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Antiwar Radio All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Thanks for listening.
I'm Scott Orton, and our first guest today on the show is Jason Zannon.
Geez, I should have asked him how to pronounce his name right, but that's probably pretty close.
He put together this really interesting website.
It's called executedtoday.com.
Welcome to the show, Jason.
How are you?
I'm great, Scott.
How are you today?
I'm doing great.
Did I say your name right?
It's actually Zannon, but you wrote the name like Zannon.
You learned not to be particular about how people say it.
Right.
Well, I should have asked you before we went on the air, and then, you know.
I'm going to spell it out phonetically here, and then maybe I'll get it right when we go out to the first break.
We'll see.
Anyway, so Jason Zannon, from executedtoday.com, where did you get the idea for this site?
Somewhere in the dark recesses of the human soul.
I think it's just always been kind of knocking around.
It's an almanac site, ties historical executions to the anniversary dates that they occur.
I don't know where it came from, actually.
I think it predates the Internet.
I always had kind of an idea that it would be kind of a cool, dark coffee table book, and then sort of the blogging format really made it the way to go.
Cool.
Well, I've been really enjoying getting these in my email every morning.
Everybody, you can sign up for the daily email.
It's just like, oh, on this day in history, only every day it's somebody who was murdered by the state.
And I guess you don't pick just Jeffrey Dahmer, or I guess he was killed in prison by another prisoner.
But anyway, you don't pick regular just death penalty cases, right?
This is all political, or not all?
It's not all political.
I really try to cover the gamut.
I mean, to me, and other people may have different reading preferences, but I guess, you know, it wouldn't be that difficult to write this site, and every single day is like, you know, someone who killed his wife for the insurance policy, or some, you know, miscellaneous mass murderer.
Right.
But that would be, I mean, fundamentally be kind of repetitive.
So I do a little of that, because that's part of the picture of the death penalty, right?
It's more interesting to me is when you can use it as a window into some sort of historical situation, just a wide variety of ways that people have lived and died.
Now, one of my favorite anti-war conservatives is the great John Basil Utley.
He writes for us at antiwar.com, and he keeps the site Americans Against World Empire at againstbombing.org, I think it is.
And his mother, Freda Utley, was a famous anti-communist writer.
Back in the days wrote a China story, I think is what it's called.
And he's the one who turned me on to this site and said I should take a look.
And then the link he sent was your coverage of the execution of John Basil Utley's father by the Soviet tyranny.
Why don't you tell us that story?
Well, and much of what I write is ultimately kind of secondarily sourced.
So John Utley himself dug up a lot of this story, as did his mother over a period of decades.
But basically, his father was a Soviet citizen, a Russian Jew, and just got one of these sort of knocks on the door of the apartment in the middle of the night when John was an infant.
And they never saw him again.
And so Freda and her youth, Freda Utley, had been sort of leftist and met John Utley's father.
His name was Arkady.
They ended up moving back to the Soviet Union.
But this also sort of occurred about the time they were kind of getting disillusioned that they had actually given John Utley his mother's name, so it would be a little bit easier passport control if they had to make a kind of quick exit if he had a foreign name.
But anyway, so he sort of disappeared into the Soviet gulag, and Freda and John fled the country.
And they had some influential friends they could call on.
So they were going through George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell and sort of contacts with ambassadors and things like this, trying to get some kind of information, and they were ultimately able to find out that he died in the camp.
But it wasn't until after the Soviet Union collapsed and it became possible for relatives of the deceased to request information about the fate of people who had been arrested and political purges for John Utley to get the files, which I think happened in the early 2000s.
It was all at risk of making a mistake.
And he ultimately went back and sort of visited the prison camp in the Arctic Circle, where it turned out that Arkady had been shot by a firing squad.
Yeah, I mean, imagine really living your whole life without your dad, and you don't even know what happened to him.
You know that the NKVD came and got him in the middle of the night, and that's the last you heard.
Right.
Kind of reminds me, actually, of a picture that I saw of a maybe nine- or ten-year-old kid in Iraq with a little cardboard sign that said, Please, where is my father?
I guess it was the American NKVD that came and got him.
Right.
