Killing as "closure"

In early January, Judy Busch of Oklahoma City was able to witness the execution of Floyd Allen Medlock, who had killed her 7-year-old granddaughter, Kathy, 10 years earlier. She's glad she went, and strongly believes executions should be televised. "Otherwise it looks like it's something we should be ashamed of," she says.

But she also admits to leaving not fully satisfied. "It was so quick and so sterile and so serene," she says. "It left me feeling angry, I guess."

Medlock's murder of Busch's granddaughter in 1990 was a particularly grisly one. First he tried to choke her to death, and when she regained consciousness, he tried to drown her in the toilet, and then stabbed her to death before molesting her. Her nude body was found the next morning in a trash bin, wrapped in a bedsheet. Judy Busch doesn't have to apologize for wanting to see him suffer badly.

Yet she resists using the word "revenge"; she prefers "retribution." And while she's glad she saw Medlock die, she chooses her words from the same therapy-speak manual Ashcroft culled from, calling the execution a "necessary experience for me to live through to know that chapter is closed."

But clearly it wasn't. The quiet, humane death that Medlock received -- by injection, the same fate McVeigh faces -- was a disappointment, especially when Busch considers "the terror and suffering that Kathy faced when she died."

She had also held out some hope that Medlock might at least finally apologize. "I don't know what I was expecting. But he just said, 'Take it easy.' He didn't look toward us at all, either. He only looked at his father."

Then the injections started. "It just looked like he was sleeping," she says. "He made several little gasps. No jerking. No anything. Then he seemed to change color some, and we knew. I couldn't help but think, why didn't he fight? It's a real disappointment. You want him to hurt."

That's a surprising admission. Few will admit the desire to see the criminal justice system inflict pain. When Gerald Stano, Florida's notorious rapist-murderer, was finally electrocuted in 1998, the twin brother of one of the victims made news by the way he reacted. The moment the electricity jolted Stano, Raymond Neal said, "Die, you monster, die." Afterward, he and his brothers marched outside, where they proceeded to light up cigars and celebrate in front of the throngs of media and anti-death-penalty protesters. "It's a wonderful day," Neal told a reporter at the Florida Times-Union. "I'm the happiest man on the earth today."

But few victims' family members admit to such bloodlust in advance of an execution, or such jubilation when they see it take place. In fact, in the debate over televising McVeigh's execution, hardly anyone cites the desire for bloody revenge among the reasons for viewing it. Which is a little odd: If ever there were a criminal who might trigger a demand for nationally televised biblical vengeance, it's McVeigh. Who can't hate a right-wing gun nut who blows up a government building that contains a day-care center, killing 168 people -- victims he later refers to as "collateral damage" in the book "American Terrorist"?

Yet advocates of televising the execution don't list bloodlust among the reasons they need to watch McVeigh die. Bombing survivor Paul Heath, a psychologist who lobbied for the closed-circuit screening of McVeigh's execution, told the Chicago Tribune that "American Terrorist" brought him "closer to having an emotional need to watch the execution than I ever had before I read the book" -- but he wouldn't use the word "revenge."

Salon columnist Camille Paglia is an exception: "I feel in my gut that any person who inflicts such atrocious physical suffering on so many innocent victims deserves to have a taste of his own medicine," she wrote in 1997. "I wish that every person maimed by McVeigh, or any relative of a person killed by McVeigh, could have at him with a sharp weapon of choice, the aim being to maximize long, lingering pain."

But if McVeigh's killing fails to satisfy his victims' need for either closure or bloodlust, it could well lead to more of us getting to watch. Although Ashcroft insists the closed-circuit broadcast won't set a precedent -- throughout his speech Thursday, the attorney general took pains to describe the bombing as "unique in our American experience," with "many unique elements and ... a unique set of circumstances" -- others think it can't help opening the door to wider viewing of executions, including telecasts.

Next Page: "Bad taste is not a good enough reason to keep something from the public"

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