THE ALDERSON PROTOCOL

   I have been a corrections officer for eighteen years. The last three years of my employment have been at the United States Correctional Facility for Women at Alderson, West Virginia.
   Alderson is renowned as the largest women’s prison in the country, and also because it is the site of the only capital punishment facility for women in the Federal system. The prison contains the only gallows designed specifically for the multiple execution of female offenders. These executions are almost entirely for drug offenses under the Substance Control Act of 2010, although occasionally women are also executed for other crimes such as murder on Federal property, terrorist-related offenses, etc. On my promotion to Corrections Officer First Grade I was assigned to Death Row. For the first two years I was part of the execution team, and for the last year I have been watch commander and in charge of organizing and supervising executions under what is known as the Alderson Protocol.
   The Alderson Protocol was first brought into use in mid-2012, when it became obvious that the normal method of death by lethal injection was inadequate, too time-consuming and too expensive to carry out between ten and twenty executions every week. The large number of executions was due to the Substance Control Act, which essentially provides the death penalty for any sale of prohibited narcotics except for marijuana, and also for the possession of fairly small amounts of drugs for any use, sale or personal. America finally decided to get serious about putting an end to drugs, and unlike any other capital punishment law in American history, the statute has been vigorously and speedily enforced. In the first few years there were at least a thousand executions at Alderson annually. Even though the drug scourge has now been largely eliminated in the United States, there will always remain a small number of people who simply don’t get the message, including women.
Female executions are now down to between three and four hundred per year, and are expected to remain at that level for some time. In my own time at Alderson, the fewest number of women I ever saw hanged on one Friday was three, the largest number ten. The usual number of hangings on execution days nowadays is normally between five and eight women. With the Alderson Protocol, this number is manageable.
   The legal appeals process takes about a year. Pardons and commutations are rare, although they do occur. When the prison warden is served notice that a death row inmate’s appeal has been rejected, she is scheduled for execution on the next Friday morning, unless that Friday falls on Christmas Day, the Fourth of July, or for some ironic reason, Valentine’s Day. (Who says prison administrators have no sense of humor?) The prisoner is brought to the warden’s office and informed that her appeal has been denied and her sentence will be duly carried out that Friday, that there is no further hope for legal intervention and she must compose herself for death. This where the crying and screaming usually occur, and there are trained psychological counselors available for the condemned woman. They’re good at their jobs, and this is why we have so few instances of women struggling or fighting when they are taken to the gallows. The prisoner is then removed to a holding cell on a long row of cells which runs parallel with the gallows platform.
   I need to describe the gallows itself. It is almost like a stage in an auditorium, a raised platform approximately forty feet long and twelve feet wide, supported by concrete pillars. The first year it was erected the warden of the time tried individual trap doors, but there were too many mechanical problems and delays, so Alderson switched to an older and simpler stepping-off system. In front of the platform are rows of folding chairs for witnesses. A single steel beam or girder with each end mounted in the concrete walls of the death house runs over the platform at a height of about fifteen feet. The girder is also supported by two concrete pillars near either end, and is further held up by steel suspension cables bolted into the roof. At intervals, heavy-duty steel U-bolts are bolted into the bottom of the beam, and the noosed ropes are attached to these bolts, threaded in manually by the set-up crew on execution morning. The beam is not exactly flush with the edge of the gallows platform. There is about three feet of clearance between the beam and the edge, so that when a condemned woman is suspended, she dangles in the air in front of the platform.
   The floor of the platform is covered in industrial carpet, except for rubber matting which runs from the ten step-off blocks, or tabourets to give them their ancient and correct name, to the door of each holding cell. The rubber matting is laid down because sometimes the condemned women actually urinate in terror at the sight of the waiting noose. (We keep a mop and bucket handy.) There is a peep hole on the door of each cell, but these remain shut until the prisoner is taken out to be hanged. The blocks are just that, large steel squares or pillars with a set of five steps leading up to them, with a carpeted top. The ropes are of seasoned manila hemp. The noose is of the British style with a heavy plastic D-ring instead of the usual American-style noose with the hangman’s knot. To be honest, this version won out because the execution team found it too much trouble and too time-consuming to tie the many nooses needed for multiple executions. One noose dangles in front of each block. The actual execution crew who carry out the hangings are all male corrections officers; female corrections officers are with each condemned woman in each holding cell, two per cell.
