Who are the death row executioners? Disgraced doctors, suspended nurses and drunk drivers

[AStern]

These are just the US executioners we know. But they are a chilling indication of the executioners we don’t know

Corinna Lain
Thu 17 Apr 2025 07.00 EDT

Being an executioner is not the sort of job that gets posted in a local wanted ad. Kids don’t dream about being an executioner when they grow up, and people don’t go to school for it. So how does one become a death row executioner in the US, and who are the people doing it?

This was the question I couldn’t help but ask when I began a book project on lethal injection back in 2018. I’m a death penalty researcher, and I was trying to figure out why states are so breathtakingly bad at a procedure that we use on cats and dogs every day. Part of the riddle was who is performing these executions.

Seven years later – and with the Trump administration promising more executions to come – I have an answer, sort of.

We do not, and for the most part cannot, know precisely who is under the executioner’s hood. State secrecy statutes put the equivalent of a Harry Potter cloak of invisibility over these state-sanctioned killers. But litigation files and investigative journalism have revealed a number of executioners’ identities, allowing us to peek behind the veil of secrecy for a glimpse of who these people are.

Consider Missouri’s chief executioner from 1995-2006, Dr Alan Doerhoff, who was responsible for 54 of Missouri’s 65 executions between 1976 and 2006. He didn’t push the syringes – shockingly, non-medical prison guards did that – but he did most everything else. “Nobody will ever do as many [executions] as I have,” he would later boast.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/17/death-row-executioners

[WarGamer]

1. Even the firing squad took 3-4 minutes for Doctor to declare death.

A wood chipper would turn out the lights pretty much instantly.