They executed people for the state of South Carolina. For some, it nearly destroyed them.

The first time Craig Baxley executed a man for the state of South Carolina, he wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do.

He slipped the surgical gloves on anyway at around 6 p.m. Behind the one-way mirror that hid his face from the others in the death chamber, a heart monitor beeped a reminder.

Still alive, it told him. That person you’re supposed to kill is still alive.

By then, Baxley was no stranger to death. Straight out of high school, he had enlisted with the Marines and trained at Parris Island next to friends who would be blown up in one of the deadliest attacks against the service since World War II, the 1983 Beirut Marine barracks bombing. Soon after he was discharged, at age 21, Baxley signed up to work for the S.C. Department of Corrections — and right away saw several men stabbed to death in prison. He was later tapped to lead a team that responded to similar crises behind bars with lethal force when necessary.

He was trained to fight, but he wasn’t prepared for this.

Hands shaking and palms drenched with sweat, he picked up a plastic tube connected to a man he did not know and slowly pushed into it the vials of drugs to stop his heart. Baxley did not look away as the lethal cocktail did its job. He watched as the light of life left the condemned man, whose head was on a gurney just a few inches in front of him. And then it was finished. Where there once was a face, there was suddenly just a corpse, left with a frozen expression of anguish.

“Time of death, 6:18,” someone spoke into their radio. Baxley didn’t wait to hear more. Within seconds he was in a bathroom around the corner, ripping the gloves off and trying to wash himself clean. He scrubbed his hands hard and asked God to forgive him for what he had done. But it wasn’t enough.

I need to get down on my knees, he thought.

Next door, the coroner was preparing the dead man’s body to be rolled away to a hearse. Near the sink, Baxley’s knees were hitting the concrete. In a ritual he would replicate over the next few years, the executioner repeated the Lord’s Prayer again and again from the bathroom floor.

“Forgive us our trespasses,” he recited out loud. “Deliver us from evil.”

Yet something evil seemed to stick. From that day on, Baxley felt like a different person. Nightmares replaced his previously sound sleep. Painful knots invaded his stomach. Anytime he became nervous, his hands started to drip with sweat like they did in the death chamber.

Others noticed. “You just changed completely, man,” he remembers people started to say. “You were just this jovial, funny guy.”

A Southern Baptist who attended church every Sunday, Baxley became convinced that killing others for the government had condemned him to hell. He stopped going to services and started thinking about suicide. Once, as his wife begged him to stop from the other side of the door, he shot a pistol through a wall and imagined the bullet going into his body.

“I was in the Marine Corps, but what I’m saying, it doesn’t matter how tough you think you are,” said the 57-year old Midlands resident. “I was the carrier out of the state-assisted homicide. I always feel like I walk around with this.”

Since 1976, when a nationwide execution ban was overturned, South Carolina has executed 43 people. Only seven states have killed more, relative to their population size. Dozens of S.C. Department of Corrections employees like Baxley were involved in seeing those deaths through.

But after Gov. Henry McMaster announced in 2017 that the state had run out of the necessary drugs for lethal injection, leaving it with only the electric chair, a device which has been likened to torture and declared unconstitutional in other states, executions in South Carolina were paused.

This year, the state made moves to start them again.

In May, lawmakers approved an additional execution method: death by firing squad. The death chamber should be ready for gunfire soon, the prisons director, Bryan Stirling, has said. And in October, he and a state senator indicated they’ll push for a new law in 2022 to enable the state to purchase lethal injection drugs by hiding information about the pharmaceutical companies that sell them.

The tools of death could next be electric volts, bullets or a drug cocktail. Regardless of the method, executions are likely to return to South Carolina. When they do, state workers will again be the ones tasked with handling the weapons — and the consequences.

The repercussions of the work for staff have often been left out of conversations about the death penalty, until now. Over the past five months, reporters at The State have spoken with 10 people who helped administer previous executions. The closer they and their families were to the act of killing, the more the men said their jobs caused long-term harm.

Those most affected by their jobs were people like Baxley, who once pressed the buttons for the electric chair and pushed the drugs into people’s veins during lethal injections. Today, they still suffer from mental and physical health problems they attribute to their time in the death chamber. It’s important they speak out, some of them say, so what happened to them never happens again.

The Commander

Inhale, exhale. Inhale.

