March 4-10, 2004

on media

Dead Man Watching

Let's get ready to lethally inject: Boxing promoter Damon Feldman knows there's money to be made in televising executions. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Could televised executions become a budgetary windfall?

by Daryl Gale

It’s family night in front of the boob tube and the pay-per-view special is about to begin. The popcorn is popped. The lights are dimmed. Everyone’s settled into the couch.

But what’s on the screen isn’t a movie, Wrestlemania or a championship fight. It’s the execution of a death-row inmate. Live. In color. Sounds like fiction, right? Well, maybe not.

In a poll of more than 1,000 American adults conducted in late January, 67 percent of the respondents favored televising the executions of inmates convicted of capital crimes. The poll, commissioned by Universal-owned pop culture channel Trio and conducted by Harris Interactive, also found that one in five people said they were willing to pay cold, hard cash for the privilege of watching the state exact the ultimate punishment.

With many states facing budget deficits, including Pennsylvania, which is more than a billion dollars in the hole, could pay-per-view executions turn out to be an unexpected cash cow?

Philadelphia boxing promoter Damon Feldman is no stranger to lucrative pay-per-view deals and the money to be made therein. Between phone calls promoting his latest venture, Feldman contemplates the idea of pay-per-view executions and how guys like him could profit from it.

"There’s definitely a market for it," Feldman says, "and although I’m not really in favor of the idea in general, it depends on the situation. Would I want to see open executions? Probably not. But if it was bin Laden or somebody like that, then yeah, definitely."

Feldman says he has acquaintances on Pennsylvania’s death row, including former local boxer Anthony "Two Guns" Fletcher, who is sentenced to die for a 1992 murder in Southwest Philly. While Feldman isn’t gung ho about watching a friend die, he says he understands the public demand could be high.

"If the opportunity came along to promote [an execution] as a pay-per-view event, I would take it, just like any other promoter would," he says. "Look, if this happens, somebody is going to make a lot of money -- maybe in the millions."

A way to make the idea more palatable to the general public, Feldman suggests, would be to use a portion of the proceeds for some sort of victim’s compensation fund, and a portion to offset the state’s expenses.

Pennsylvania last executed a prisoner in July 1999, when Philadelphia serial killer Gary Heidnik was put to death by lethal injection. According to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) in Washington, D.C., 232 Pennsylvania death row inmates currently await a similar fate, although Heidnik represents only the third execution here since the death penalty was reinstated in 1978. In that respect, Pennsylvania lags far behind other states in both volume and speed. According to the Texas Department of Justice, since 1982, the Lone Star state has executed 320 inmates, including 24 in 2003 alone.

Kate Philips, spokesperson for Gov. Ed Rendell, says she ran the idea by the big guy. His reaction was apparently less than enthusiastic.

"The governor says he’s not in favor of televised executions," Philips says. "He just doesn’t think it’s appropriate."

All this talk about capital punishment and revenue enhancement has the folks at the DPIC ready to pull their hair out. The DPIC is a nonprofit organization dedicated, according to its Web site, to "serving the media and public with analysis and information on issues concerning capital punishment." Lawyer Richard Dieter, who serves as DPIC’s executive director, is aghast at the notion of people gathered around their television sets to watch someone being put to death.

"To say the least, I don’t think it’s a good idea," Dieter says. "It’s a question of dignity. The condemned is not worthy of sympathy in the eyes of the public, but he’s still a human being. People may want to see it, but we don’t need to see it."

Dieter says the subject comes up every few years, but thus far the courts have shot it down. While he admits that the cost to the state of trying capital cases is excessive, he says the latest angle of states turning a tidy profit on the pay-per-view telecasts gives him chills.

"Each capital case costs the state some $2 million from trial to execution," says Dieter, "but some of that could be recovered by commuting the inmate’s sentence to life and have him work to pay the money back. Even at 40 cents an hour or whatever it is for prison work, it still helps more than returning capital punishment to public spectacle. The idea of making money off the [pay-per-view] deal is a new low."

Besides, Dieter argues, the public would quickly get bored with lethal injections, and demand a more telegenic form of execution. Thirty-seven states including Pennsylvania use lethal injection as the sole method of execution. Others still rely on the electric chair, gas chamber and even the gallows, but those states use lethal injection as an alternative choice.

"Lethal injection would just be bad TV," he says. "Five minutes of watching a prisoner strapped to a gurney and quietly put to sleep would make money the first couple of times, sure, but then one of two things would happen: Either the public gets bored and stops tuning in or demands more exciting methods of putting them to death."

There is precedent, however.

Until the last public execution -- some 20,000 spectators watched the hanging of Rainey Bethea in Owensboro, Ky., in August 1936 -- the general public could attend the proceedings without restraint. After that, states mandated that executions be carried out to exclude public view.

Generally, it’s done with a few witnesses representing the prosecutor, the victim’s family and media. One notable exception was the June 2001 execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, whose final moments were witnessed by more than 300 people, some by closed-circuit television. (There had actually been some talk of broadcasting McVeigh’s execution, but it never happened.) And, in June 2000, television viewers in Guatemala watched the live broadcast of the lethal-injection executions of convicted kidnappers Amilcar Cetino Perez and Tomas Cerrate Hernandez.

Despite that history, Dieter says he hopes the idea never sees a substantial groundswell of public support.

"As a society, we’re always complaining about the lack of respect for the sanctity of life," Dieter grouses. "But this makes the taking of a life even more banal and cheap, which serves no one."