   At eight thirty on Friday morning, the warden enters the death house by the inside door (not from the gallows side) and goes from cell to cell along the inner corridor, reading each condemned woman her death warrant and asking if she has any last words to say, which are recorded by a stenographer. This is so the actual execution will go swiftly and efficiently. At eight forty-five, the official witnesses (no media) are allowed in. They are paid $50 per execution plus travel expenses and some of them turn up at hanging after hanging. At nine o’clock sharp, once all the nooses have been rigged, the warden comes out onto the gallows platform to observe, and the watch commander gives the signal to begin.
   The holding cells are numbered on the gallows side, one through ten. The watch commander slides back the peep hole slot on cell number one. One of the female guards on the inside unlocks the door and admits the watch commander and two male guards from the execution team, thus making for a somewhat crowded cell. When the peephole slides open, the second female guard requests that the prisoner stand up. She is wearing a white hospital examination gown with only a single string tie at the back. When the execution team enters, the female guard requests that the prisoner turn around and face the wall. Ideally, from then on until the prisoner is dead, there is no more speech of any kind, although in practice sometimes it doesn’t work out that way. The female guard then unties the hospital gown and lets it fall to the floor. (Prisoners are executed in the nude supposedly because the added humiliation is to be part of their punishment, but frankly I have always thought it was so the mortuary team wouldn’t have to undress them and pull off dresses and underwear soaked with feces and urine.) The female guard draws the condemned woman’s wrists together behind her back, and one of the male guards handcuffs her.
   She is then led out the door, a few brief steps along the rubber mat, up the steps and onto the block, which is large enough for three people to stand on the top. She has a male guard on either side of her, holding her arms. The guard on her right reaches out with one hand and secures the noose. While the guard on the left holds both arms and steadies the prisoner, the one on the right slips the noose around her neck and cinches it under her jaw just below the right ear. He nods to the guard on the left. Each guard keeps one hand on the prisoner’s elbow, place their other hands on the prisoner’s upper back and lower back respectively, and without any word or further delay they “assist” her, as the official terminology says, off the block. They don’t actually push unless the prisoner is struggling. If the prisoner is quiet and resigned, as most are, they gently but insistently move her forward until she steps off the block.
   The condemned woman drops two to three feet and is suspended. The rope tightens and bites into her neck, there is a kind of “huuh!” from her as if she had received a sudden blow, her head is tilted forcibly upward and to the left at an angle, and then for anywhere from sixty seconds to fifteen minutes or more, she does the Dance of Death, which is always fascinating to watch. Every Dance is slightly different, as unique as a snowflake. Occasionally the prisoner’s neck is broken, but the idea that a broken neck causes instantaneous death on the gallows is a myth. You can tell the neck is broken because there are no major convulsions, but there is severe twitching and palpitating in the body and the hanging woman’s head rolls back and forth, sometimes blood coming from her mouth as she bites her tongue. I have seen this go on for six or seven minutes before death occurs.
   Usually, however, the drop does not break the neck, and death is by strangulation. After the drop the condemned woman usually kicks wildly on air for several minutes, which of course has the effect of making her swing freely like a pendulum, back and forth, the rope creaking. With the swinging of her body and the heaving of her chest as she tries to draw breath, her breasts jiggle and bounce enticingly. She writhes and twirls at the end of the rope, bobbing and gasping, eyes goggling in her head. Most hanged women attempt to do the “bunny hop,” trying to jump or draw themselves upward to take a little of the pressure off the noose and perhaps draw a gasp or two of air, and occasionally they succeed, although the resulting slight downward drop cinches the noose still tighter around their necks. Very occasionally a hanged woman is able to twist herself around and actually get her toes or feet back up on the block for a few seconds. In that case the guards, who have by now come down from the block and are standing on either side of it in order to prevent that very thing, push her feet off and set her swinging again.
   Generally speaking, although not always, the first wild convulsions and kicking dies down after a few minutes, and then comes the awful stretching, as the hanged woman’s toes seem to stretch down and her body arches, as she seeks some kind of floor beneath her to ease the agony of the rope. The swinging subsides somewhat and now she begins to turn more than swing, first to the right and then to the left. One of the most gripping of all experiences is to look into the eyes of a hanged woman who has reached this phase, because you can tell that she is entirely conscious still, suffering beyond imagination, that she knows perfectly well where she is and what is happening to her. Sometimes the prisoner makes small, odd gasping noises, although not always.
   After the stretching and turning comes the twitching or spasmodic phase, as the body itself begins to die. This is usually marked by the fluttering of the toes, quivering of the breasts, and jerking of the handcuffed wrists behind her back, and often her tongue lolls out of her head, a bright cyanosed blue almost like something out of a cartoon. The official finish is considered to be when bowels and bladder relax in death and a stream of feces and urine is released into a tile trough with drains that runs beneath the gallows. A guard with a hose quickly washes the excrement down the drain and standing on a stool and wearing latex gloves, he cleans the dangling body with an alcohol and disinfectant-soaked wash cloth. At this point death is presumed to have occurred, but in my experience it’s generally about thirty seconds after she shits. You can see the light go out in their eyes, like turning off a lamp.
