This Labor Day weekend, I was thinking about emotionally taxing and stressful professions.  I concluded that working on death row falls into that category.

I was reminded of the film “Monster’s Ball” and the prison executioner played by actor Billy Bob Thornton. The character displays a “tough” demeanor to the public. He’s all business, a stoic professional doing his duty. But after each execution, in the privacy of his home, he vomits. Ice cream is the only food he can keep down.  Heath Ledger plays Thornton’s son, a member of the execution team. More disturbed by the executions than his father, Ledger’s character unexpectedly pulls his revolver out of its holster one day and kills himself.

Real-life responses similar to those of “Monster’s Ball’s” main characters were documented in the mid-Twentieth Century years of U.S. executions. New York veteran executioner John Hulbert served in the infamous Sing Sing prison from 1913 to 1926.  One night, according the Village Voice, Hulbert collapsed shortly before he was to pull the electric chair’s switch. After the prison’s doctor revived him, he completed the execution, and then spent a week in the prison’s hospital.  Hulbert quit in 1926, saying, “I got tired of killing people.” Three years later, he shot himself in the basement of his home.

In the 1950s, Dow B. Hover became the state’s sixth executioner. The Columbia County sheriff earned $150 for every execution he conducted at Sing Sing. He occasionally conducted New Jersey’s executions. In the Village Voice article, Hover’s daughter Gladys recalled his severe, daily migraine headaches that no medicine could relieve. His son,  Dow C. Hover, said, “He felt bad about (his job).” “He’d go see a minister and straighten himself out.”  At the age of 89, Dow B. Hover killed himself in his car, his garage filled with exhaust fumes.

More recent research and anecdotes from death row personnel underscore the emotional strain of the work.  The book “Who Owns Death? Capital Punishment, the American Conscience, and the End of Executions,” published in 2000 by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, contains insightful interviews with death row employees whose responses to executions included depression, nightmares and emotional numbness.

Michael Osofsky’s 2001 study of 50 death row employees in Louisiana’s Angola prison, found they had mixed emotions about their job.  Some didn’t feel they were acting out of revenge when they executed condemned prisoners, or that they were on a “mission” to do so. They described themselves as “soldiers of the court,” carrying out judges’ and juries’ wishes. They made it a point to treat the death row prisoners well, no matter what crimes they committed.

Many were religious, and took advantage of the warden’s Christian prayer session held about a half hour before each execution.  Some worried about their salvation due to having participated in executions, and looked to scripture and clergy for answers. Other team members said executions caused them anxiety.

Osofsky’s study found that the execution team members seldom discussed their work at home with their spouses or other family members.  Many felt closer to fellow team members than to their own families.  Divorce rates among the team members were higher than the national average: 75% compared to 50%. They rarely sought help from mental health professionals or psychiatrists, and they had few opportunities for what Osofsky called “post-execution catharsis.”

Ron McAndrew, a former Florida prison warden who conducted three electric-chair executions in that state, and shadowed five lethal-injection executions in Texas, used to be among the death row prison personnel who thought of his work as a profession, similar to execution team members in Osofsky’s study.  Until he began to have nightmares.

“My change of heart was gradual and painful,” McAndrew wrote in a 2009 Orlando Sentinel article. “At night I would awaken to visions of executed inmates sitting on the edge of my bed.

“Part of my job was to help strap prisoners into the electric chair, and signal the hooded executioner to administer the current. But each execution lessened my support. In Texas, I thought the more ‘civilized’ executions by lethal injection would remove my repugnance. They didn't.”

This year, McAndrew testified before a New Hampshire study commission on the death penalty that he and many former death row personnel discussed the traumatizing effects of executions. "We spent hours on the phone, trying to process the horror we went through,” said McAndrew, quoted by the Associated Press.  “We never admitted it at the time. That would have shown weakness in a job that demanded strength."

“Showing weakness” versus “strength” was a factor in lawsuits filed by two former South Carolina prison employees against the state’s corrections department. Terry Bracey and Ira Craig Baxley said they were forced to perform executions or face demotions and lose their leadership positions within the prison.  Both men, who retired on disability in 2007, said they were not adequately trained to conduct executions, and received no counseling.  Bracey said he suffered nightmares, emotional disturbances, and a desire to wash his hands after executions. Baxley experienced “emotional upset and religious and ethical conflict.”  A psychologist diagnosed Baxley with generalized anxiety disorder caused by conducting executions.

U.S. District Court Judge Cameron Currie ruled against Bracey this March, and threw out Baxley’s lawsuit this April. In the ruling against Bracey, Judge Currie wrote in part, “At most, he was given a difficult choice with emotional repercussions.  .  . Jobs, particularly jobs in the field of law enforcement, sometimes require tough choices."  The judge ruled Baxley’s argument  -- that his free speech right was violated when he told his supervisor he did not want to execute prisoners -- was not strong enough.  Bracey's lawsuit continues; Baxley's effectively ended with Judge Currie’s ruling.  Attorney Lewis Cromer of Columbia, South Carolina, who represents both men, told the city’s newspaper The State that he would appeal the ruling in Baxley’s case.

"I just feel when you condition a man's job on killing people .  .  .  it's clearly outrageous and intolerable in a civilized society," said Cromer.

During the nation’s current economic recession, most that have a job are fortunate and grateful. But if our country would only abandon the death penalty and replace it with an alternative punishment, prison personnel serving on death rows could lay down their emotional and psychological burden, which comes with killing people for a living.  It’s too high a price to pay for employment.