What role?

What role do journalists play in an execution? I finished Pickett's book. He struggled to find his place, his role. Shortly after he began he decided he was there as a comforter - regardless of his growing opposition to the death penalty. He focused on his work as a minister of God - tending to the spiritual needs of these men, comforting them in their last hours.

But what role do journalists play? I have been inside prisons as part of the "Scared Straight" program years ago. I've toured prisons. I even sat in a chair in the gas chamber in a prison in Colorado and looked out the thick glass windows and wondered what the people who had died in that very spot had seen and thought before they died. As the guards there told me, many would hold their breath as the gas seeped up - hoping to prolong life by another minute - only to find the sudden intake of breath after release sped up the process. I remember looking outside through the small, high window and seeing on the treetops of the pines and the walls of the prison.

I have done stories on prisons. I have heard the steel doors clank shut behind me as I followed an officer into the windowless hallways. I have heard the jangle of keys echo down empty hallways and seen the inside of cells, the cinder block walls, the toilets and sinks an arm's length from the bunks. I have eaten with inmates at long tables while guards stood by. I have walked through an exercise yard surrounded by security guards who briefed me about what to do if we were charged by an inmate. I have seen inmates hurl paper and feces through cell bars and whistle and jeer as escorted young juvenile offenders through the prison. I've seen the shanks, the guns carved from soap, the crude weapons prisoners make - all piled high on a table. I've seen photos of inmates killed by inmates.

It's not like this is all new to me. I've seen the bodies of women carved up by murderers. I've talked to women whose faces were so swollen by beatings that they could barely talk. There are nights I cannot get the screams of a woman being tortured and killed out of my head - courtesy of an FBI agent during a training class I took while in the police academy. He played a brief few seconds of the tape they'd taken from a killer. I've seen clips from "snuff films" and interviewed my share of officers who have worked murder scenes. There are many, many, many reasons why I should strongly support the death penalty.

There's also a woman in Tennessee named Teresa that I spent hours interviewing. She was convicted of murder when she was 16 and served 30 plus years in prison before being released on parole. Her crime? She had hitchhiked home from a party with her 14 year old cousin. The man who picked them up beat them both and raped her before she wrestled his gun away from him and shot and killed him. Both she and her sister ran from the scene. She was convicted. Her defense counsel spent less than two hours with her prior to trial and convinced her to plea bargain or face the death penalty. She listened to him and spent her entire life basically - behind bars. Should she have been executed for defending herself? There are reasons, stories like this, and like the more than 100 cases where DNA had freed innocent men from death row, that are equally strong reasons for opposing the death penalty.

But I'm not writing about Christopher Scott Emmett or John Langley because I feel one way or the other about them or whether the death penalty is right or wrong - or should I? It goes back to my role as a journalist. If, as I said at the beginning, I can look into the eyes of Christopher Scott Emmett - even metaphorically, and again, through accounts from friends and family of John Langley, and tell my reader what I saw, have I done what I need to do? If I can equally convey both sides of the issue, of the debate on the death penalty, have I done my job?

It is harder for journalists. We offer no condolences. We must remain impartial. We seem uncaring when we are truly neutral. We have no power to wring either comment or truth from anyone. We must trust what people tell us when there are no documents, no court records, no witnesses to corroborate what they are saying. We are hampered by our own naivete s, our lack of or abundance of experience. I have seen more than some, less than others. All that I am I bring to this story. Yet I was not there for the trial. I did not sit in the courtroom. I did not smell the fear, the anger, the remorse the hate of those involved. I am merely witness to the execution.

By agreeing to witness the state-sanctioned death of a murderer I am consciously and deliberating agreeing to alter who I am forever. Will it help? When a police officer puts on his/her uniform and goes out on the streets every day and sees all they see and experiences all they experience - it changes them forever. They must think, at times, like the criminals they seek. Is this sacrifice or just part of the job? Is it worth it? I don't know. I won't know until it is "too late."

I'm going a long way from simply looking into someone's eyes.