That's not what we call them, though.
We call them heroes.
No, no, indeed.
And obviously, you know, a case like this, which we know basically because he had a foreign wife and a foreign son that were able to push this later, stands in for lots of people who died in ways that are not necessarily executions per se.
So, I mean, you know, to the person on the receiving end of it, a firing squad or a cluster bomb is about very much the same thing.
So, my side, I try to keep fairly well focused, but, you know, in a sense, these people are also standing in for this sort of complex of institutional violence that they live in.
So, most people in the Gulag weren't executed by firing squads or just worked to death or, you know, died from maltreatment.
Right.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so, on the front page of Executed Today, you have a button over here on the right side, ten executions that defined the 2000s.
Let's talk about that a little bit.
Oh, this is classic blogger link bait, you know, top ten lists and things like that.
So, this went up at the end of the 2000s, and I was just trying to capture the view at that moment of what are some of the most memorable, noteworthy executions of that decade.
So, obviously, Saddam Hussein is a clear number one on that list.
But it's, you know, it's a spatter.
It's guys in sort of different situations.
The second guy on that list is the former head of China's Food and Drug Administration.
Anglicizing the title, who basically took bribes to rubber stamp dangerous products, and China made an example out of him shortly before the Olympics.
You know, the Bali bombers, the terrorist bombing in Indonesia were executed in 2008.
One of the ones that's sort of most powerful now is Cameron Todd Willingham, who you may remember is a subject of a profile in The New Yorker a couple of years ago, basically exploded the case, the state's pseudoscience arson case against him.
All right, I remember his story.
Yeah, explain that one in a little more detail, please.
Well, he's one of the strongest sort of potential wrongful execution cases, which, of course, has not been officially acknowledged by the state in any way.
And a lot of this information was actually available when he was executed in 2004.
He basically, his house burned down while he was in it and his children, I think three children, if I've got that right.
And he got out of the house, but his very young children did not.
And so they charged him with arson.
And, you know, sort of based on that and some circumstantial stuff that like he was allegedly a party boy.
And so therefore, the fact that he had kids was going to, you know, was crippling his lifestyle.
And he didn't look adequately concerned about getting back into this burning house when he got out.
So it's it's a sort of circumstantial stuff.
And they brought in a forensic testimony, which happens very frequently.
And you get these sort of forensic testimonies that have the imprimatur of science upon them to provide the definitive evidence for the jury.
And yet these burn patterns that we could observe proved that he poured kerosene on the floor as an accelerant.
And so obviously he started the fire.
Well, and then it came out that, no, they were liars.
And the guy was already dead at Rick Perry's hand.
Right.
I said eventually.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
I don't want to put words in your mouth.
Hold it right there.
We'll be back, everybody.
With Jason Zinone right after this.
I think I said it wrong again.
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Inject our own because they probably won't come home anyway.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
Santaura Radio.
I'm Scott Wharton.
I'm talking with Jason Zinone about this awesome website, executedtoday.com.
Sign up for the e-mail list and you get a on this day in history, the state murdered this guy or this guy or that lady or whoever.
It's very interesting stuff.
And we're talking about this guy who was executed by the criminals that run the land of Texas.
This guy, Cameron Todd Willingham, 2004.
And I'm sorry, because we went out to break right at the good part there.
You said that the so-called forensic scientists, people testified at the trial that, oh, yeah, he had poured liquid accelerants all over the floor.
Then the state killed him.
And then what happened?
Well, one of the horrible thing about it, really, one can always be in a position to say retrospectively, oh, we screwed up.
And that's obviously awful.
I mean, the guy is dead.
But they were in a position to know that they had screwed up before they executed him.
He was convicted in the early 90s, at which point arson forensics at kind of a folklorish stage where it was sort of little bits of received wisdom that got handed around.
This is my understanding as a non-forensic investigator.
I welcome corrections from anybody who's in that position.
But essentially, it became a more sort of scientific and objective science over the succeeding years while he was on death row and his appeals were playing out.
But before his appeal, he maintained his innocence the entire time.
