More stories

  • in

    Jeremy Renner and the Science of Extraordinary Near-Death Experiences

    A little over two years ago, the actor was run over by a snowplow. Like thousands of others, he then felt an “exhilarating peace.” Why?A little over two years ago, the actor Jeremy Renner was run over by a seven-ton snowplow. In a new memoir, he wrote that as he lay near death, he experienced something extraordinary.He could see his entire life at once, and felt an “exhilarating peace” and a connection to the world. He also saw family and friends arrayed before him, telling him not to let go.“What I felt was energy, a constantly connected, beautiful and fantastic energy,” Mr. Renner wrote. “There was no time, place or space, and nothing to see, except a kind of electric, two-way vision made from strands of that inconceivable energy, like the whipping lines of cars’ taillights photographed by a time-lapse camera.”What Mr. Renner described is “classic for near-death experiences,” the term researchers use for such events, said Dr. Jeffrey Long, the founder of the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation.Dr. Long’s foundation has collected more than 4,000 accounts similar to Mr. Renner’s. Some people who have come close to death have recounted a sense of energy, peace and absence of time, as Mr. Renner did. Some have also described watching their body from above, moving through a tunnel toward a light and even meeting God.The general public may be familiar with these events through a genre of memoirs that present near-death experiences as proof of a Christian afterlife. But they have been reported across countries, demographics and religions, as well as by atheists, and have been a subject of scientific research for decades.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    Standing With History to Say Goodbye

    As a reporter, I often observe from a press box or the sidelines. This time, I decided to join the masses.I never had the chance to say hello. But I stood in line to say goodbye.After Pope Francis died, my editors asked me to fly to Italy in advance of a move next month to take up the post of Rome bureau chief. I recently finished an eight-year tour in Tokyo and had thought I would cover the twilight of Francis’s term.Instead, after arriving Thursday night to help report on the funeral and upcoming Conclave to elect Francis’ successor, I wandered over to St. Peter’s Square on Friday morning. I wasn’t planning to linger. I hadn’t picked up my press badge yet, and had read my colleagues’ stories about people waiting for hours to pass before Pope Francis’ coffin.Once I joined the flow of the faithful, I didn’t want to leave the line. I felt an undeniable pull to stay. It was a holiday in Italy and many locals stood to wait along with thousands of tourists and pilgrims. I heard Italian, Spanish, English and many other languages. There were nuns in their habits, older people in wheelchairs, youth groups dressed in identical T-shirts and carrying matching drawstring backpacks.Despite the heavy police presence, the order was loose, with some people weaving in and out and passing ahead, as if on a congested freeway on a weekend. There was not much grumbling, perhaps in deference to the solemn reason we were there.Mourners standing in wait along with thousands of tourists and pilgrims. James Hill for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    Mother and Son, 8, Found Dead in Bronx Home With Daughter, 4, Left Alone

    It was not immediately clear how long the two had been dead or how long the younger daughter had been surviving alone in the apartment.A mother and her 8-year-old son were found dead inside their Bronx apartment on Friday night, along with her 4-year-old daughter, who was alive and alone, according to the police and the woman’s family.The woman, 38, whose name has not yet been publicly released but who was identified by her family on Saturday as Lisa Cotton, was discovered at around 8:30 p.m. after the police received a 911 call requesting assistance at her apartment in the Wakefield neighborhood.Upon arrival, police officers found Ms. Cotton and her son — who, according to his uncle, had a disability that inhibited him from walking or eating solid foods — lying unconscious in the apartment, as well as the 4-year-old girl, who was awake.Emergency medical workers arrived shortly after the police and pronounced Ms. Cotton and her son dead, the police said. They transported the girl to the Montefiore Medical Center in Wakefield, where she was in stable condition on Saturday.It was not immediately clear how long Ms. Cotton and her son had been dead before they were discovered, or how long her younger daughter had been surviving alone in the apartment.Neither Ms. Cotton nor her son showed any obvious signs of injury when they were discovered, according to a law enforcement official. The police said the city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner was investigating the cause of death on Saturday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    Who are the death row executioners? Disgraced doctors, suspended nurses and drunk drivers

