SULLIVAN SPEAKS eloquently to the moral argument for televising executions. Equally important is the constitutional argument. For years, broadcasters as varied as former talk-show host Phil Donahue and 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace have argued that the government has no right to stop the media from covering executions. Donahue went to the Supreme Court, and lost. Wallace put a proxy execution — the death of one of Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s patient-victims — on the air, provoking a public outcry and landing Kevorkian in prison, possibly for the rest of his life.

The media are not completely banned from covering executions, of course. Print reporters are allowed in, and 10 will be at McVeigh’s. (Also attending, as a guest of McVeigh’s, weirdly enough, will be Gore Vidal, who’s exchanged letters with McVeigh in which they’ve expounded on their anti-government views, and who plans to write about the execution for Vanity Fair.) Members of the print press will be able to take notes, and to report on what they see and hear. But the First Amendment does not specify which reporting techniques are constitutionally acceptable and which are not. And this is the television age.

Emily Rooney, the host of Greater Boston, on WGBH-TV (Channel 2), has been arguing for more than 10 years that executions should be carried on television. “I feel passionately about this,” says Rooney, who’s been a news director at WCVB-TV (Channel 5) and an executive at ABC News and the Fox News Channel. “I believe we have the right to have access to something like this that is part of our government in action. Period.” (Disclosure: I’m a semi-regular paid guest on Greater Boston’s Friday “Beat the Press” roundtable.)

The strength of the First Amendment argument is that it trumps the utilitarian concerns that televised executions might whip up hysteria among the condemned’s supporters, or intrude on his right to privacy, or lead to prison riots.

For instance, when I asked Rooney whether she has a position on the death penalty, she replied, “I do, but I’m not even going to tell you what it is. This is a freedom-of-the-press, right-of-access argument.” And when I asked her whether she was concerned that televising McVeigh’s execution could reignite the right-wing militia movement (something McVeigh himself probably had in mind when he asked that his execution be televised), she said, “I refuse to participate in a political discussion on this. I have the right to see it because it is the ultimate intervention of our government.”

In fact, though Rooney doesn’t put it this way, all the concerns raised by opponents of televised executions would be better solved by abolishing the death penalty than by preventing us from seeing what is being done in our name.

That’s not to say there aren’t legitimate worries about televising executions. It may not turn out, as some death-penalty opponents like to think, that such broadcasts would diminish public support for capital punishment — support that’s already on the wane, thanks to a number of widely publicized wrongful convictions in recent years. Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center on Violence at Northeastern University, says televised lethal injections could be so dull as to leave people even more inured to the death penalty than they already are.

“It’ll draw big ratings the first time, but when people realize how boring it is they won’t watch anymore,” Levin says, arguing that in terms of “visceral brutality,” such executions “pale in comparison with R-rated slasher films that teenagers see every day.” Conversely, Levin also points to evidence that, dull or not, the death penalty already creates a “brutalization effect” in places where it is most often carried out. Not only is the death penalty not a deterrent, says Levin, but it can actually lead to an increase in violence. “Televising an execution may make the point even better,” he warns. “We’ve got to be very careful. The best-intentioned policies can produce a boomerang effect.”

Levin makes a good point. But, again, the brutalization effect would be more thoroughly avoided by ending the death penalty than by keeping TV cameras out of the death chamber.

NOT EVERY execution is boring. The Death Penalty Information Center, whose Web site (www.deathpenaltyinfo.org) is an invaluable source of anti-capital-punishment data, has posted a compilation by University of Florida professor Michael Radelet of so-called botched executions. Most of them involve the electric chair, which is rarely used these days. But lethal injection and other allegedly humane methods do not always work as intended.

Take, for instance, the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, put down in 1992 by then–Arkansas governor Bill Clinton just in time to boost his tough-on-crime credentials in the presidential primaries. According to Radelet, it took more than 50 minutes to find a suitable vein in Rector’s arm. Witnesses reportedly could hear the brain-damaged Rector, whose veins had been damaged by his use of antipsychotic medication, moan loudly eight times. Or take Pedro Medina, electrocuted in Florida just four years ago. Writes Radelet: “A crown of foot-high flames shot from the headpiece during the execution, filling the execution chamber with a stench of thick smoke and gagging the two dozen official witnesses.” And the electric chair is still used in Florida, although the condemned may choose lethal injection instead.

This is what is being done in our name. This is what our government doesn’t want us to see.

Before the 20th century, executions were always carried out in public, and their purpose was very different from that of today’s invisible deaths. In Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776-1865 (Oxford University Press, 1989), historian Louis P. Masur writes that hanging day was an opportunity for civil and religious leaders to join together “to display their authority and to convey the values they believed most fundamental to the preservation of the moral and social order of the community.” The role of the condemned, Masur notes, was to “perform the role of the true penitent at the gallows.” He adds: “For observers, this was perhaps the most dramatic episode in the theater of executions. How would the prisoner act at the gallows? What sort of moral vessel would the prisoner become?”

Such a public ritual of death may strike us as repellant today, but at least the participants understood what was happening, and did not shrink from their moral complicity in it. Contrast that with the execution of Jerome Bowden in Georgia in 1986. Just before his death, he delivered a rambling final statement in which he spoke mainly of his love of God, his sorrow for his acts (he’d murdered two women), and, incredibly, his thanks for the kindness of prison officials. “The old creature was destroyed and I became a new creature,” he said. “I know that the Lord is with me no matter what may happen.”