The governor is always listening through a phone when people condemned to die in South Carolina take their last breath. During 13 of the state’s recent executions, the Commander was on the line with the governor.

After executions were allowed again, following the reversal of a 1972 U.S. Supreme Court decision that banned the death penalty nationwide for years, no one working at the Department of Corrections had experience carrying out capital punishment, said Jim Harvey. Since the Central Correctional Institution in Columbia was where executions had been carried out before the ban and his job was to oversee prisons in the Midlands, it fell to him and a few others to develop the steps for how the state would do them once more.

Harvey said many of the rules he settled on were not written down. The information was kept in his head and transferred by instruction to others who needed to know it, like the warden and the people who escorted the condemned to the death chamber. “We didn’t want it to be published,” he said.

One of those secrets was how executioners were chosen. Harvey said he carefully hand-picked, then interviewed the three individuals from the most responsible he knew among prison staff.

“Most people think that you pick volunteers for that. That’s the last thing I wanted to do,” Harvey said. “Anybody who would volunteer to kill somebody is not somebody I wanted working for me.”

For leading the group involved with carrying out executions until he retired in 1998, he was given the Commander title.

But that’s just what occupied Harvey during the week. On Sundays, the broad-shouldered father of two could be met at church, serving communion as an ordained deacon. He’s “pro-life for all life,” he said, and the Coosawhatchie native, now 74, is as quick to pray with a friend as he is to mention the forgiveness of Christ in conversation.

Did it upset him, then, to listen over the phone as people died according to rules he had written, for crimes they were charged with committing long ago?

A young lady had presumed to know the answer before, Harvey recalled.

As he had done after each execution, that night, the Commander had walked outside the prison to share the news with the massive crowd congregated in support of the death penalty.

“They’re all applauding like it’s a football game,” he remembered, his low voice smacking in disapproval.

There was no celebration when Harvey crossed the street to share the same information with a smaller group protesting the execution. It was from that side that the question had come: “Well, I guess you’re happy now, aren’t ya?”

Harvey looked the woman in the eye.

“Ma’am, you have no idea.”

But if she was clueless then of the Commander’s feelings about working on executions, she wasn’t alone. Until he was interviewed alongside his wife by a reporter in 2021, Harvey had talked openly to almost no one about the emotional toll the work had taken on him. Not with his team, and not even with her, his partner of 52 years.

He was trying to spare her anxiety, he said. Regarding the silence among the others involved, they were all macho men. To confide in them would have been to show weakness, Harvey said. So though the team thought he was just fine for over a decade as he oversaw their work on executions, he wasn’t.

“None of us ever enjoyed doing it,” Harvey said. “None of us wanted to do it.”

He would be consumed by stress for weeks before each execution, and afterwards, it would be at least five days until he felt somewhat back to normal, he said. He spent that time at home hunched above his desk, agonizing over every detail of what had happened and easily losing his temper with his family.

Seated across the table from him in their Lexington kitchen this summer, his wife Charlotte corrected him. It actually took him longer than a week to recover, and she should know. As a former nurse who worked in intensive care units, she was a trained observer.

“She saved lives, I took lives,” Harvey conceded.

Charlotte does not consider herself brave. But brave she had to be in those years, and brave she was. While Harvey hid his feelings at home, she kept the family secret at work. Not once did she reveal who she was married to at the hospital, though Harvey’s face would sometimes flash on local TV channels in patients’ rooms. Someone could want revenge, Charlotte figured.

And it was she who addressed some of the injury caused by the stress at home. As Harvey was helping carry out executions, she developed “a classic, big depressive episode,” Charlotte remembered, which she quietly treated with antidepressants.

“I resented the fact that this was taking so much out of Jim,” she said. In their marriage, “it just created a crevice.”

Inhale, exhale.

The night after the couple discussed for the first time how executions had altered their family with a reporter, they stayed awake for hours, breathing silently in bed.

Did I say anything that could upset him? Charlotte wondered in the dark.

Then, another thought: Why hadn’t she been able to say where she stood on the death penalty when she was asked? Could it ever be right to take a life — even if the government did it, even if her own husband was once involved?

Dr. Rita Nakashima Brock is a theologian and national expert on moral injury, the distressing aftermath people may experience when they perpetrate, fail to prevent or witness events that contradict deeply held values and beliefs. What the Harveys endured was typical of what can happen when people are involved with something traumatic like killing, she indicated.

