Transcript

HAMISH ROBERTSON: Twenty-six years ago, a former Oklahoma state legislator, William Wiseman, drafted a simple paragraph that became the first lethal injection law in history.

After the United States Supreme Court overturned state capital punishments laws in 1972, Mr Wiseman, along with state law makers all over the country, redrafted the laws.

But in William Wiseman's case, while he voted for the return of capital punishment, he was uneasy about the brutality associated with the electric chair, hanging and the firing squad.

So with the help of a coroner, he crafted the lethal injection law.

But he's lived to regret it.

Mr Wiseman now opposes the death penalty in any form, and from Oklahoma, he told our Correspondent John Shovelan in Washington that he feared sanitising capital punishment had made it easier for courts to impose it.

WILLIAM WISEMAN: By making the process less horrifying I may have… in fact I likely did make it easier for juries to impose the penalty.

JOHN SHOVELAN: Do you think that's actually happening?

WILLIAM WISEMAN: There's no way to test these things, but I think my sort of horseback appraisal, and pop psychology appraisal of the situation is that they would not be responsible for the horrors of electrocution, and instead while the life would be terminated that they wouldn't have these violent images as something they were associated with. So I think it makes it easier to do.

JOHN SHOVELAN: What about the people on death row themselves? Do you have any idea about how they feel about it?

WILLIAM WISEMAN: I get anecdotal reports about how people on death row react to it. There is such a thing as of course death row humour, and it's disturbing and yet at the same time it's part of humanity's laughing in the face of death. The electric chair, down at McAlister, which is where we execute people in Oklahoma, was always referred to as Old Sparky.

I mean that's how it was referred to by the people that were headed that way, and I remember being a little unsettled when after the law was passed in 1975 that I wrote, reports came back to me from corrections people that the nickname for my technology was “Happy Hour”.

JOHN SHOVELAN: Your view now is that you're opposed to the death penalty. That would seem to be out of step with the vast majority of Americans.

WILLIAM WISEMAN: I think that probably the majority of America supports capital punishment to the extent that they’re informed by it. In the first place whether we approve of capital punishment ethically or not as an appropriate response to behaviour, we have to be sure that the decision is reached correctly and that we have accurate conclusions about guilt or innocence.

And the other thing that I often hear from people is ‘well, these criminals don't deserve any mercy, they don't deserve not to die, they earned their death’ and while that may be true, the reason I'm opposed to capital punishment is not for the sakes of the people who are going to be executed, it's because I don't like what executing people does to us and what it does to society. It's an intentional act of killing and I think it's wrong.

JOHN SHOVELAN: What does it do to society?

WILLIAM WISEMAN: I think it continues blurring the line about the nature of life and we face life every day, it becomes routine to us, we get up in the morning, we go to bed at night, we work, we don't work, whatever, but none of us really has any kind of reliable understanding of the reason we're here in the first place, if there is a reason.

And so as long as life itself is such a mystery and it probably always will be, it seems to me it’s terribly dangerous for us to cross the line and make the decision about another life in a deliberate act to end a life where we don't even know where it came from or where it's going.

I think that's wrong.

HAMISH ROBERTSON: William Wiseman, speaking to John Shovelan, in Washington.