I keep coming back to the same question. Why wasn’t Governor Bill Lee even in the room?
If Governor Lee insisted that Harold Nichols be executed, he should have been the one to do it himself. This is not rhetoric. It is a moral demand. If the state is going to take a human life, those who authorize it must confront the full human reality of what that authorization means. To hide behind bureaucracy, protocols, and the anonymity of state power is not leadership. It is cowardice.
Governor Bill Lee’s Faith That Won’t Look
Governor Lee is a man who speaks often of his faith. He invokes God in his public life. He attends church. He prays. But faith that cannot look death in the face is not faith at all. It is performance. If the governor believed that God sanctioned the taking of Harold Nichols’s life, then he should have taken it. He should have stood in that room. He should have looked into Harold’s eyes and told him why. He should have felt the weight of what he ordered.
He did not do this. He was miles away when Harold died. He was insulated by distance, by process, by the comforting fiction that he was not the one killing anyone. But he was. Every signature on a death warrant is a hand on the needle. The fact that others carried out the physical act did not absolve him. It indicted him. It meant he wanted the killing but not the burden of it. He wanted the death but not the dying.
The Luxury of Distance
This is what power allows: the luxury of violence without witness. The governor ended a man’s life and never saw his face. He authorized death and slept soundly, because the machinery of the state has been carefully designed to protect him from the human cost of his decisions. But protection is not innocence. Comfort is not righteousness. And delegation is not courage.
Harold Nichols was a human being. He had a body that breathed, a mind that thought, a history that made him. He had people who loved him. He had fears and regrets and memories. Whatever he had done, he remained human. And the question was never whether Harold deserved to live. The question was whether Bill Lee deserved the power to kill him without ever confronting what that meant.
Politicians speak of deterrence, closure, protection. But the structure of modern executions reveals something far less noble. The governor did not watch. He did not see the chest rise and fall, the eyes flutter, the final irreversible moment. He signed a piece of paper. A team of people he will never meet carried out the act in a sanitized room. The legal system, the prison staff, the execution team—all served as buffers between the act and its author.
This distance is deliberate. Without it, the act is unbearable.
What Governor Bill Lee Would Have Seen
Consider what it would have meant for Governor Lee to carry out the execution himself. He would have faced Harold Nichols directly. He would have seen the fear. The humanity. The entire life the state intended to extinguish. Every argument about justice or deterrence would have collided with the raw reality of killing another person. The abstractions would have dissolved. Only the act would have remained.
Most people would have recoiled. Most people would have refused.
And that recoil is precisely why executions are structured the way they are. They allow cowardice to masquerade as authority. Cruelty to masquerade as justice.
A System Built on Looking Away
The death penalty requires its authors to cultivate distance from consequences. It demands that human beings suppress empathy, conscience, moral imagination. It rewards those who can compartmentalize—who can see a death warrant as paperwork rather than a human life. Any system that incentivizes this cannot claim to be just.
There is evidence that capital punishment produces widespread psychological harm—not only to the families of the condemned but to executioners, prison staff, legal officials. Executions do not cleanse the conscience. They fracture it. They force ordinary people to participate in acts society would otherwise consider monstrous. The governor, removed from the room where death occurred, was insulated from that fracture. Yet he bore responsibility for it. The distance protected his comfort. It exposed his cowardice.
Some argue executions provide closure or deter future crimes. These claims are empirically weak and morally hollow. But the deeper problem is not statistical. It is this: to intentionally end a life when alternatives exist—alternatives that protect society without killing—is to act with cowardice disguised as courage. It is to choose violence while pretending your hands are clean.
The Only Honest Response from Governor Bill Lee
We recoil from imagining a governor personally carrying out an execution because we know, deep down, what executions truly are. Deliberate killing. And if we know that, we must acknowledge the only ethical response: the state should not be in the business of killing at all.
Governor Lee did not carry out the execution himself. He did not have the stomach for what he ordered. He never does.
What kind of man orders a death he won’t witness? Governor Bill Lee just needs to admit it…he’s a coward.
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*If you would like to support the Execution Intervention Project (the organization that financially supports Dr. Hood’s work), click here.
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