Q. How does the State make certain it’s executing the right person?
A. Prior to any execution attempt, your identity will be surreptitiously confirmed using sophisticated DNA-fingerprinting autoradiograph techniques developed by the LAPD Forensic Crime Laboratory.
Q. What will happen to me after I’m killed?
A. You will experience a sense of well-being. You (i.e., your soul) will separate from your body. You will travel through a dark tunnel. Emerging from this darkness, you will encounter a field of white radiant light. And you will enter this light. You will conduct a review of your life. You may encounter a “presence.” You will probably meet deceased loved ones. At some juncture, you may hear what you think is your body calling out, beseeching you. Do not return to your body! This bark or whooping sound is made by a spasm in the muscles of the voice box caused by increased acidity in the blood of the corpse.
Your body will undergo rigor mortis (rigidity), livor mortis (discoloration due to settling of blood), and algor mortis (cooling). Tissue will break down through enzymatic action, and putrefaction will ensue through the decomposition of proteins by bacteria. Your body will be colonized by necrophage insects, including blowfly larvae and saprophagous beetles, and within three to six months, caseic fermentation should occur.
Q. This is a change of subject, but — Why, after he’d been so successful as a starting pitcher and in fact had recently thrown a no-hitter against the Boston Red Sox, was Dave Righetti pulled from the starting rotation and put in the Yankee bullpen? Was this just the result of one of Steinbrenner’s autocratic tantrums, or was there some sound baseball reasoning behind the decision?
A. The months following Righetti’s July Fourth no-hitter against the Boston Red Sox were among the most tumultuous in Yankee history. Players had the locker room repainted, replacing the traditional Yankee pinstripe motif with gyrating chained dancers and huge flying griffins bearing futuristic bare-breasted Valkyries with laser guns. Each game was preceded by a ritual team circle jerk. Post-game revels raged into the early morning. It was not unusual to find Meg Tilly, Teri Hatcher, Amanda Plummer, Vanessa Williams, Jaye Davidson, Kate Capshaw, Janet Reno, Daphne Zuniga, Helena Bonham Carter, and the like sprawled languidly across the locker-room floor as players sipped sweat from their navels with teeny coke spoons. Sports fans will not soon forget the image of a simpering Don Mattingly injecting Ritalin into his neck for the benefit of press photographers. Steinbrenner’s capricious mean streak was exacerbated by the cheese-free diet he’d been put on by his cardiologist. One minute, he seemed too spaced out to recognize anyone; the next, he was clubbing or pistol-whipping whoever was handy. Predictably, players and coaches oscillated between rhapsody and despair, their heady self-confidence undermined by an involuntary nihilism. Righetti, the crotch of his uniform distended by the heavy cock rings he now insisted on wearing when he pitched, circumambulated the mound between pitches muttering what a New York Post headline described as “Hermetic Incantations and Insane Glossolalia!” Righetti was ultimately placed on the disabled list and committed by Steinbrenner to the psychiatric hospital in Rodez, France, where the visionary dramatic theorist and poet Antonin Artaud had undergone sixty convulsive shock treatments. Pledging that his star pitcher would receive “the finest care money can buy,” Steinbrenner stipulated that Righetti be given sixty-one convulsive shock treatments — one for each of the home runs Roger Maris hit in 1961. Three weeks later, Righetti rejoined the team in Kansas City. That night, in the eleventh inning, Yankee utility infielder Hector Peña hit a mammoth 600-foot shot to dead center field. Following a protest by Royals manager Dick Howser that Peña was using an illegally doctored bat, umpires confiscated his Louisville Slugger, sawed it open, and discovered two pounds of stolen Russian plutonium. The Yankees were forced to forfeit the game and effectively dropped out of pennant contention. That off-season, in an effort to restore morale, Steinbrenner took the team on a tour of Japan, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. Although several Yankees tore anterior cruciate ligaments slipping on the raspberry-colored snail-egg pods that litter ballparks in the Mekong lowlands of southwest Laos, and during a game in the Mujahedeen Dome in Kabul, Afghanistan, rookie prospect Andre Knoblauch lost his legs when he stepped on a land mine chasing a line-drive hit into the gap in left-center, the trip was a great success. Steinbrenner was particularly impressed with the custom practiced by Japanese players of wearing glass vials of potassium cyanide on cords around their necks. And in an exhibition game against the Yomiuri Giants, a Yomiuri player, caught in a run-down between second and third base, did indeed swallow his suicide capsule rather than suffer the ignominy of being tagged out. The Yankees returned to the United States, proceeding directly to Fort Lauderdale, and throughout spring training they evinced a renewed esprit de corps and seriousness of purpose. The new season began with extremely high expectations. But on opening day, several hours before game time, as starting pitcher Dave Righetti napped on a training table, his fingers interlocked behind his head, Knoblauch — in a stupid rookie prank — put a caramel apple in Righetti’s left armpit. When Righetti awoke and discovered the caramel apple stuck fast to the armpit of his pitching arm, he panicked and, seizing the wooden stick, wildly pried the agglutinated candy-coated winesap from his body, taking several layers of torn flesh with it. Righetti was rushed to a nearby hospital where surgeons performed an emergency graft using 53 infant foreskins donated by a Bronx mohel who was a rabid Yankee fan and had heard what happened on his car radio. Righetti returned to the stadium in time to pitch two innings of hitless relief, and remained in the bullpen for the rest of his tenure with the New York Yankees.
Q. Could innocent people who happen to be near me at the time of my New Jersey State Discretionary Execution also be killed or injured?
A. Yes! It’s quite possible that bystanders unfortunate enough to be in your proximity during your execution attempt will be inadvertently killed or maimed. “Collateral damage” is an integral component of the NJSDE program, effectively increasing the degree and rapidity with which NJSDE releasees are stigmatized by, and ostracized from, their communities. The fact that being anywhere near you puts someone at risk of being killed or paralyzed by a stray 9-mm round, gruesomely disfigured by an errant machete, or blinded by a wayward crossbow arrow makes it unlikely that — in the gym, for instance — that person will choose the StairMaster next to yours, never mind join you in tucking away some sea leg fra diavolo and Chianti at the local trattoria, and less likely still that he or she will have sex with you later that evening. As an NJSDE releasee, you’ll be amazed not only at the corrosive anxiety of living with an indeterminate death sentence, but at how quickly you’ll be shunned as a pariah wherever you go. That’s why The American Spectator awarded NJSDE five bastinados — its highest rating — in a recent evaluation of state-funded internal security apparatus, calling it “A breath of fresh air … The most whimsical deterrent program in years!”