   Now, as fascinating as it is watching a naked woman do the Dance of Death, while all of this is going on the guards are not just standing there observing. As my first watch commander on death row said, “This is a legal process, not a cabaret.” There are other women who must join their erring sister on the gallows. Once the actual physical struggle of the first executed woman has subsided and she has reached the turning as opposed to swinging stage, the watch commander goes to cell number two and opens the peephole, the second condemned prisoner is stripped and cuffed and led out onto the platform and up onto the block, and the entire process is repeated. After she has somewhat calmed down on her rope comes cell number three’s turn, and so forth until all of Friday’s batch of condemned women are hanging in the air. It is not unknown, when there are less than five prisoners to be hanged, for all three or four of them to be dangling in a row and still active, or “fidgeting” as the term goes.

And we do this every week.

   I think the best thing I can do is to describe my first hanging at Alderson in detail. There were six condemned women on that Friday morning, whose actual names I will change in case any of their families should ever happen across this article. Margie, aged 24, was a “biker gal” and an out and out meth dealer. Julia, aged 28, was a single mother who had tried to make some extra cash selling coke and got the gallows instead. Naima, aged 20, was a tall, elegant looking light-skinned black girl who had the wrong boyfriend and possibly took some satisfaction in the fact that he had swung in Marion Penitentiary the week before she kept her own date with the noose. Mei Ling, age unknown but young, was an illegal Chinese immigrant who tried to pay for her entry into America by running some heroin in from the Hong Kong Triads. Kristy, aged 17, was a former cheerleader who I personally think just got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the court didn’t take that view of it. Finally there was Audrey, aged thirty-something, a voluptuous former ace TV reporter and anchorwoman who simply wasn’t able to get it through her head that when it came to her personal cocaine habit, no means no and yes, even for media personalities, hang means hang.
   I have to admit that I was nervous. I had seen death enough in Iraq and that aspect of it didn’t bother me, but I had was worried that I would do something foolish or have a rope break on me, or push a girl off the block but forget to put the rope around her beck, or otherwise screw up. I needn’t have been concerned. The hangings went off like clockwork and, I was afterwards told, were a pretty typical example of what to expect every Friday morning.
   I was assigned to be right-hand guard for the first two executions, Margie and Julia. You should bear in mind that until the door opened, I hadn’t even seen either of these women I was about to kill. Like I said, that’s a pretty crowded cell with six people in it, and so since I entered the cell after the watch commander I didn’t see Margie until her hands were already cuffed behind her and she turned around, naked. I saw that her body had several intricate biker tattoos, including the standard barbed wire around the bicep. She was blond, her hair was cut short, and she had good firm breasts, not huge but very well formed. Her blue eyes were calm and unreadable. A genuinely tough chick; she understood that she was about to be hanged, there was nothing she could do about it, and so why kick up a fuss?
   The female guard led her forward, I fell in behind her and when she stepped out onto the platform took up my position on her right, and my fellow officer—Dave Thompson, I think it was that day—took her left arm. Margie walked calmly and steadily to the block and climbed the stairs up onto it, regarding the noose in front of her with no expression in her face at all. I reached over and quickly slipped the noose over her head and around her neck, cinching it under her right ear. She looked at me briefly, and in a calm voice she said simply, “I’ll do it.” Without an assist from us she calmly stepped into space, dropped, stopped, and swung.
   Margie’s legs splayed a bit as she began to kick, and I noticed her tongue came out immediately. She seemed to be grunting as her white, tattooed body twisted and twirled at the end of the rope, over and over, “Uh…uh…uh…” She beat her cuffed hands against the small of her back, twisting them until her wrists bled. After a minute or so she tried “bunny hopping” to catch a breath, and that kept up for a good two minutes, her tits flopping and bouncing merrily, when there was a resumption of the kicking for a time and then suddenly she sagged and began to twitch.
   “All right,” said the watch commander quietly. “Let’s do number two.” He led us back to the cell doors and opened the peephole on the second cell.
   Julia had her face to the wall and the female guard was just untying her hospital gown and letting it fall when I entered the cell. This time it was my turn to do the cuffing. I stepped up behind her with the cuffs, the female guard gently brought her arms behind her back, and I snapped the steel over her wrists. Her hands were a little plump, but shapely, and I saw that she was red-headed, and her back and her buttocks were powdered with freckles. She turned around and I saw a full-figured woman, heavy but not fat, perfectly proportioned, with two of the most magnificent knockers I had ever seen and a fiery red bush. Her face was stunned, like a deer in the headlights, and I notice that her whole body was glistening with sweat, the acrid sweat of fear.
