Eliza Steelwater Transcript (1)

January 12, 2008

Narrator: You’ve been listening to Sound Authors where authors sound off. If you’d like more information about Sound Authors and Dr. Kent’s guests visit soundauthors.com. Now back to Dr. Kent and friends.

Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. Today is the five-year anniversary of Governor Ryan of Illinois commutation of 167 sentences to death. Tell me a little bit about–my guest joining me is Eliza Stillwater, author of The Hangman’s Knot and the upcoming book The Murder Industry. Tell me a little bit about what the candidates might think about the death penalty. I’m putting you on the spot here.

Eliza: As far as I know–I just saw something on the Internet–every single one of them claims to support it except maybe Dennis Kuchenich(?).

Kent: Except Kuchenich. Isn’t that interesting?

Eliza: Kuchenich. Thank you. Of course he’s pretty unelectable it would seem because he’s quite far to the left. But both Obama and Clinton are apparently on the record as supporting the death penalty. It would not be a good idea if they were elected to a post. I think they just don’t want to make it an issue.

Kent: They don’t want to bring it out.

Eliza: Right. The whole campaign could start getting twisted around that and we have other important issues like health care and Iraq that have to be dealt with.

Kent: Do you think the American people are coming around with this New Jersey declaration and with Illinois? Do you think the American people are changing their minds about the death penalty?

Eliza: Well maybe very slowly but as a matter of fact New Jersey citizens were polled and were solidly in favor of the death penalty when it was abolished. And as far as I know, every single state that has abolished the death penalty has done so while there was a majority of support. But what’s happened is just that legislatures are–they’re concerned about what kind of political trouble they can get into if they execute an innocent person now that we have good ways of finding out such as DNA. They don’t really want to have to tweak their budgets around so we spend all our money on capital trials. And I think it’s what it’s always been. There’s going to be a gap between public support and what legislators and governors do and in my mind, that’s appropriate because they’re the people that think about it harder. Most people you know if someone calls them on the phone ‘are you in favor of the death penalty?’ ‘Oh, yeah.’ It was–I think it was in New Jersey it was 62 percent for but when they were asked about if life without parole were available, support for the death penalty dropped to only 52 percent.

Kent: And speaking about the death penalty I can understand that people favor it in some ways but I do know that a lot of these methods are not humane and I know you think about that as well. Can you tell me a little about the humanity of some of these punishments?

Eliza: Well I don’t think execution and humane belong in the same sentence but we’ve been looking for an acceptable method of execution since at least the 1890s and in my view it’s actually an attempt to keep the death penalty going. We have to satisfy supporters of the death penalty with an execution but we can’t make them feel like they’re blood thirsty barbarians. Actually the most humane method of execution is probably a gunshot to the back of the head at point blank range as the Chinese do but as you can imagine that’s pretty messy. As far as the lethal cocktail, so called, we can’t know if it’s humane because the person is paralyzed before death. In fact that chemical is forbidden for animal execution who are killed with a simple overdose of a barbiturate. But it’s all about not feeling bad about ourselves and not having something messy happen. Sometimes in legal hangings the drop was miscalculated and the person was decapitated and blood got all over the witnesses. Well you know that didn’t go down well.

Kent: Isn’t that similar to what happened to Saddam Hussein?

Eliza: Is that right? Was he decapitated?

Kent: I’m not sure but I know that it was a very inhumane and poorly done execution and there was footage on uTube or whatever and I found it appalling that that kind of thing could end up on uTube.

Eliza: Well you know there are those among death penalty proponents that say we should televise all executions.

Kent: Ugh.

Eliza: I have mixed feelings about that. I mean would everyone go ‘yeah, way to go!’ or would be people be horrified? I’m not sure.

Kent: Yeah, that’s true. If we televised what we’re actually doing wouldn’t that put it right into the public eye? Well let’s talk a little bit about your book and where we can find it and all of that. The Hangman’s Knot has been available for a little while.

Eliza: Yes, It’s on amazon.com and other online booksellers. You can also get it from the publisher. It’s now under the aegis of Perseus Books. P-E-R-S-E-U-S. I suspect it’s cheaper from amazon.com. I did want to say one more thing about my upcoming book The Murder Industry if that fits with you. . . .

Kent: Wonderful.

Eliza: I’m afraid my summary wasn’t too succinct. What I’ve been investigating and what I’ll talk about in the book is the ways that the media and the justice system exploit victims and also paint a false picture of crime in the United States. The families that I’m working with mainly as informants who lost their parents to murder. Their case has to compete for public attention with about half a million televised instances of murder that an average 16-year-old has seen in his lifetime. TV simulates reality. They use techniques like crime scene details and documentary style camera work to convince watchers they’re receiving real information. But in fact studies have shown that media crime depiction included-let’s see I have the figures here–47.9 percent murders whereas the real rate of murder among all crimes is one percent. Also the media show crimes that are solved. 61.5 percent of the crimes that are discussed on the media were solved. In real life it’s 18 percent that even get arrested.

Kent: My goodness.

Eliza: So you know–violent crime is big business for both media and politicians and that’s why the book is called The Murder Industry.

Kent: And what are your hopes for the future? Do you see a change?

Eliza: Yes, I do see a gradual change. There’s sort of two scenarios that seem possible to me. One is that we do in fact drop the death penalty nationwide and work out some sort of way of keeping people incarcerated for life or long enough to satisfy public expectations. Another scenario which I hope will not happen is that certain–because the states have quite a lot of autonomy on this question, another possibility is that certain states, notably Texas, will go on indefinitely holding executions while the whole rest of the country is moving on.

Kent: Right. Well thank you so much for being on the show. It’s been a pleasure speaking about this very serious subject. Eliza Stillwater is the author of The Hangman’s Knot and we’ll look for that next book, The Murder Industry, soon. Thanks for being on the show.