“It becomes a kind of sodden despair, where they’re just kind of plodding through the day and going through the motions,” she said, noting that some compartmentalize their pain, work to exhaustion or anesthetize themselves with alcohol. “But it’s hard on other relationships with people around you because they can tell you’re not the same.”

The Commander would do things differently today. Harvey thinks he was wrong to conceal how his work was affecting him, and wants people tasked with executions now to know they should be more vocal with each other and their families about the job’s toll.

And though he once helped create the rules for how the state should kill, his opinion on whether people should be executed at all has changed, too: He no longer supports capital punishment.

“Because there’s so much inequity in who gets the death penalty and who doesn’t,” Harvey explained, pointing to the fact that over 1,000 people are serving life sentences in South Carolina for murder. “Very, very little difference between them and the guys sitting on death row for the same offense.”

Justice William Brennan Jr. made a similar observation when the U.S. Supreme Court decided death sentences could be unconstitutional because of the arbitrary and discriminatory way they had been administered. “It smacks of little more than a lottery system,” he wrote in 1972.

For two executioners who administered the punishment to those who later lost the lottery, the job would damage almost every aspect of their lives.

The Executioners

Before he executed the first person to die in South Carolina’s electric chair in nearly 10 years, Terry Bracey said he was given only one instruction.

“You see that button over there?” said the prison’s maintenance worker who had set up the device. “When the green light comes on, push.”

Moments before Bracey’s fingers pressed the knob, he heard something else. It was the condemned man, speaking up from behind the glass that separated him from his executioners to say how uncomfortable he was strapped down to the seat.

His discomfort is long over, but Bracey and Baxley, the veteran who prayed on the floor, still suffer through theirs.

“I recall the look on his face. I recall the smell of his body,” said Bracey, years later in a deposition. “I recall me being a part of cooking [him] to death.”

As for Baxley, who was also working as an executioner that day, he remembered how the man’s hands tightly gripped the seat’s arm rests as the electricity hit him. When the hood that covered his face during the execution was removed, the skin had turned black and “his eyes and everything was just like he was in gruesome pain,” Baxley said.

In court documents for worker’s compensation claims they later filed after they left the Department of Corrections, and over multiple conversations with a reporter in 2021, the two men described a toxic culture of carrying out the death penalty during the early 2000s distinct from the one Harvey said he took care to craft before he retired. After he left the agency, executions started to be conducted in a way that was “just totally, totally callous,” Baxley recalled.

In a deviation from how Harvey said he used to select executioners, Baxley and Bracey reported that their agreement to work in the death chamber was made to seem like a condition for promotions to leadership roles, though they were officially considered volunteers.

“If I didn’t say I would do it, I wouldn’t have gotten promoted, so how do you say it’s ‘volunteers’ when you won’t get the job?” Baxley remarked.

Never were they screened by a psychologist or thoroughly trained for the task, they said. Neither were they invited to attend debriefings or told to attend counseling focused on their work in executions, they added. They did have access to three free therapy sessions the agency offers to all its employees, which both said they tried to use but found unhelpful.

In the absence of more assistance from the state, the men said they did their best to take care of themselves. The pair would sometimes stay late to console and consult with each other after they worked together on an execution. Once, one of them approached the other to show him the dictionary definition of a serial killer — and Baxley concluded that “the definition of serial killer is Bracey and myself.”

Other nights after an execution was done, Baxley wouldn’t talk. He’d go to a nearby bar and get drunk.

Eventually, both men realized they wanted to stop. But when they asked the warden, Robert Ward, if they could take a break from execution work, he said they could lose their leadership roles if they didn’t do it, the men said, and could instead be demoted to work in a prison somewhere else. (Ward would later deny these claims in legal documents.)

So they kept going. They both valued their managerial roles and needed them to support their families. Bracey, then the major of the Rapid Response Team that addresses prison violence, was nominated for supervisor of the year, he said. Baxley was the major of a similarly specialized team, called the Special Operations Response Team, and often won the highest praise in his evaluations, he noted.

But they eventually reached a breaking point. After they quit a few years later, they sued Ward and the then director of the Department of Corrections, Jon Ozmint, for violating their rights and intentionally inflicting emotional distress. They also filed worker’s compensation claims against the department, based on what they said were permanent disabilities owing to workplace stress and emotional damages.

