Executioner’s Song No Longer a Nocturne

PHOENIX —  The days of cellblock lightbulbs flickering at midnight, candlelight vigils and literal 11th-hour appeals may be coming to an end.

Arizona, Texas and Virginia are abandoning midnight as the hour of death, opting to hold executions in the afternoon or the evening to reduce lost sleep for judges, overtime for guards and added strain on victims.

“Dispensing justice at that hour of the morning is difficult, to say the least, and we have an obligation . . . to give our best efforts in every one of these instances,” said U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, complaining about an execution in Arizona last June that prompted the state to do away with putting inmates to death at midnight.

It was 3 a.m. in Washington, D.C., before the high court finally rejected a flurry of last-minute appeals for killer William Woratzeck and cleared the way for his death by injection minutes later.

Now, Arizona prosecutors plan to ask the state Supreme Court to schedule future executions between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m.

Texas, which has executed 30 people so far this year, changed its execution time two years ago to 6 p.m. instead of between midnight and dawn.

And Virginia, which ranks second behind Texas with six executions this year, recently changed its time from 11 p.m. to 9 p.m.

California’s execution time remains midnight.

Where the midnight tradition got its start is unclear. Some prison officials said the idea was simply to carry out the execution as soon as possible on the execution date set by the court. Others said the reason was to reduce the risk of inmate disturbances and large protests.

Midnight executions gave rise to the Hollywood image of the lights flickering in the cellblock, striking fear in the other prisoners, when someone dies in the electric chair.

Whatever the reason, more and more midnight executions began to take their toll.

“It was just a strain on everyone to be up to all hours in the morning trying to make clearheaded decisions,” said Texas prison spokesman David Nunnelee.

Before the time change, Nunnelee said, he would be awake as late as 6 a.m. and still have to be at work at 8 a.m.

Some states have no plans to switch to daytime executions. In Nevada, holding executions by injection just after midnight frees more employees to help with the process, said prison spokesman Glen Whorton.

“You can use staff to do the execution rather than control the inmates,” Whorton said. “You’re going to have overtime, regardless. It takes a lot of people to do this, and if you do it during those evening hours you have a larger pool of people to choose from for those activities.”

Changing the time of execution will not stop last-minute appeals, however, said Aaron Caplan, one of Woratzeck’s lawyers.

“Now that we have fax machines and e-mail, it allows us to scramble around and do things at the last minute. It doesn’t matter if the last minute is at 5 p.m. or at midnight,” Caplan said. “About the only difference with 5 p.m. is, once the flurry is over, the restaurants are still open.”