Pretending to die is not typically part of a correctional officer's job,

unless they're part of the team that has to carry out an execution.

Before we continue a warning that we're going to be describing how an execution is carried out which might disturb some listeners.

Katarino Escobar was a correctional officer for the Nevada State Prison System,

and he recalls taking part in a rehearsal ahead of a scheduled execution.

So, the last execution, I played the inmate, there was no bench, there was nothing, and I'm just playing along.

And at first Escobar says he was handling it just fine.

He wasn't even nervous when his colleagues handcuffed him and escorted him out of the holding cell,

but then the other officers took him into the same gas chamber where 23 people had been put to death.

And when I walked in there, something happened.

I started thinking of my mom, I started thinking of my brothers.

That gas chamber is the size of a bathroom stall with huge windows on the sides.

And when the team began to strap Escobar down to the gurney inside that small room, he says everything started to feel different.

It was so real that the environment within the gas chamber changed.

I believed that I was being executed. I wasn't acting or playing no longer.

16 years later, he still thinks about how it changed him.

It doesn't matter how you look at it, you participate in taking a human being's life.

And that is not what we take in lightly.

Consider this. Hundreds of people involved in executions say their health has suffered because of it,

and the government has done little to help them.

From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Thursday, November 17th.

It's considered this from NPR.

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