Though they pursued some of their legal efforts separately, the harm they described in the court records was similar.

Both recounted being haunted by gruesome scenes they witnessed, like when a tube they were sending lethal drugs through popped out of the man’s vein mid-execution. “Well, hopefully he has enough in him to kill him,” Baxley remembered a doctor remarked.

Then there was the moaning, singing, whistling and winking that came from the condemned men moments before they were put to death, and the urinating and defecating in the aftermath.

“It’s all just unbelievable and just one of the worst things you ever want to see in your life,” Baxley told a questioner in the deposition.

After they left the agency, the men sought more counseling and were diagnosed with PTSD and depression. Today, both men take medication to sleep through the night. Bracey has a heart condition and Baxley endures severe stomach pain his doctor linked to elevated stress levels at work. None of these problems were present before they starting executing people, they said, and they believe their time in the death chamber is the cause.

With family, friends and faith, their relationships continue to suffer.

“I’m 6’3, and I feel reduced now to being a coward in a corner,” said Bracey, who also lives in the Midlands. “I wonder whether God will ever forgive me now.”

Though they received disability retirement benefits from the state, Baxley’s and Bracey’s worker’s compensation claims and lawsuits were dismissed.

In response to the lawsuits, Ward and Ozmint denied that Ward had indicated the former executioners could not get and keep their positions as team leaders without doing the execution work, and denied they violated the former executioners’ rights. Even if Ward had threatened the men with losing their leadership roles when they asked to stop serving as executioners, the choice to keep their jobs and keep killing people — or stop executions and get demoted — would have been typical of the tough ones law enforcement employees often face, a South Carolina district court judge, Cameron McGowan Currie, ultimately decided. And they had insufficient evidence to prove their lack of training or counseling, she found.

But experts said the consequences Baxley and Bracey described are serious and beyond what those in parallel situations experience.

To Professor Emerit Dr. Jennifer Freyd, a psychology researcher at the University of Oregon who studies how people respond when organizations fail to support them, the executioners’ ordeals sound like hallmark institutional betrayal. Those who feel betrayed by their workplaces are more likely to have symptoms of depression and anxiety, and are more likely to attempt suicide, research has shown.

“It’s absolutely necessary for the government to not cause additional harm, to the extent it can be avoided for the people who are then tasked with doing the execution,” Freyd said. “It makes sense that people who are paid to kill other people are going to be very vulnerable to institutional betrayal and moral injury.”

Dr. Brock agreed. “We have such a taboo in the culture against killing another human being, especially religiously, that it bothers people no matter what the law says,” the theologian said.

Some veterans also experience trauma after they kill overseas, but while they’re often celebrated as heroes, executioners suffer in relative solitude. “That isolation is just deadly in a lot of different kinds of ways,” said Brock.

In cartoons and movies, executioners are painted as bloodthirsty men who swing axes and dress in chain mail. The ones briefly described in “The Executioner’s Song,” a recollection of a state-sponsored killing in Utah, showed off macabre execution souvenirs to a woman at a bar.

Baxley doesn’t fit the stereotype. These days, he spends much of his time taking care of animals others mistreated. His neighbor’s pit bull terrier, Shadow, a rescue, has separation anxiety, so he walks the dog while her owner is at work. When he went to the beach this summer, he brought Shadow, too — along with Bubba and Bolt, two tiny Chihuahua and Chiweenies he adopted from the Humane Society — and made sure the neighbor would feed the three feral cats he usually minds.

And the only souvenir he wants to show from his time in executions is his opinion that the death penalty should be administered differently than it was when he was employed. Though he’s not opposed to capital punishment, after helping kill 10 people for the state, he now believes executions must be done right or not at all.

At a minimum, the families of the victims and the condemned who also have to watch should be respected, he said, and executioners should be screened and evaluated by a psychologist before taking on their roles. They should be carefully trained for the task and required to report to counseling afterwards. Baxley wants the state to learn from his story so that it doesn’t happen again.

Few could speak with more authority. But for all his hard-earned wisdom, he is not completely at peace. Though he has spent over a decade in therapy since he left the agency, he still harbors a burning anger for those he holds responsible for damaging his life.

