ABSTRACT
Since this country’s last public execution in 1936, all U.S. executions have been carried out solely in front of state-selected witnesses. Members of the media have tried to bring their cameras and tape recorders into execution chambers but courts have consistently ruled against them. In 1998, however, audiotapes of twenty-two Georgia executions (tapes created by members of the state’s Department of Corrections as their own procedural archive) entered the court record when Atlanta capital defender Michael Mears subpoenaed the tapes in a lawsuit challenging the humaneness of the electric chair. This is an edited transcription of one of these tapes: the execution of Ivon Ray Stanley, carried out on July 12, 1984. Stanley’s execution was broadcast on May 2, 2001, on public radio stations across the country as a part of The Execution Tapes: A Public Radio Special Report, produced by Sound Portraits Productions and WNYC.
