Last Words

Eric Dexheimer has posted, "Does who’s watching change a condemned man’s last words?" at the Austin American-Statesman Focal Point blog.  Here's an extended excerpt:

If you knew your victim’s friends and relatives were watching your execution, would it change what you said just before the lethal cocktail started flowing?

That’s the question behind this recent study of Texas’s death row inmates’ final words. The hypothesis: That the presence of relatives and friends of victims during the execution more often provokes the condemned to offer expressions of guilt, or words of contrition and remorse.

Why study this in Texas? Sheer numbers, for one. With more than a third of all of the nation’s executions occurring here, Texas is to executions what Nevada is to slots. To study the death penalty and not come to Texas would be malpractice.

Another reason is that Texas has been cataloging the final words of its ex-death-row residents for nearly three decades. Most condemned prisoners take advantage of the opportunity to make a last statement; of the 345 executions between December 1982 and June 2005 the study examined, 269, or 71 percent, did so. (Interestingly, every one of the 105 inmates executed since then has taken advantage of the opportunity to speak.) The result is a veritable Library of Congress of last words.

Finally, in 1996, the state started permitting family members of the convicted’s victims view the proceedings, so the content of final utterances could be compared before and after the change.

According to the study, “Of Guilt, Defiance, and Repentance: Evidence from the Texas Death Chamber,” by Stephen Rice and co-authored by University of Texas-Austin doctoral student Danielle Dirks, the final statements were analyzed by assigning “thematic codes” to various sentiments expressed in the moments before inmates were executed.

The findings? For one, inmates opted to utter a final statement more often if a victim’s representative was present than if not: 82 percent versus 68 percent.

Prisoners were also slightly more likely to admit guilt — and much more likely to express repentance...