Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer

by Sunil Gupta

This pain, this excruciating agony of impending death is called ‘death row phenomenon’. One Supreme Court judge even uses an Albert Camus reference from ‘Reflections on the Guillotine’, an essay written in 1957 to describe it: ...For the man condemned to death, on the other hand, the horror of his situation is served up to him at every moment for months on end. Torture by hope alternates only with the pangs of animal despair. His lawyer and his confessor, out of simple humanity, and his guards, to keep him docile, unanimously assure him that he will be reprieved. He believes them with all his heart, yet he cannot believe them at all. He hopes by day, despairs by night. And as the weeks pass his hope and despair increase proportionately, until they become equally insupportable. According to all accounts, the color of his skin changes: fear acts like an acid. “It’s nothing to know if you’re going to die,” one such man in the Fresnes prison said, “but not to know if you’re going to live is the real torture.” ...As a general rule, the man is destroyed by waiting for his execution long before he is actually killed. Two deaths are imposed, and the first one is worse than the second, though the culprit has killed but once.