BROOKE GLADSTONE:
This week New Jersey became the first state in more than four decades to abolish the death penalty.
JON CORZINE:
Today New Jersey is truly evolving. We evolve, if you believe as I do, that government cannot provide a foolproof death penalty that precludes the possibility of executing the innocent.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
That was New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine. His state, however, is not exactly alone. In January of 2000, in the wake of high-profile DNA exonerations of convicted felons, Illinois declared a moratorium on executions. Other states followed, and a study out this week by the Death Penalty Information Center, an organization critical of capital punishment, showed that nationally executions are at a 13-year low.

Fear of executing a wrongly-convicted person is one reason, but not the only one. States are waiting for the Supreme Court to hear oral arguments next month about whether the drug cocktail commonly used in lethal injections constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. This case could lead to serious changes in how, and if, the death penalty may be applied.

The ultimate ruling stands to affect most the state of Texas, where the relentless machinery of justice has resulted in 405 lethal injections since the resumption of executions in 1982.

As Bob reports, for the state of Texas, for its people and especially for its press, punishment by death has become grim routine.
BOB GARFIELD:
In September of 1986, a drugged-up employee of the Central Texas Crime Prevention Association broke into a house on Sunshine Drive in Austin. There he stabbed two young women to death and disfigured a 30-year-old man. Apart from the victims, there were no eyewitnesses.

Twelve years later, in Huntsville, Texas, when Jonathan Wayne Nobles was executed for the murders of Kelly Farquhar and Mitzi Johnson-Nalley, witnesses filled an adjoining room. Some were from the victims’ families. One was a Catholic bishop. One was country singer Steve Earle, who had befriended the convict. And another was Associated Press reporter Mike Gracyzk, who had been in the same cramped quarters 158 times before.
MICHAEL GRACYZK:
There are no seats, and you stand virtually shoulder to shoulder. It's a very narrow room. And there have been instances where some of the folks have gotten rather emotional and have hyperventilated or have become so distraught that they'll pound on the walls or fall to the floor. And it can be — very uncomfortable in there.
BOB GARFIELD:
Gracyzk, in his capacity as a wire service reporter serving subscribers all over Texas and the world, has seen hundreds of executions, but it was this that haunts him: As the lethal cocktail was injected into Jonathan Nobles, the condemned man began to sing Silent Night.
MICHAEL GRACYZK:
And when he got to "round yon Virgin, mother and child," he gasped and then he died. And now at Christmastime, when I hear those words at Christmas Mass, you look around and you see all the people reveling in the joy of the season, and I'm thinking of Jonathan Nobles.
BOB GARFIELD:
Mike Gracyzk witnessed his first lethal injection 24 years ago and, he says, has long since stopped keeping count. What he does pay attention to is the placement of his stories. Every now and then a Karla Faye Tucker comes along to command the attention of the world in the days and weeks before her execution. But often the media pool consists only of Gracyzk and a reporter from the local Huntsville Item.

Over the years, Gracyzk says, the media representation has grown smaller and smaller, and his dispatches have moved farther and farther back in the newspaper. This disappoints him.
MICHAEL GRACYZK:
I'm not suggesting that the prison system, particularly here in Texas, does anything wrong or improperly, but the ultimate question is would you as a citizen want the state to be doing these things and no one around to be an independent observer of this?
BOB GARFIELD:
It's a question that also puzzles Bill Crawford, author of Texas Death Row, a dispassionate but nonetheless chilling compendium of the first 376 prisoners put to death in Huntsville correctional units since 1982.

Putting aside all of the political and moral questions attendant to the death penalty, Crawford doesn't understand why the appetite for genuine crime and punishment is so low.
BILL CRAWFORD:
Fictionalized accounts of gruesome crimes are tremendously popular. I mean, we're a Law and Order/CSI society. If you dress up these stories and then you don't talk about the final consequences of these crimes, they're incredibly compelling for people. And that's why I think we're so fascinated by these types of criminal shows.

But to me, the actual facts of the case, and, to me, the actual execution process itself is much more fascinating.
BOB GARFIELD:
To flip through the book is to read details of crimes, one more monstrous and cold-blooded than the next, this, all juxtaposed with the prisoners' last words and last requests, a parade of double-meat cheeseburgers and perfunctory appeals to Jesus.

It's 376 portraits of the banality of evil, with the effect of rendering the monsters pitiful and small. And in the slow but steady drumbeat of Texas justice, those stories seldom break through.

To Michelle Lyons, spokesman for the Huntsville Prison, this is less a reflection of execution fatigue than weariness with violent crime itself.
MICHELLE LYONS:
I think that, unfortunately, crime has become routine.
BOB GARFIELD:
Whereupon, complacency sets in about even the ultimate punishment. This is most obvious when the press calls from places that do not execute 20 people a year. When out-of-town reporters show up, she says, especially foreign ones, they're plenty fascinated but tend to arrive with an agenda.

MICHELLE LYONS:
When I have a journalist who is first beginning, I can tell immediately when they will ask me how they could get in touch with the inmate's family, but they don't ask me how to get in touch with the victim's family.

Instead of asking when we have an execution scheduled, they may have a reporter that says, you know, well, when is the next - when is he scheduled to be killed. Even just that little change of verbiage really does give an indication of what the journalist's true feelings are.
BOB GARFIELD:
She's probably right about that. But if European news organizations parachute into Huntsville to sneer at American brutality, Texas media, on the whole, do not. Editorial positions across the state media almost universally reflect Texans' 60-some percent support of capital punishment. A prominent exception is The Dallas Morning News, which recently opposed the death penalty on the grounds of protecting the innocent.

Michael Landauer is an assistant editorial editor for The News.
MICHAEL LANDAUER:
Dallas County has had more DNA exonerations than any other county in America, not on death penalty cases, but they certainly highlight the errors that can be made. And we're very uncomfortable with that.
BOB GARFIELD:
The paper printed an impassioned dissenting opinion, and also made clear it supports what it calls "death by prison." Still, this is Texas. Surely readers would rise up against the liberal media and scream bloody murder. Nope. Not as much as a canceled subscription. But why?

Has the public lost its thirst for frontier justice? Landauer thinks not. Instead, he attributes the absence of backlash to sound editorial strategy. To achieve its goal of a New Jersey-like outright ban, the editorial board concluded that it must focus on the most palatable objection, potential miscarriages of justice. Constitutionality and morality were left out of the discussion.
MICHAEL LANDAUER:
I bet an editorial page editor in Minnesota listening to this is going, oh, these people are so soft, why aren't they, you know, yelling and screaming? And I can totally understand that. I wish we were in a position to do that.
BOB GARFIELD:
Expediency trumping principle — it's an interesting subject for a j-school class about editorial writing. But more interesting is what it suggests about the wages of journalistic indifference.

Regardless of whether the public is satisfied with or simply numbed by the parade of dead men walking, how does it come to pass that editorial pages seeking to end capital punishment conclude that moral authority alone will not do? Could it be that newsrooms across the state have let the moral issues vanish by neglect?

When Mike Gracyzk watches a condemned man die and writes about it, he knows that most papers will condense the story to a paragraph and shoehorn it into a hole on page 18. But he files those stories anyway, at last count some 400 of them, because he believes that when a state executes a citizen, it's news - every time.