the long-term mental-health repercussions for prison staff are not something that tends to be a focus in the death penalty debate. The spotlight generally falls on justice, revenge and the statistically unproven idea of a deterrent. But it’s there if you look: short opinion pieces about decades of sleepless nights from former superintendents, the stress and anxiety of practising to kill someone over and over, worrying about it going wrong, living with it going right. Some former executioners become abolitionists, they write memoirs, they travel the world trying to convince those in power to
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