Bowden had an IQ of 59. And the people of Georgia, to their credit, were so appalled that a law was passed just two years later exempting the mentally retarded from the death penalty. Yet Bowden’s last words were not heard by anyone other than a handful of witnesses until two weeks ago, when WNYC Radio, in conjunction with the documentary production company Sound Portraits, broadcast “The Execution Tapes” — audio tapes from death row that had come into the possession of a Georgia lawyer. (The tapes can be heard at www.soundportraits.org.)

Most of the tapes consist of prison officials describing executions. There is, for instance, this moment-by-moment narration of the execution of Ivon Ray Stanley, IQ of 62, who was electrocuted for the murder of an insurance salesman despite evidence that he was merely a bystander.

“By a count of three, press your button. One, two, three,” intones an anonymous official. An echoey clanging sound can be heard. Then: “The execution is now in progress. When the first surge entered his body, he stiffened and I heard a pop, as if one of the straps broke, but I can’t tell from this vantage point. He is still at this time sitting there with clenched fists but no other movement. He’s slowly relaxin’ at this time.”

Civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate, a Phoenix contributor, says “The Execution Tapes” remind him of Shoah, the nine-and-a-half-hour 1985 Holocaust documentary, in the way that the “emotionless bureaucracy” of Georgia’s killing machine is captured for all to hear. “They’re no more evil in a lot of ways than the people who work at the post office, or General Motors,” Silverglate says of the executioners.

Silverglate, like Emily Rooney, favors televising executions on First Amendment grounds. Though he fears that such a step might well lead to a coarsening or brutalization of the culture, he says, “We have a certain faith that in the long run it’s better to have an open society than a closed society. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that people have to know what’s going on in the name of the government.”

IN A very real sense, Timothy McVeigh makes it too easy to talk about the death penalty, whether we should see it, and why. More than any well-known condemned prisoner — more than John Wayne Gacy, more than Ted Bundy — McVeigh represents the face of pure evil. “I can’t speak for all death-penalty opponents, but I don’t think a majority are going to be shedding a tear for Mr. McVeigh,” Joshua Rubenstein, Northeast regional director of Amnesty International USA, told the Phoenix last week. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once observed that “hard cases make bad law.” McVeigh is proof that, sometimes, easy cases make bad law too.

As for whether McVeigh should be executed on television, in public, his demise will take place amid such heavy media scrutiny that it hardly seems to matter.

Yet McVeigh’s death will mark another step down the road to a more brutalized culture. It is, for the federal government, the perfect execution, and one chosen almost as if by design: McVeigh will be the first inmate to be executed under the 1994 restoration of the federal death penalty because Bill Clinton, before leaving office, granted a six-month stay of execution to Juan Garza, a Hispanic drug dealer from Texas.

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, calls McVeigh’s upcoming execution “a free ride for the federal death penalty.” A white man who had a good lawyer will die for unspeakable acts of which he is unquestionably guilty — thus giving a boost, Dieter notes, to “a system that is as unfair and biased or worse than that used by any of the states.” This is McVeigh as human sacrifice, dying for the black, the marginalized, the retarded, the poor, the lawyers both conscious and unconscious, both sober and drunk.

And, of course, the system will be administered for the next four years by George W. Bush, who presided over the nation’s most fearsome killing machine as governor of Texas, and who is so callous that he once mocked Karla Faye Tucker, an ax-murderer-turned-born-again-Christian who was put down on his watch.

Put down, that is, like a dog on her last trip to the vet’s.

Our current system of death has evolved as the perfect response to a culture closely divided between Blue and Red, between those who oppose the death penalty and those who favor it. It’s a system designed to produce complacency. Neither side has to think about it too much. No one has to look.

But being able to watch the government mete out the ultimate penalty is a constitutional necessity. It is our right. And, whether the immediate effect would be for good or for ill, it would shake us out of a complacency that we should never be allowed to feel for what is being done in our name, behind our backs, out of view and out of mind.

Additional reporting and research by Susan Ryan-Vollmar. Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.