    Being an executioner is not the sort of job that gets posted in a local wanted ad. Kids don’t dream about being an executioner when they grow up, and people don’t go to school for it. So how does one become a death row executioner in the US, and who are the people doing it?This was the question I couldn’t help but ask when I began a book project on lethal injection back in 2018. I’m a death penalty researcher, and I was trying to figure out why states are so breathtakingly bad at a procedure that we use on cats and dogs every day. Part of the riddle was who is performing these executions.Seven years later – and with the Trump administration promising more executions to come – I have an answer, sort of.We do not, and for the most part cannot, know precisely who is under the executioner’s hood. State secrecy statutes put the equivalent of a Harry Potter cloak of invisibility over these state-sanctioned killers. But litigation files and investigative journalism have revealed a number of executioners’ identities, allowing us to peek behind the veil of secrecy for a glimpse of who these people are.Consider Missouri’s chief executioner from 1995-2006, Dr Alan Doerhoff, who was responsible for 54 of Missouri’s 65 executions between 1976 and 2006. He didn’t push the syringes – shockingly, non-medical prison guards did that – but he did most everything else. “Nobody will ever do as many [executions] as I have,” he would later boast.Doerhoff’s identity was revealed when a lawyer for a condemned prisoner checked the prison’s chemical dispensary logs and discovered that 2.5 grams of sodium thiopental (the drug used to anesthetize the prisoner) had been used in previous executions. The state’s protocol called for 5 grams, double that amount. The prisoner sued.State officials first told the court that the chemical dispensary logs were wrong. But the next day, they wrote again to “apologize to the court and the parties for providing incorrect information”. The logs were correct. The amount of sodium thiopental being injected was wrong.Troubled by the finding, the court allowed the prisoner’s lawyers to conduct a limited deposition of the state’s chief executioner. The executioner stated under oath that he had problems mixing the drugs, “so right now we’re still improvising”. He also said that he “sometimes transpose[d] numbers”.View image in fullscreen“I am dyslexic,” he explained. “So, it’s not unusual for me to make mistakes.” (Doerhoff later stated that he was not dyslexic, he just sometimes mixed up numbers.)Missouri doubled down on its executioner, telling the court that it was confident in his competence and planned to continue to use him in future executions. But the court rejected the state’s assurances, writing that it was “gravely concerned that a physician who is solely responsible for correctly mixing the drugs which will be responsible for humanely ending the life of condemned inmates has a condition which causes him confusion with regard to numbers”.The state appealed, but soon thereafter, investigative journalism discovered Doerhoff’s identity. Jeremy Kohler with the St Louis Post-Dispatch broke the story in January 2008, and with it came another shocking revelation: Doerhoff had been sued for medical malpractice more than 20 times, and his hospital privileges had been revoked at two hospitals. Doerhoff had also been publicly reprimanded by the state medical board for hiding his malpractice suits from the hospitals where he practiced.All of this was known to the Missouri attorney general’s office when it assured the court of Doerhoff’s professional competence. After oral arguments, the state dropped its appeal of the ruling.The following year, Missouri’s legislature passed a law stating: “A person may not knowingly disclose the identity of a current or former member of an execution team,” authorizing punitive damages for violations.“Their answer to the public finding out they had an incompetent doctor was making it impossible to find out who the doctor is,” an ACLU spokesperson stated.No longer able to serve as Missouri’s executioner, Doerhoff joined the staff of a local hair-removal business and served as an executioner for the federal government and at least one other state – Arizona.Arizona knew about the trial court’s ruling in Missouri, and the facts behind it. But it hired Doerhoff anyway, and he conducted an execution for the state in 2007, just months after being barred from conducting executions in Missouri.When attorneys found out about Doerhoff’s involvement, the prisoners next in line for execution in Arizona sued.Arizona settled that suit in 2009, agreeing to a number of changes in its lethal injection protocol, including formal background and license checks of its executioners. But during the litigation, attorneys for the prisoners discovered that Doerhoff wasn’t the only executioner who had no business conducting executions.One of Arizona’s three IV team executioners was medical team member #3, who was once a nurse but had his nursing license suspended. At the time of the litigation, his occupation was running an appliance business in another state. The identity of medical team member #3 is unknown, but the court noted that he had been arrested multiple times, “including three times in 10 days in Arizona for a DUI in 2007”.Arizona pledged that with its new screening system in place, the court could be confident that the state would use only licensed medical personnel going forward.But in 2011, Arizona was hauled back into federal court because it had not made good on its promise. The prison director admitted to conducting five executions with full knowledge that medical team member #4 did not hold a medical license of any kind. Nor did officials conduct the required criminal history check on him. If they had, they would have learned that medical team member #4 had been charged with DUI in 2008, public intoxication in 2000, and writing a bad check before that.Medical team member #4 was a prison guard who had previously served as a medical corpsman in the military. He later stated that his only screening was a phone call from the warden “asking whether he knew how to start an IV and whether he would have a problem doing it for an execution”. He was not asked any other questions, and at the time, he had not placed an IV for 15 years. On paper, Arizona was dutifully screening its execution team members. But in reality, the state was doing nothing of the sort.View image in fullscreenMissouri and Arizona are not the only states where discoveries about executioners have raised serious questions about the care and competence with which executioners are chosen. In 2006, a federal court struck down California’s lethal injection protocol based in part on the “inconsistent and unreliable screening of execution team members”.The execution team member responsible for the custody of lethal injection drugs had been disciplined for smuggling drugs into San Quentin before joining the execution team; two team members had been arrested for drunk driving; one suffered from depression and PTSD; and one had been out on a two-month medical leave from getting into a fight with a prisoner.The court in California also noted the “extremely troubling” disappearance of sodium thiopental that was ostensibly taken from the prison pharmacy for training purposes but never used and never returned. “These circumstances may warrant investigation by an appropriate law-enforcement agency,” the court wrote. In California, the state’s executioners were also the chief suspects in a potential criminal investigation.The federal government has proven no better than states on this score. Not only did the federal government hire Doerhoff after he was banned from serving as Missouri’s executioner, but it also hired a nurse for the Timothy McVeigh execution who had been charged with felony aggravated stalking and first-degree tampering with property, ultimately pleading no contest to the misdemeanor version of both charges. The nurse had allegedly smashed the windshield and headlights of a man who was seeing his estranged wife, ran over his mailbox, smashed windows of his home, and left voice messages threatening to burn his house down and blow his “[expletive] head off”!Federal officials knew of the convictions when it hired him – the nurse was on active probation and had to get permission from his probation officer to leave the state.“It seems bizarre to me that we would knowingly allow an offender, on active supervision, to participate in the execution process at any level,” a probation supervisor had written while the department was considering the request. But the permission was granted.In an internal memo, the administrator who confirmed the request for travel wrote: “It would be extremely problematic for [the nurse] and this department if the media got wind of this.”And how did this nurse-executioner get on the federal government’s radar? He was recommended by the Missouri department of corrections. A nurse with his own serious criminal convictions was secretly conducting executions on behalf of the show-me state.Lethal injection litigation has likewise revealed patently unfit executioners in other states as well. In Maryland, litigation revealed that one member of the state’s execution team had been fired by a local police department and charged with poisoning several neighborhood dogs, while another execution team member had been suspended for spitting in prisoners’ food.In Tennessee, litigation revealed that a member of the execution team had pleaded guilty, twice, to possession of a controlled substance, and missed an execution because he was at an in-patient treatment program. That was in 2007. In 2021, Tennessee’s physician-executioner stated that he surrendered his surgery accreditation because of “too many malpractice suits” – at least 10 by his estimation.These are just the executioners we know. But they are a chilling indication of the executioners we don’t know. As the former head of Oklahoma’s corrections department told a legislative committee in 2023, the prison staff charged with carrying out executions are “some of the lowest-paid state employees in government”.In executions, as elsewhere, you get what you pay for. Even when a doctor is nominally involved in the execution process, the people injecting the drugs are typically low-level prison employees.Most executioners say they just fell into the job. The opportunity came to them, and they had their reasons for saying yes. For prison guards, it may be a necessary step to moving up the prison ranks. Doctors likewise tend to say they simply slipped into the role. They had agreed to be an observer, but then the medical team needed help. Who were they to watch executioners prick a prisoner a dozen times in a desperate attempt to pierce the vein when they could do it more quickly?One reason doctors aren’t giving, but merits mention anyway, is money. A doctor willing to participate in an execution is a precious commodity, and states will pay dearly for it – up to $20,000 in cash per execution in some places. No doctor yet has said they’re participating in executions for the money. But the fact that they can make a killing from state killing has to be worth something.