   Julia didn’t say anything as we led her out. She faltered briefly when she saw the noose, and walked up the steps slowly but on her own. I looked over and I saw that Margie was still alive, swinging slowly, her legs weaving drunkenly and her toes straining for a floor they would never feel again. (As an aside, I am sometimes asked how the women who are last in line for execution react when they step out onto the gallows and they see four or five or more other naked female bodies dangling on ropes, some of them still kicking and writhing and strangling. My answer to that may sound odd, but it’s true: they almost never look down the row, because their own noose is in front of them and that’s all they see. They’re fascinated by it. The few times I have seen a condemned woman look at those who were hanged before her, it’s like they don’t take it in. Their eyes turn back to their own noose.)
   I slipped the noose over Julia’s head and closed it under her right ear. She didn’t look at me, but instead closed her eyes and started drawing in deep, deep breath after breath, quickly, hyperventilating almost, trying to suck as much air and oxygen into her body as possible. I’ve noticed that a lot of women on the gallows do this. It’s not a good idea, because it simply prolongs the agony, but I suppose it’s almost instinctive when you know your breath is about to be choked off forever. Dave and I placed our hands on Julia’s back and gently propelled her forward. She balked and I thought for a moment she was going to start struggling, but we resumed the pressure on her back, and this time she let herself move forward until she dropped. Her tits were large enough so that even from behind I could see them flop as she plunged and the rope snapped and creaked and she was suspended.
   Julia’s head started rolling back and forth immediately, but unlike Margie whose tongue had protruded instantly, Julia’s teeth were clenched and her face was a twisted rictus of pain. Her neck was thick and her body heavy, and you could see the rope biting into it, burning itself into her flesh. Her legs kicked frantically and her cuffed hands behind her back clenched and unclenched repeatedly, twisting and turning to try and get out of the cuffs so she could grab the rope. Julia did the “scissors” for a bit, straightened legs going back and forth like scissors. Then she bunny-hopped for possibly a minute, trying to draw at least one gasping breath, without success. Her fine breasts bounced and jiggled like Jello. Back and forth she swung like a pendulum, first scissoring, then bunny-hopping and doing what is called the “staircase,” bending and kicking her legs like she was trying to climb an invisible stair. (This is also sometimes called the “bicycle.”) She grew weaker and weaker before settling down after maybe five minutes into a long, slow writhe of agony, her body twirling slowly on the rope.
   “Okay, she’s well on her way,” said the watch commander. “You two can stand easy now,” he told Thompson and me. “Just keep an eye on your two ladies and make a note of the time when they shit. Wait, there goes one now.” I heard a kind of splattering and saw that urine and a stream of loose bowel movement were running down Margie’s legs. The watch commander jotted down the time in his notebook. “Number one danced at 9:02, crapped out at 9:14. Okay, Maxwell and Jablonski, front and center for number three.” For the rest of the executions, until the time came that evening to take the bodies down from the gallows, Thompson and I were just spectators, except for the fact that I made a note when Julia voided her bowels at 9:23 A.M.
   Naima was led out, naked and cuffed and staring, her high-breasted, caramel-colored body long and lean and lithe and also covered with the sweat of fear. She stared at the noose before her in pure horror. Officer Maxwell flipped it expertly over her head and drew her long curling black hair through it before fitting it nice and snug under her chin. She said nothing until she was slid into space, but I have to say that Naima performed one of the most exuberant and exciting Dances of Death I’ve ever witnessed. I have seen few hanged women fight for life as long and as hard as that black girl did. She twirled and kicked and lunged and leaped on the rope, her legs scissoring at incredible speed, then launching into lashing kicks, then climbing the stairs. Her breasts were doing things most exotic dancers only dream of. It was obvious from the way her bulging eyes kept looking at the block that Naima wanted to get back onto it so she could draw at least one more
breath of life, and twice she actually managed it for a second or so, until the guard pushed her feet off and set her swinging again. She danced at full throttle for almost ten full minutes, bunny-hopping and I think actually managing to get a little air into her tortured lungs, before she finally relaxed and drooped and turned silent at the end of the rope. Unconscious, but not dead. Naima didn’t actually empty her bowels and bladder until almost twenty minutes after she was suspended.