But before his execution and his clemency pitched to the governor, I think maybe the last sort of judicial filing or two that he had, he actually had arson investigators lined up, the same people basically who are being quoted now, and said, look, their scientific testimony for why this had to be arson not only makes no sense, but it actually correlates with why it would be an accidental fire.
And so you can actually see some video of this theory of action called flashover.
But, I mean, essentially, this is in the filing that went to Rick Perry.
And he was asking at that time for the 30-day stay, which the governor could grant so that they could investigate this a little bit more and make it an actual sort of ruling on this.
And he got short shrift from the governor at that time.
And this had been around in the anti-death penalty sort of community.
This was actually a guest post written by somebody in that world a couple of years before this thing came out in the New Yorker and really kind of made headlines.
But all that information was available to the state of Texas before they dropped the plunger.
And of course there's Carla Faye Tucker, who Bush mocked on Larry King, saying, oh, please don't kill me, which she had never said.
And this was a lady who had completely turned her life around and was helping everybody else in prison and whatever.
And I think every single faction of any religious community in all of America was begging for clemency for her.
And he went on TV mocking her, paraphrasing something she never even said.
And that was before the people of this country turned out by the tens of millions to make this man president, after he sat on national TV going, oh, please don't kill me, in her voice, supposedly.
I think that was in a private interview with Tucker Carlson.
I could be wrong about that.
No, it was Bush Jr.
Because Bush thought it was a friendly audience.
He thought he could do that kind of stuff.
He was so shocked that Bush realized he screwed up.
Oh, I thought it was Larry King.
But yeah, you may be right that it was Tucker.
That would be everywhere.
Yeah, amazing.
So anyway, everybody, the site is executed today.
It's about state murders of people for various reasons.
And they got one for 365 days.
And apparently you've got also on this day for quite a few of these, too.
So hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of notable historical executions.
And, in fact, it looks like the top one here, Thomas Hardy, is not a man who was executed, but a man who lived a particularly long and interesting life, witnessing executions of every description, huh?
Well, he only apparently saw two.
But, coincidentally, they were separated.
One was August 9th and one was August 10th of two years later.
So this gives me an excuse.
I was looking for excuses to get a little bit out of the business of strictly being about death, because it's plainly morbid.
Well, it says here that he wrote about the Napoleonic Wars all the way through the First World War.
Yeah, as well as basically he got sort of some of his short stories are kind of from stuff that his dad told him from the Napoleonic War days.
So the link there is to a short story about somebody who had a chance to assassinate Napoleon but didn't have the gun.
So it's one of his lesser works.
But he sort of spans this time where he was very much in the hanging business.
Very interesting.
So he wrote about war the whole time, or all different whatever?
Tell us more about this guy.
I'm going out of my depth to illiterate critiques about Thomas Hardy, but he's a gloomy kind of author.
Tess of D'Urberville is one of his most famous heroines dies by hanging at the end.
And so the one that's actually mentioned this day for August 9th, if you scroll further down on the page, is a woman that he actually saw hanged in 1856 who's thought to be sort of part of the inspiration for that.
She was a battered woman who kind of snapped in a confrontation with her husband that hatcheted him to death.
And then he was there and sort of witnessed her hanging very stoically and kind of disturbingly sexually.
But this thought to have sort of informed this character he created later.
Wow.
So I guess tell us some of your favorites from Executed today.
I was afraid you were going to ask that, and I was trying to think of what they are because you turned through them so quickly.
I revisit some of these things.
Like Old Friends I haven't seen in a while.
Oh, yeah, I haven't thought of that.
A couple of days ago, Hiroshima Day is also the anniversary date of the first use of the electric chair in the United States.
Really?
Which is a fantastic story of Americana.
Basically Thomas Edison was in a PR campaign to save his direct current electric empire, which would ultimately fail.
Oh, man, I don't like where this is going at all.
As you know it, it's going exactly where you think it's going.
Oh, no.
It definitely created this much more efficient alternating current, which was being run by West Vietnam, so they were a competition.
The word electrocution comes from these traveling road shows that Edison was doing electrocuting animals, large fauna up to elephants, to show how deadly alternating current was.
It's competitive as current, with the upshot of you don't want to wire houses in New York City this way because then if you touch the volt, you might just drop dead because this stuff is running around in your house.
