It was 1 a.m. exactly Washington time. I was keeping an eye on the clock as I lay in bed listening to a man talking on an audiotape. But it was hard to believe that at precisely that moment the man was lying strapped to a table in a prison 750 miles away to the west and lethal drugs were being injected into his body. The voice of Alan Bannister sounded so calm and composed as he was being interviewed three months before, just after the Supreme Court turned down his last appeal and he must have known his days were numbered.
Four minutes later he was pronounced dead. His English wife, Lindsay, was watching his execution from behind a glass panel. So were five relatives of Darrell Ruestman, the man Bannister had shot in the heart on August 21st, 1982.
Rodney Ruestman, brother of the murdered man, said to reporters after the execution that over the 14 years Bannister was on death row he had spoken to members of his family. "We are sorry for his family. We are not sorry for Alan Bannister," Rodney Ruestman told the reporters. "We are glad this is over, but you can't call us happy. There are too many victims here."
This echoed the words of Lindsay Bannister, who had told reporters before the execution: "Tonight we will have a new set of victims." She denounced the execution as "a hideous, cruel and barbaric system".
So justice had been done under the US system. Bannister becomes the latest statistic from death row - the 60th man to be executed this year, which is going to see a record number of executions.
The circumstances of the Bannister case had aroused a lot of interest abroad, including Ireland, where Magda Finnegan from Clontarf has set up an Irish branch of Friends for Life, whose members write to and visit condemned prisoners and campaign for a new trial where they believe an injustice has been done, as in the case of Alan Bannister. He never denied shooting Ruestman but said it was during a struggle and that he was guilty of seconddegree murder, which does not draw a death sentence.
Executions are an indispensable part of American justice, while they have been abolished in most European countries. In 1972 the US Supreme Court ruled against capital punishment when it found that it infringed the constitutional ban on "cruel and unusual punishment". But the court's objection was not to death sentences as such, nor the method, but the arbitrary way that the states imposed them.
Once individual states adjusted their procedures so that they could claim the death penalty was being applied in a "fair and impartial manner", the executions resumed from 1977. Since then, 418 men have been done to death by various means, including electrocution, gassing, shooting and hanging but increasingly by lethal injection.
Not all states have the death penalty. Some 12 of the 50 do not. It is also noticeable that of the 38 states which have the death penalty, the overwhelming number of executions are in the South. Texas heads the list with 138 followed by Virginia (43), Florida (39), Missouri (29), Louisiana (24) and Georgia (22).
When all appeals have been exhausted it is up to the governor of the state to grant clemency or confirm the sentence. President Clinton and the federal government have no role.
The President, incidentally, is in favour of capital punishment, as are most Americans. When he was campaigning for the presidency in 1992 and still governor of Arkansas, he interrupted his campaign to come back to Little Rock and be on hand for the execution of a brain-damaged black man called Ricky Ray Rector who used to yell he was going to vote for Clinton.
Appeals from Pope John Paul as well as international outrage have failed to move governors to grant reprieves when they believe there are no extenuating circumstances. Reprieves are granted, however, and total 76 since 1976.
Public opinion seems to be hardening further in favour of the death sentence. For years, Colorado juries have been reluctant to impose it but several weeks ago the state had its first execution for 30 years.
It was for a rape and murder of a young mother who had been kidnapped in front of her children and dragged away by a rope to be a sexual slave until shot to death in a field. Even opponents of the death penalty must at times wonder if death is not an appropriate penalty in such cases.
THE Catholic bishops in the US are determined to oppose public opinion on this issue. In Texas, with its soaring rate of executions, the state's bishops this week said life imprisonment without parole should be the maximum punishment.
"We sympathise with the profound pain of the victims of brutal crimes. Nevertheless, we believe that the compassionate example of Christ calls us to respect the God-given image found even in hardened criminals," they said.
In the same week, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the use of the electric chair does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment following a horrific incident last March when flames shot from the headpiece of Pedro Medina as he was being executed. The chair was later tested by "experts", who found the flames were caused by a sponge catching fire and that death had been "painless".
This is bad news for the dozens of prisoners on death row in Florida. But the judges did indicate that it was time for Florida to change to lethal injection. Is that the good news?