Death at Midnight: The Confession of an Executioner written by Donald A. Cabana with its bright green title and the front-and-center image of a gas chamber is not a book that can be easily misjudged by the cover; it is unflinching, somber, and agonizingly, brutally, honest and thought-provoking.
Dr. Cabana’s use of descriptive language would (and did) make creative writers weep in envy of his visceral images crafted through deceptively complex sentences. With just a few words and little effort on the part of the imagination of the reader, Dr. Cabana paints pictures of the reality of execution that most people would prefer to forget; the people being executed are still human beings with thoughts, hopes, fears, and desires.
Trying to summarize this book does it no justice. The book begins at the end for an inmate by the name of Connie Ray Evans, a death row inmate who was sentenced to execution for the murder of a gas station clerk during a robbery. It’s a rather fitting beginning since there’s no way to ease into a topic like this, it’s an all-in, all-at-once, in-your-face issue. No amount of preparation or philosophical discussion can prepare you for the reality of the death penalty, just as no amount of testing can prepare one for the reality of the execution via gas chamber. Dr. Cabana’s horror over the reality of execution, made worse by the fact that he himself liked Connie Ray Evans as a person, is easily felt in the first chapter. It only gets heavier from there as more context is provided in the following chapters.
While the book brings in information about the legality of the death penalty, never once does it feel like the clinical, somewhat distanced philosophical approach one would expect of a lecture or lesson from a Criminal Justice teacher. Given that Dr. Cabana is more invested in the human aspect of the situation, this comes as no surprise, but is, instead, refreshingly raw. Nothing about this book is clinical or distanced. Dr. Cabana was faced with the reality of the death penalty and the personhood of those caught under the weight of such a practice and makes sure everyone who reads his book is faced with it as well. Death at Midnight makes the reader confront the reality that when discussing the death penalty, people like to forget that the people being put to death are, like all humans, complex and nuanced beings; they are infinitely more than the crimes they have committed, whether society wants to acknowledge that or not. As Dr. Cabana puts it:
Executions strip away the veneer of life for both warden and prisoner. Connie Ray Evans and I transcended our environment, and the roles in which they had been cast. The two of us had somehow managed to become real people to each other. There were no more titles or social barriers behind which either of us could hide—I was no longer a prison warden and he had become someone other than a condemned prisoner. We were just two ordinary human beings caught up in a vortex of events that neither of us could control. (16)
Never once does Dr. Cabana let us forget that these are people, regardless of their circumstances. Even when faced with the death of a staff member of the prison by an inmate, Dr. Cabana still treats the man with compassion despite his own anger.
When I first started this book, I was not prepared for it. I could tell from the cover this was going to be a book that would emotionally impact me, but I still wasn’t prepared for how much. There were several times I had to put the book down and walk away from it because I was so overwhelmed by the raw brutality of the words. I knew I was getting into something heavy, but I still wasn’t prepared. There is no way to read this book and maintain emotional distance because this isn’t fiction. This isn’t The Green Mile where you can remind yourself that it’s just a story; this is a confession, plain and simple. Dr. Cabana declaring “you are my friend, Connie . . . I won’t forget you” (187) moments before being the one to order the lever drop on the gas chamber is heartbreaking and without doubt one of the most emotionally devastating things I have ever read.
Everyone should read this book, even if for no other reason than to remember that we are all flawed but nuanced creatures with infinitely more to each of us than a single moment of our legacies, and these nuances deserve to be explored.