“The executioner is the one that suffers,” [Jerry] Givens says on the day after Davis’s execution in Georgia. “The person that carries out the execution itself is stuck with it the rest of his life. He has to wear that burden. Who would want that on them?”

During the 17 years that Givens worked as an executioner in Virginia, he put 62 men to death.

We don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about the collateral damage of the death penalty: What it does to the families of the condemned inmates, to the people whose job it is to kill, and — of course — to all of us as members of a society that condones killing people as the proper response to murder.