Ohio's minute-by-minute execution logs
The Associated Press obtained the records of the final hours 23 people executed in Ohio since 1999.
The executions are carried out at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, where guards maintain a running computer log from the time a condemned inmate arrives at the prison in the Appalachian foothills to the moment a funeral director leaves with the body a day later.
Through a public-records request, The Associated Press obtained copies of the logs to more fully examine how the state carries out the death penalty. The request was filed after one execution was delayed because of problems finding a vein for the injection.
Peppered with intimate details yet deliberately emotionless in tone, the logs' exhaustive entries sweep up the mundane and the moving in the sparsest and at times coldest of diaries. The log keepers offer no opinion, attempt no creative flourishes.
[...]Prison employees, who volunteer for the job and are not identified, compile the log, with occasional spelling or grammar errors, at a Dell computer. They sit at a desk directly across from the 12-foot by 14-foot holding cell where condemned inmates spend their last day, 17 steps from the death chamber. [AP]
Read the whole thing, it's a truly horrifying story.
Republican congressman 
