Brandon Bernard’s execution marked the first of five planned for the last days of Trump’s presidency. If the other executions go forward as scheduled, Trump will have overseen more executions in 2020 than any US president in more than a century.
What follows is a compilation of quotations taken from the accounts of witnesses of different executions that capture a range of experiences. They are from family members, relatives of victims, lawyers, and members of the press.
I put on my black suit and made my way to the prison.
I wanted to be sure it was finished, and that’s why I went.
I think it is important that we have some written record.
•••
I was there to bear witness.
I was really scared.
Time stands still in a prison.
•••
Our guide reviews the ground rules and leads us out.
We had to go through a steel door that sounded heavy when it closed behind us.
We were in a room without a clock.
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A small, unadorned room facing a curtained picture window.
A large roll-down blackout curtain was stretched over the entire window from the inside.
There were plastic chairs.
•••
Bright fluorescent light leaks through the cracks in the vertical shades.
We waited in the room for so long I started counting the concrete blocks in the wall.
I hear a ratcheting sound of what I presume was handcuffs either going on or coming off.
The turquoise curtains opened, as in a theatre production.
•••
The room was brightly lit.
You’re watching through glass, and then the process starts.
The gurney – I mean it takes up almost the entire room.
You can hear every breath everyone takes around you.
It’s not like watching a gory murder in a movie.
•••
As the chaplain moved away and the execution began about a minute later.
A large black microphone was suspended in the air.
He looked through the window towards us in the witness room, wearing a yellow shirt and white cotton trousers with a dark stripe down the side.
All the hair from his head and face was freshly shaven clean.
We just sat there for a long time while they started with his hands and worked their way around the body, trying to get a vein.
With huge silver buckles.
He kind of raised up and gave us a what-for look.
I was hoping he’d say, ‘I’m sorry,’ but he wouldn’t even look at us.
We could hear everything.
•••
It hits.
The third chemical actually stops the heart.
After the last time I saw his chest rise, he laid still for several minutes.
I think he breathed like five times.
The window into the death chamber is like a frozen TV picture.
It’s hard for me to tell if he has stopped breathing.
I felt numb.
Then the blinds closed.
The warden repeats the time and we file out.
•••
No matter what anyone says, there’s really nothing to prepare you.
My thoughts even have trouble distinguishing whether tonight was another Bronson movie or reality.
I was sitting in my car at a red light and I looked in the rear view window, and I swear I saw the man I just saw die.
There was no cathartic release at the end of it. And that struck me as wrong.
In the van, I suddenly realize that I had not gotten sick, as expected.
It was too easy, for all of the pain he caused my family all of these years.
It was done. It should have been done.
•••
My legs feeling like rubber.
It wouldn’t sink in until later.
People don’t realize that you never get over it.
I’m often asked if I have nightmares.
I wish I could say anything I saw Thursday night will change that.
Death, I had thought, would freeze time. But it would not.
Not a day goes by. Not a day goes by.
As compiled by Claire Cameron, author of The Bear and The Last Neanderthal
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