    Corinna Lain is the author of Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, out on 22 April More

  • in

    How I Survived Heart Surgery

    A writer explores how a Jewish ritual changed her relationship with mortality.I had a hole in my chest.Three weeks had passed since my open-heart surgery. My body was rejecting some of my stitches, spitting them out like rotten food.“It should heal on its own,” the doctor said as she used tweezers to pack the wound with gauze.She was perched just below my neck with her headlight on full blast. I wanted to turn away, but I needed to know: How deep did this hole actually go?A few weeks earlier, I’d checked into this same building to undergo the surgery I had studiously avoided. There was no definitive sign or test to say “it was time,” but the worsening symptoms made my ailing heart impossible to ignore. A dash to catch a train sent me into a full asthma attack, climbing stairs had become a breathless activity. It was time to accept reality: This wasn’t the version of my heart that could carry me into old age.At 43, there would be no “good time” to take 12 weeks off. There was a demanding small business and my aging parents.“I just didn’t have the room in my schedule,” I told a friend.“Listen to yourself,” she said. “This is not a conference. This is an organ.”I worried about my husband. How would he manage? What about our kids? Would they be traumatized watching me go through this? And there was always the risk of complications and the fact that I might not be better off afterward. Still, like the good girl that I am, I picked a surgery date.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    Mystery of Gene Hackman’s Death Brings Grief and Bewilderment to Santa Fe

