When the State Is a Serial Killer
DEATH ROW WELCOMES YOU: Visiting Hours in the Shadow of the Execution Chamber, by Steven Hale
In 2018, Steven Hale, a writer for The Nashville Scene, was selected by lottery to be among the handful of witnesses to a Tennessee man’s death by lethal injection. Hale knew about the condemned man, Billy Ray Irick, only from court records that detailed the abuse he’d suffered as a child and the horrible suffering he’d gone on to cause. In 1985, Irick raped and murdered a girl he was babysitting.
After more than three decades on death row, Irick, 59, was bound to a gurney by thick straps. As a strong sedative entered his veins, his eyes shut and he started to snore. Then his body responded to another drug, maybe the one meant to stop his heart.
“He jolted,” Hale writes in “Death Row Welcomes You,” an up-close exploration of the recent revival of capital punishment in Tennessee. “His face turned almost purple.” Eventually, he stopped breathing. “That concludes the execution of Billy Ray Irick,” a voice announced over a loudspeaker. “Please exit now.”
The last public hanging in the United States was carried out in 1936, in front of 20,000 people, like a medieval revenge ritual. Today, even the most extreme punishments are administered privately, behind prison walls, with efforts to inflict as little pain as possible. “Barbarism dressed as bureaucracy,” Hale writes of a century’s progress.
