INVITATION TO A BEHEADING

Americans are keen on the death penalty but incompetent at carrying it out, argues

William Cash, who's seen two botched jobs Los Angeles IT IS SAFE to say that Mitchell Rupe, convicted in 1981 of murdering two bank clerks, will not be walking briskly to the gallows for his impending hanging in Washington State. Weighing over 28 stone, he will either waddle from his death- watch cell or be removed by a pulley-style crane.

His execution does not promise to be a pretty sight. He is so fat that as the noose tightens his neck will probably stretch like a human bungee cord until his head pops off — decapitating him and making a mess of the walls and floor of the death cham- ber. Thankfully he has not requested that it be televised, unlike his fellow murderer David Lawson, who is trying to get his 15 June execution broadcast on the television talk-show Donahoe.

`Beheading was a punishment used in barbaric times,' Rupe's lawyer said last week. The appeal on the grounds of 'cruel and unusual' punishment was turned down by the state on the grounds that even if decapitation does- occur, it 'won't neces- sarily inflict undue pain'.

Unfortunately for the 2,800 people awaiting execution in the United States, these are barbaric times. America's execu- tioners are staggeringly incompetent. Since 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated, of the 237 executions carried out at least 19 have been botched — such as the one in Texas in 1988, when the intravenous line carrying the lethal 'juice' into the veins of Raymond Landry explod- ed, spraying the execution team with dead- ly poison. A new needle and line had to be inserted; it took nearly half an hour for him to die.

It is a bit rich of President Clinton (who as Governor of Arkansas approved the execution of a severely brain-damaged murderer) to lecture the world on human rights, most recently kicking up an ugly fuss over the US teenager sentenced to six of the best for vandalism in Singapore, as well as hectoring China, when his own country's execution methods often seem reminiscent of mediaeval torture chambers. The United States remains the only indus- trialised western nation to continue with capital punishment. I have been to two executions here. Both were serious cock-ups.

First, earlier this month, the 33-time seri- al killer, John Wayne Gacy, was to be exe- cuted by lethal injection at Stateville Correction Centre at 12.01 a.m. He was wheeled on a trolley into the death-cham- ber, lit up by stage spotlights and separated from the witnesses by a sliding glass win- dow. Five minutes after the order was given to press the two buttons releasing the fatal cocktail — sodium pentathol, pan- curonium bromide and potassium chloride — an anxious-looking official stood up and, as if it were a macabre Punch and Judy pantomime, closed the curtains.

The Illinois death-machine had — again — broken down. A technician was sent backstage to replace some tubing, whose poison had clogged it up. Gacy was finally declared dead at 12.58 a.m., nearly an hour after the operation began. A similar mal- function reportedly occurred in 1990 at the prison's last execution.

A year before, the teenage-killer, Robert Alton Harris in California, was buckled into the San Quentin gas chamber, only to be unbuckled after the phone rang with an execution stay just seconds before the cyanide pellets were due to be dropped. He was executed a few hours later with the same gas — Zyklon B — that was used by the Nazis to exterminate inmates at Auschwitz.

A video of Harris's execution was ordered to determine whether death by gas constituted 'cruel and unusual' punishment — in violation of the Eighth and Four- teenth amendments to the US Constitu- tion. In 1983, witnesses to the gassing of rapist-killer Jimmy Lee Gray in Parchman, Mississippi, fled the viewing area after being nauseated by the sight of Gray eight minutes into the execution — smash- ing his head against a steel pole as he slow- ly suffocated to death.

Thirty-six US states still have the death penalty. The problem is not so much the differing methods of execution — gas, fir- ing squad (it took over two minutes for Gary Gilmore to die in 1977 after a squad supposedly shot him in the heart), hang- ing, electric chair, lethal injection — but the equipment, which remains, so often, crudely antiquated or hopelessly unreli- able; many prisons have leaking or rusted- up death- chambers that haven't been used for years, combined with a new generation of brazenly underqualified prison staff with little or no technical or medical expe- rience.

A revolting example was the electrocu- tion — or rather roasting — of police- killer Jessie Tafero at Florida State Prison in 1990. A weak current caused smoke and blue-orange flames to pour from his head as voltage was applied; it took three jolts to kill him — his barbecued flesh was left hanging off the bone. The fault was due to a prison official buying a synthetic shower sponge down at the local supermarket to act as a headpiece conductor (electric chair headpieces are often made from old football helmets).

Most prisons refuse to spend any money updating their death-machines. When Fred Leuchter, an execution equipment specialist, was approached to replace the old leg electrode on the Florida chair, his estimate of $2,200 was rejected as too expensive. He was ordered, instead, to make a home-made electrode from an old army boot, some roofing materials, and a stainless steel bolt obtained from the local DIY store. Such a device was accordingly used on Tafero.

Just as the electric chair was supposed to be a painless alternative to hanging — the first electrocution in 1889 was bungled — so 'lethal injection' is supposed to be the 'humane' method of the 20th century. It has often turned out, however, to be the very opposite. In 1953, after four years careful deliberation, the British Royal Commission Inquiry on Capital Punish- ment concluded that hanging was prefer- able to lethal injection.

One problem with lethal injection is that so many inmates have been drug addicts. On 24 January, 1992, witnesses to the exe- cution of police-killer Rickey Ray Rector heard loud wails coming from the Arkansas death-chamber as technicians were about to slice open his arm — a 'cut- down' — in order to insert an intravenous line; just before they applied the scalpel, an hour after the execution began, they locat- ed a vein in his right hand.

A few months later, in Texas, it took staff 47 minutes to find a 'good' vein in Billy Wayne White — despite his helping to locate one. Of nearly 50 inmates to be executed by lethal injection since 1976 in Texas — the state leading the death count — an estimated 80 per cent had difficulties. The execution is done manually, with six syringes. At the first, Warden Jack Pursley was so clueless that he mixed up the chemi- cals into a thick white gunge, blocking the syringes up. The poisons are not meant to be blended.

Part of the reason for the rising number of blundering executions is that there is no such thing as formal execution training in America — in 18th-century England a hangman was a trade much like any other. Also, disturbingly, doctors are now not allowed to be involved with the life elimi- nation business. In March, the American Medical Association ruled that 'participa- tion in executions contradicts the funda- mental role of the health-care professional'.

This opens up the serious possibility that a prisoner might incorrectly be pronounced dead (especially a problem with lethal injection, which uses a tranquilliser). Whilst AMA guidelines state it is accept- able for a doctor to 'certify' death, some- body else must first declare the person dead. The unfortunate snag is that only a doctor can do so.

In the last century, when hanging was the standard mode of execution in the United States, there were cases of prisoners surviv- ing the process. It might yet happen again, but not, I suspect, to Mitchell Rupe.

William Cash's Educating William: Mem- oirs of a Hollywood Correspondent (Simon & Schuster: Touchstone), is published in paperback on 6 June.

`I always said Capriati played better on grass.'