is a slow process, and it takes its toll even on those correctional employees who have to participate in it:
Quote:Corrections officers actually carry out the executions, and 31% of them suffer Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In comparison, 20% of Iraq veterans suffer PTSD. Lewis E. Lawes, who supervised 303 executions in New York, wrote, “I shall ask for the abolition of the Penalty of Death, until I have the infallibility of human judgment demonstrated to me.”[34] Donald Cabana, who served as a corrections officer in Missouir, Florida, and Mississippi, said you "do not have the right to ask me, or any prison official, to bloody my hands with an innocent person’s blood. Not in the name of justice, not in the name of fairness."[34] Ron McAndrews, a corrections officer from Florida and Texas, said: "[T]hose of us who have lived through an execution know just what the death penalty does to those who must perform it. In my tenure as warden, I helped perform three electrocutions in Florida and oversaw five lethal injections in Texas. In both places, I saw staff traumatized by the duties they were asked to perform. Officers who had never even met the condemned fought tears, cowering in corners so as not to be seen. Some of my colleagues turned to drugs and alcohol to numb the pain of knowing that a man had died by their hands. I myself was haunted by the men I was asked to execute in the name of the State of Florida. I would wake up in the middle of the night to find them lurking at the foot of my bed. One of them had been cooked to death in a botched electrocution. I stood just four feet away watching flames rise out of his head, hearing the electrician ask me, ‘Is that enough? Should I continue?’ It wasn’t until I left my post as warden that I finally sought counseling for the trauma I had been through."
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/get...th-penalty