It was a scare campaign.
So the electric chair was coming.
Simultaneously, New York was looking to replace Hain, which had had a couple of botches recently, and so they sort of made a nice little match.
Edison convinced, it was a lobby that helped convince the New York legislature to go with the electric chair using alternating current, Westinghouse's standard.
Westinghouse wouldn't sell them the generator, so they had to get it indirectly through resale from someone in Brazil or something like that.
And then on the 6th, August 6th, 1896, I may get that wrong, 1892, they tried it out on this guy William Kemmler, and it was a horrible botch.
Wow.
So can you do 10 more minutes here?
Absolutely.
Okay, great.
Everybody, I'm talking with Jason Zinone from executedtoday.com.
Sign up for the email list.
We'll be right back.
Anti-war radio.
Anti-government killing people radio.www.executedtoday.com All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm talking with Jason Zinone from executedtoday.com.
Sign up for the email list.
You can get this day in history, the state killed this guy or that guy, every morning in your email.
So a couple of notes here.
First of all, of course, you were absolutely right about George Bush and Carla Faye Tucker there.
It was a print article, a print interview that he did with Tucker Carlson.
The question was about Carla Faye Tucker on CNN, who, of course, never said what Bush paraphrased her as saying.
So, of course, you're exactly right about that.
And then, secondly, I wanted to say about George Bush that there was, before he was the president, and I think before he was even actually officially running for president, he did an interview with, I don't know, Country Time magazine or something.
It was a little hill country newspaper from one of those counties, West Austin somewhere, anyway.
And it had him with his pretend cowboy hat and all this and his feet up on the desk and whatever on the cover.
And they asked him about commuting the death penalty sentence of Henry Lee Lucas, the serial killer.
And, of course, the detail there was that he really was not guilty of the one that he was sentenced to death for.
He was in another state, and it was a proven fact, and it couldn't be.
So he had no choice but to commute the sentence.
But the way he explained it to the interviewer was, look, I've executed a lot of people, all right?
But on this one, you know, the lawyer said I really absolutely had to commute it because he was just in another state, and if we could get him on another one, we'd do that or something.
But that was his initial response was, I've executed a lot of people.
That's his defense of himself, this guy.
Right.
Anyway, so we're back to the first, or if you have something to say about that, go ahead.
Otherwise, back to this first execution with the electric chair on Hiroshima Day, 1945.
Yes, it's a nice confluence of events.
Love these guys.
So, wait a minute, you said this thing in 1945, this first one with the electric chair, was completely botched?
How long did it take the guy to fry?
I don't have the page up in front of me.
I'm not going to be able to quote it.
It took him, I believe, two or three applications of the currents.
So they ran him through once, and everyone in the room was very nervous.
And then they turned it off, and then they realized he was still moving.
Forgot the wet sponge on his head?
And they kicked the room, because they were making the stuff as they went.
I guess we better turn it on again.
Madness.
All right.
So tell us some good ones from history.
I don't know, World War II or the American Revolution or ancient Rome.
I don't care.
You can do whatever you want.
I'm interested.
Gosh, well, World War II is one of the sort of go-to spots any time there's kind of a thin date.
Obviously, World War II provides legions of potential executions.
I think you just had an interview yesterday, I believe, about Andrei Vlasov and some of the guys who were repatriated under Operation Keelhaul.
Vlasov's date actually just passed a few days ago, and I took a pass on him, because I wanted to do a sort of more thorough treatment.
So that means I have to kick it down the road another year.
But there was a similar one that we did for the Ukrainian Nationalist Army, which is a really kind of interesting formation.
I mean, these guys are Ukrainian nationalists.
There's probably a lot not to like about them.
And ultimately, their aspirations were for statehood.
They were being ground between these two massive, tyrannical states, and they probably really had no good choices available to them.
But, yeah, they basically sort of tried to make nice with the Nazis in order to get out from under the Soviets, and that didn't work.
And they were on the wrong side of that after the war, obviously.
There's probably no way that story was going to have a happy ending, which obviously was true for a lot of people in that area of the world in the 1940s.