He blames Ozmint and the other men then in charge, some of whom said they were not conflicted by their roles in executions.

The Leaders

Before he oversaw the deaths of 14 people as the director of the Department of Corrections from 2003 to 2011, Ozmint said he prayed and hugged each of them in their cells, then made sure their final statements were ready to go.

One of those men was James Tucker, whose last words were recited by his attorney before state workers pushed the buttons to electrocute him.

“To those I have harmed, my abject apologies and regrets,” the lawyer read on behalf of Tucker, who was convicted of two murders. “I am ashamed.”

As for himself, Ozmint does not feel ashamed for ordering Tucker and the others dead. He said it was his job to see that their lawful sentences were carried out.

“Does the trooper feel terrible when he writes a ticket because he knows a person can’t afford to pay it?” he asked. “I don’t feel guilty about your sin, do I?”

Ozmint never used the free counseling sessions the agency offers to its employees. He never had heartburn about overseeing executions because he understood his role and that of the executioners as not those of decision makers, but of ministers, enacting the will of South Carolinians. If he does hear of workers who suffered, “I look at people and I think, man, you’re just in the wrong profession,” Ozmint added.

Other leaders arrived at similar conclusions about their duties.

The agency’s commissioner when Pee Wee Gaskins, South Carolina’s infamous serial killer, was put to death, Parker Evatt said he was against capital punishment when he first assumed the position and still is today. Like Ozmint, he said he met with the people executed under his leadership before they died. But giving the go-ahead for their executions didn’t shake his faith. That was the law of the land, so he saw to it.

As for Gary Maynard, who served as the department’s director immediately before Ozmint, he did struggle with the idea of taking a human life. Still, someone else would have had to do the job if he hadn’t, he said, so he came to terms with overseeing the killings of the three men executed during his tenure. As the Associated Press reported, Maynard ultimately remembered his two years as the agency’s director as “two of the best years of my life.”

Bracey, the former executioner who worked with Baxley, understands why leaders of the Department of Corrections aren’t as tormented as he still is today. He wasn’t bothered by executions either before he had to do them himself.

“Unless you’re the one pushing the button, then that’s a whole different story,” he told a reporter over the phone. “I’m really envious of them, because I don’t have that same privilege to not to feel that way.”

Discourse about the effect of execution work is rare in America. Though thousands of people have been executed nationwide since the early 1900s and hundreds were likely involved with the killings, states tend to keep key information about the employees hidden from the public. The reason given is often security, the law or both.

Workers can also be reluctant to speak. When journalists for The State approached a former security director, warden and executioner, the three requested that their involvement in executions not be reported. Another former executioner for South Carolina had committed suicide, three former Department of Corrections employees confirmed.

More open discussion is critical, indicated Freyd, the professor emerit who studies institutional betrayal. She suggested the state collect data about the consequences suffered by execution workers, then use that information to educate those in charge.

“This is one of the hardest jobs there is,” Freyd said. If executions are to continue ethically, which she is not sure is possible, the needs of people who do the work should at least be identified and met, for this reason: “To not have the job destroy them.”

Nick Sullivan, an intern with The State Media Co., contributed reporting.

More Secrets From the Death Chamber

• There’s more at www.thestate.com. Click on this new story for pictures documenting the state’s 303-year execution history.
• Coming next week: South Carolina is readying the firing squad option. Why won’t it share details with taxpayers?

Tell us your story

Reporter Chiara Eisner is still reporting about executions. Reach her at 803-814-4464 or ceisner@thestate.com. Send encrypted messages to chiarareports@protonmail.com. Your name will not be published without your consent.

There’s Help

• If you are thinking about suicide or struggling with issues discussed in this article, VOA|ReST is a free, confidential, video chat group for people struggling with isolation, fatigue, frustration, anxiety and more. Create an account and sign up to participate here.
• Reach the Veterans Crisis Line and Military Crisis Line, a government-sponsored service, at 1-800-273-8255 (Press 1). This line connects veterans and service members in crisis, and their families and friends with U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs responders.
• For support not affiliated with the government or military, text HELLO to 741741 to speak with a trained listener from the crisis text line. It’s free, available 24/7 and confidential. Or call 1-800-273-8255 to speak with a certified listener from the Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

This story was originally published November 4, 2021 5:00 AM.