    Residents mourning Mr. Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, are consumed by the unusual circumstances surrounding their deaths and why they were not discovered sooner.Settling in for a drink the other night at Jinja, the restaurant in Santa Fe, N.M., that Gene Hackman and his wife dined at and had invested in, a group of patrons decided to honor the couple by ordering a round of “Gene’s Mai-Tais” off the menu.But in the days since Mr. Hackman, 95, and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, 65, were found dead on the floor of their home, the toasts and tributes have been freighted with a sense of bewilderment over the circumstances of their deaths.Mr. Hackman was found dead near his cane in the mud room of their secluded home just outside the city, and Ms. Arakawa was found on the bathroom floor, next to a counter with pills scattered about. One dog was found dead in a nearby closet, while two others were roaming on the property, and data from Mr. Hackman’s pacemaker indicates he died nine days before the couple was discovered.Now, Santa Fe, a city of 89,000 people that has drawn artists and cultural figures for decades, is grappling with a macabre mystery: How did two of their most famous residents die, and how could no one have known for so long?“You can’t help feeling guilty that you didn’t call him,” said Stuart Ashman, a friend of Mr. Hackman’s who met him on a committee of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe in the late 1990s. “You sort of take for granted that your friends are where they are and everything is status quo.”Among both those who knew Mr. Hackman and those who had never once seen him around town, theories about what might have happened were piling up.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    Digital Estate Planning: How to Prepare Your Social Media Accounts

    When planning your estate, leave instructions for handling your online accounts, data and other electronic affairs.How do you want your social media pages, smartphone photos and computer files handled after you die? While property and money distribution are usually at the top of the estate-planning list, don’t forget to leave instructions regarding your digital accounts and assets — so your survivors are left with more than just random bits and pixels from your online presence.Here’s a short guide to getting your digital material in order, as well as advice for dealing with the accounts of those who departed without leaving directions.Create a Digital DirectiveA law known as the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, enacted by most states, gives a chosen representative (like your estate’s executor) the authority to manage your electronic affairs. For specific instructions, create a document stipulating how you want your online accounts and all digital content handled when you die or become incapacitated, and keep it with your other estate papers.Giving access to your account user names and passwords will greatly help your representative, but proceed carefully. You will need a safe place to list the credentials for all your financial institutions, as well as for any e-commerce stores, insurance policies, online storage, email, social media platforms, cable and wireless carriers, medical apps, and media subscriptions.The 1Password app can hold all kinds of confidential information.1PasswordOne way to encrypt and store this sensitive information is to enter it all into a password-manager app. Wirecutter, the product review site owned by The New York Times, recommends 1Password ($3 a month for an individual plan, $5 a month for the shared family plan) or Bitwarden (free, with in-app upgrades). Apple and Google have their own free apps, which save and store passwords on devices running their software.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    Issa Lopez on Fear and Horror in Fiction and in Real Life

    Fictional fear can be beautifully distracting from life’s real terrors.This personal reflection is part of a series called Turning Points, in which writers explore what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. You can read more by visiting the Turning Points series page.Turning Point: The American horror film genre more than doubled its market share in the past decade.As a Mexican — specifically a Mexican child who had to face death early in my life — I learned a nifty trick pretty quickly: the way my culture transfigures fear of death into art. Into storytelling. Into music.Mexican identity is one and the same with death. It is a direct response to the fear of vanishing, yes. But it took some years of living in the United States and in several other countries to understand that this is not just a Mexican thing.All artistic endeavors throughout history, around the world, come from the same source. We tell stories to remain. To deny the void. To fight the void. We sing and dance and make movies and tell jokes to explain a bit of the unexplainable, to tame the endless darkness, all of the things that lurk beyond what we can see, the shadows beyond our tiny campfire.Our relationship with fear is fascinating. It is the feeling, other than pain, that we hate the most. We bottle fear to consume in tiny doses in the form of roller coasters, bungee jumping and our all-time favorite: horror movies.I love horror movies. I just adore them, and I am very much not alone in that. Unlike superheroes or musicals or westerns, the business of horror is perennial; it will never go away. Audiences show up for horror year-round, decade after decade. There are whole streaming services dedicated to horror, and they do well. A single genre, go figure.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More