Yeah, well, I can't wait to read your write-up of Operation Keelhaul.
That's got to be the biggest unreported scandal in the history of anything that ever happened.
I mean, when did three million people ever get killed at the hands of the Democrats, and it didn't get written down for anybody to read about later?
Well, I think you should hook me up with someone who's a brilliant expert to write this, since I'm just some guy who runs a blog.
Oh, come on.
You know the guys who know.
Well, Jacob Hornberger wrote an incredible—that's the interview you're talking about, and he wrote an incredible piece in seven parts called Repatriation, the Dark Side of World War II, as opposed to the Light Side of it, I guess.
Right.
Yeah, that's the best treatment of Operation Keelhaul I know about outside of books.
Right.
Well, I'll definitely follow that one up.
Some of the best pieces really are the ones where people who are truly subject matter experts get to come in and write about this, because if anything, my expertise is kind of like marshalling a lot of dates, and I end up jumping around from spot to spot.
And since I've tried to write the story of the situation that people are living in, World War II is one day where we kind of have some known reference points, but you sort of landed at an unfamiliar time and place, then the first thing you have to do is try to figure out who are these people, what's going on, why did this person die?
So I'm able to get an expert who really knows the terrain to do guest blogs and interviews and things like that.
We've had people talk about the Great Fire of London.
There was a guy who was basically just sort of mentally ill and insisted on claiming credit slash blame for it and got hanged as a result even though nobody thought he was guilty.
It's a really interesting case.
There's an absolutely heartbreaking case called the Poppenheimers in Bavaria in 1600, and they were basically just sort of poor itinerant laborers who got caught up in a witch persecution at the wrong time, and they just butchered this entire family in the most horrendous fashion possible in front of their small child who was made to watch this, and then several months later they decided we better stay on the safe side.
The kid might be infernal too, and they executed the kid as well.
Man, human beings are really weird, aren't they?
I can't really figure it out, man.
I'm trying to picture a situation where I'm going to be one of the members of a mob witch-hunting people and killing kids and stuff.
I can't see it, but it happens all the time, I guess, stuff like that.
Hell, in Africa right now they have witch scares where they go around murdering people for superstitious reasons.
Yeah, I think ultimately most of us would like to think that we wouldn't be that kind of person that would join the SS or join the Lich Party or something, because we're not in the right time and place.
I guess I tend to think that most of us are, myself included.
It's susceptible to be that guy.
Yeah, I mean, that's what they prove with the Stanford prison experiment and whatever, is that they can basically come to any neighborhood and make 5% of the people the guards of the other 95% and then leave them to it, no problem.
We'll all enslave each other, do anything we want.
Amazing.
All right, okay, so a different period of history.
If we go to, say, deeper into the Middle Ages, because I find that this is how I really, I don't do this enough, but this is really how to learn history is reading biographies and really getting that sense of time and place.
Is there stuff that, you know, certain executions of the Middle Ages that kind of really bring you to what it was like in that era?
Or pick an era, I don't care, go ahead.
No, I mean, I guess I just want to be hesitant about saying that it brings you to what it was like, because there are so many other facets.
You know, we noticed the witches that get burned, but lots of people who weren't witches lived other forms of life.
There are a lot of peasant revolts in the, like, the 1200s, 1300s, 1400s.
Basically, they universally get crushed.
They follow this predictable script where they'll have some initial success, and then the peasants sort of agree at the local nobles and, you know, break out in some sort of episode of violence, and often they're, you know, they're going strong for a couple of weeks, but their peasant army, you know, they have to get back to their crops, so the energy dissipates or they run into, you know, armored cavalry or something like that, and the peasant leaders just tend to suffer the most horrible possible fates.
I mean, there are these stories all over.
Many of them become heroes later on, like Georgi Dozia in Hungary is kind of in that category.
But, yeah.
Amazing stuff.
I highly suggest everybody you check out executedtoday.com.
Sign up for the e-mail list there, and, oh, there's even a random execution button if you just want to see what you can see.
Well, like I've been trying to tell you, it's not left versus right, it's the state versus you.
Right here, executedtoday.com.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today, Jason.
Thank you, Scott.
Jason Zanon, everybody.
