Following him, the chamber was used twice more under the George W. Bush Administration, and then left idle for almost two decades. McVeigh’s was the first federal execution in thirty-eight years. The anesthetic effect of the first is understood to be short-lived the last, it has been claimed in court, feels as though one is “being burned alive from the inside.” The death chamber there was first used in 2001, in the execution of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, who was killed by what is now considered the traditional lethal-injection cocktail of three drugs: sodium thiopental, an anesthetic pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant that effects asphyxiation and potassium chloride, a salt that causes cardiac arrest. Terre Haute was selected as the site for federal killings in 1993-amid a rise in capital sentencing following a twenty-year lull-because of its central location in the country. The prison complex-south of downtown via Route 150, past the dome and bell tower of the Vigo County courthouse, and after the Tire Barn on Spring Hill Road-comprises the medium-security Federal Correctional Institution and the maximum-security U.S. Penitentiary, the home of the Special Confinement Unit: death row and the death house, a low, windowless building of dark-red brick on the northern edge of the grounds. The surrounding country is in fact flat and wide, precipitously exposed to the sky. The sole federal execution chamber in the United States is in a place called Terre Haute-the high ground-in far western Indiana, named for a swath of land that rises above the nearby Wabash River.
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