Then came the young Asian girl, Mei Ling. She was chattering in Chinese, pleading for mercy no doubt, a small girl with pale breasts and shoulder-length black hair. She fidgeted for seven or eight minutes, then her tongue slid out of her mouth and I saw that light I mentioned go out in her eyes. Hers was the quickest death that day, which was odd, because physically she was the lightest. But hanging ropes do strange things to different people, I learned.
   Next came Kristy, seventeen years old, blonde, all-American cheerleader type, naked and handcuffed and sobbing. “I’m sorry…I’m sorry…please, please don’t kill me!” But they killed her anyway. As they dropped the noose over her head she begged them piteously, “Will it hurt? Please don’t hurt me!” She gave a scream as she was assisted off the block by her two hangmen, a scream that was cut short by the snap of the rope. Kristy gurgled and her mouth foamed with saliva. She danced a long time, and she was the first I would see do what we call the “chair”, drawing her knees up almost parallel with her waist and letting them hang there for many seconds, almost like she was sitting in a chair. Kristy’s face was contorted and staring, and she looked down at all of us one by one as she swung back and forth, watching us watch her as she died. Her pert young breasts quivered, and poured with sweat while she bunny-hopped for breath and then scissored for a minute at a time before trying another bunny hop or two. Finally her legs hung limp, but her head still rolled and drool bubbled from her mouth. I could hear her gasping for the last minute or so of her life, and then came the trickle and plop and smell of her bowels and bladder emptying out.
   Last but not least there was Audrey. Tall, her body white as marble, long black hair and green eyes, and finely sculpted silicone-enhanced breasts with implants she had made her network pay for. Dark triangular bush, an incongruous pair of horn-rimmed spectacles on her face. I heard her say from the cell, “No, please, leave them on. I want to see.” So she stepped out naked and cuffed except for her eyeglasses, which were riveted on the noose in front of her. She was led up onto the block as if in a trance. The right hand guard took the glasses off her face and tossed them down to me, reached out and took the noose, and as he tried to slip it over her head Audrey began to struggle. She didn’t scream or say anything, but simply jerked her head back and forth, trying to avoid the noose falling down around her neck. The left-hand guard, who had met this tactic before, reached up and grabbed Audrey’s hair and pulled her head back sharply. The right hand guard slipped
the noose around her neck and then pulled her hair forward and out of the noose so it wouldn’t interfere with the constriction, and cinched it tight. Then they eased Audrey’s body forward and she stumbled off the block and swung into the air.
   Audrey’s death I actually made a few notes on, and it’s fairly typical. She kicked full force for approximately ninety seconds, then twirled a bit, then bunny-hopped as she swung back and forth for possibly a minute. Then she climbed the stair for about thirty seconds, then more twirling, then she scissored for about a minute, then more bunny-hopping for another minute. Her breasts bounced and wobbled and her chest heaved. Her head was at a sharp angle, her eyes goggling but still conscious and perceiving, and her tongue partly protruded but still pink. There was frantic tearing at her cuff-confined wrists, with bleeding, and I noticed the same convulsive thumping of her bound hands into the small of Audrey’s back that I had noticed when I hanged Margie. In the sixth minute her twisting and turning seems to have gotten her a brief moment or two where she could breathe a little. I distinctly heard Audrey gasping. In minute seven the scissoring began again, then she climbed the stair again for not quite the full minute, and then the quivering and twitching began, accompanied by rolling of the head and foaming from the mouth. From about the ninth minute on she mostly hung still and swung only slightly, but Audrey’s eyes were still conscious and followed us as we moved on the platform. In minute twelve there was a brief, weak spasm of kicking—I noticed that she had actually painted her toenails before walking onto the gallows—followed by an odd sounding series of long, gulping gasps that drew no air. Her tongue now rolled out fully and it was blue from lack of oxygen. Even if she had been cut down at that moment she would almost certainly have been brain dead. Then she was quiet until minute fifteen when she gurgled and jerked and then shit and pissed. Her eye-light went out about a minute later, and Audrey was dead.
   The prison doctor stood on his stool and put his stethoscope on the no longer quivering breasts of each woman, and pronounced them all dead. The watch commander escorted the witnesses out of the execution chamber, and we locked up and went off to the chow hall for breakfast. The bodies of the condemned women would be left hanging from the gallows for another five hours, until we began taking them down and cleaning up at 3 PM. Just to make sure they were dead.
Before leaving I looked down the row and saw six naked female bodies hanging on ropes, slowly turning in the breeze from the air conditioning. It is a profound and solemn and deeply impressive sight that never fails to awe me on every Friday morning, when justice is done and we implement the Alderson Protocol.

Copyright by Hogarth Hemp (2006).

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