Kenneth Dean Quotes
It’s a very unique job. Not many people are willing to do this or can do this.
Dean at the time was a veteran of 120 executions
Kenneth Dean, Member of Execution Team, Walls State Prison, Huntsville, Texas, NPR Witness to an Execution, October 11, 2000
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
More and more evidence had been mounting that innocent men had been mistakenly sentenced to death throughout the country and Texas executed more people than any other state.
Mitchel was convicted for his writings and deported to New Zealand from which he escaped to the United States where he worked as a journalist before returning to Ireland.
The state of Texas had an enthusiasm for executions that was greater than and different from all the other states. Their execution numbers were closer to Iran and China than they were to other American states. The Supreme Court had ruled that corporations were people for purposes of being entitled to freedom of speech.
Texas executes more people than the rest of the United States does. However, just before the debate an investigation disclosed 56 recent cases in Texas where the “criminals” were completely exonerated based on the work of some volunteer attorneys and law students. They were all released from jail where many had served decades for crimes they did not commit. 5 were released from Death Row—awaiting to be executed. See {635339}.
He did not want his executioners to dispatch the victim quickly but make him suffer,
Beheading, if the headsman were competent, was a mich less painful way to die than the early forms of hanging where the rope strangled the condemned. As a result, it tended to be reserved but the upper classes and aristocrats of the day unless they were guilty of treason of coradice in warfare in which cases beheading was witheld.
Although we think is grizzley and macabre that throngs of people should attend executions adn percieve the spectators to be gross and insensitive, there was a bizarre kind of morality operating in many counties. At all times in history executions tend to bet botched with terrible and unnecessary suffering inflicted on the victim. When executioners do that with drug coctails or other methods of dispatching death, we tend to make institutional complaints. But as this quotation shows, the executioner was often turned on by the mob and in some cases were actually themselves killed.
Schmidt was the Executioner at Nuremberg. Some regard it strange that a n executioner should be concerned witth the suffering of the condemned, but he saw himself as a professional whose job it was to dispatch the guilty, but he saw no reason why that should suffer any more than was necesary.
Prison guard and member of the "tie-down team" (those who strap the inmate onto the gurney for the execution)
