Gangster Presents... Killing Death Row

Gangster

BBC

True Crime, Documentary, Society & Culture

4.8 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 6 October 2023

⏱️ 4 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Join Livvy Haydock as she takes us deep into Death Row in the USA. While support for the Death Penalty in the US remains at over 50 per cent, there’s been a steady decline in the number of executions – from the modern era peak of 98 in 1999 to just 18 in 2023 so far. Only a handful of states actually carry out the killings. It’s even become more difficult for executioners to get hold of the drugs used in lethal injections, which is what led Livvy Haydock to a surreal story about a man in Acton, West London, who was supplying these lethal drugs to state penitentiaries in the US, and on to the macabre world of Death Row – and the people who live, work, and die on it.

Whether it’s the bizarre hunt for new lethal injection supplies, or the tip of the glasses that mark an executioner’s signal, Livvy goes right behind the scenes into the chamber itself to examine the pressures on the system that have left just 5 US states actively carrying out executions this year and around 2,400 Death Row prisoners in limbo. We’ll hear from an inmate waiting to die, and one saved at the last moment. We’ll chat to the wardens who make it happen, and the campaigners who want to stop it. And throughout it all, we’ll discover the possible future for Death Row in the only western democracy still carrying out capital punishment.

Listen first on BBC Sounds from Friday 13 October 2023.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the
0:03.8	podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.
0:08.6	It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.
0:15.3	What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism
0:19.8	and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.
0:23.7	And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject
0:28.4	you might not even have thought you were interested in.
0:30.2	Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,
0:36.1	you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.
0:39.7	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:44.6	I just would take my glasses off in execution.
0:46.9	It would start.
0:49.7	It gets to be routine to take those glasses off and give that signal. But the first time I did it was an unbelievable
0:57.0	feeling.
0:58.0	There are people in the USA whose job it is to help kill other people.
1:05.0	Have you ever wondered what that's like?
1:09.0	It's a hell of a thing to watch a man die.
1:14.0	I'm Livy Hey Duck.
1:17.0	I make the Gangster Podcast, and now I've got a six-part podcast from BBC Radio 4 called Killing Death Row.
1:28.1	I got interested in death row because I once heard the wildest story about a lack of death row drugs.
1:34.4	Drugs used in some of the executions are supplied by a British businessman.
1:38.9	Even more bizarre man who runs his business out of an extremely modest little driving school in a rundown area of West London.
	...

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