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kiss of death
The low turnout is largely attributable to the fact that executions are now routine—there were thirty-seven in Texas in 1997 alone—and that many of them simply are not publicized anymore. The first execution in twenty-five years in a state, as was the case with California’s 1992 execution of Robert Alton Harris, may draw hordes of reporters and spark well-attended candlelight vigils. But with each passing execution, there is less and less media and public interest.10 The ban on television cameras from execution chambers has, in fact, taken away two of abolitionists’ most powerful arguments: the faces of execution participants and condemned inmates and the public’s ability to see for themselves the violent act, however sanitized, of the execution itself. Because of the lack of television coverage, death row inmates, already dehumanized in capital trials, are perceived as unseen monsters or ugly mug shots, not as fellow human beings, however depraved, with parents, siblings, and children like the rest of us. The case of Karla Faye Tucker—the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War—showed just how powerful a human face can be. After widely publicized pleas for mercy, coming from religious leaders as diverse as Pope John Paul II and Pat Robertson, a Texas poll found that only 48 percent of Texans wanted the execution to go forward, even though another poll showed 75 percent of state residents favored capital punishment in the abstract. That executions are conducted out of the public eye means that Americans are never forced to watch what the government is doing on their behalf.11 American politicians who work for the death penalty’s abolition have become an endangered—at times, almost extinct— species. After the Oklahoma City bombing, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously—without a single dissenting vote—that a jury should be allowed to sentence to death any perpetrator of the bombing. While a large and growing number of politicians are supportive of a moratorium on executions, only a few politicians, such as Sena-