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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26736 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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I'd much prefer to be taken out back and shot, personally.

Concerns with the pain of the drugs aside, I would also just regard it as much more dignified. If you want me dead, look me in the eye and shoot me. Evading the matter and putting on a pretense of it being humane is just an absurd spectacle. It makes me think of people that are happy to eat meat from the grocery store, but think shooting a deer is barbaric. If you're completely unwilling to face what you're doing, you shouldn't do it.

I have to say I like the Ned Stark rule - the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. The whole concept of an "executioner" as a distinct role is a bit perverse. Oh, I just kill people for money, it's other people's job to decide if they deserve it or not.

Give judges a shotgun to go with their gavel.

IIRC firing squads in Utah are draw from volunteers among law enforcement and correctional officers, the executioner isn’t special(in fact quite literally; one of the four rifles is loaded with a blank so each man on the squad has plausible deniability).

I thought it was 3/4? Or was it somewhere else that has 5 executioners but only 1 live round?

In the most recent execution by firing squad, 1/5 had a dummy bullet shooting a wax cartridge. Of course Utah executes very rarely.

The firing squad was made up of five anonymous volunteers who were certified police officers. The officers stood about 25 feet (7.6 m) from Gardner, aiming at a white target positioned over his heart. The firing squad's .30-caliber Winchester rifles were loaded with live ammunition except for one that contained a non-lethal wax bullet (see Blank Cartridge).[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronnie_Lee_Gardner

If you had the choice between a method that was very messy and unpleasant for the executioner but quick and painless for the executionee, versus another that was clean and easy for the executioner but more distressing and painful to the executionee, what would you choose? Frankly, I'm on the executioner's side on this one. I just wish people were more honest about their motivations--"yeah, I don't care much if he suffers for a minute; I just don't want to have to clean his brain up off the walls".

Setting aside that this is a false dilemma for the sake of a hypothetical, I would weight those based on just how distressing something was for an executioner and how painful for the condemned. I wouldn't torture someone for the sake of it being done by a simple flip of the switch instead of being something to face. Likewise, I wouldn't force an executioner to do a ridiculous long and grim proceeding for the sake of it being easier on the condemned. But really, this isn't a choice, we already have longstanding solutions that work just fine, with firing squads and hanging being the two most obvious.

In addition to what I wrote above about wanting people to face the reality of what they're doing rather than avoid it, another element that I think is important and ignored by both pro-death and anti-death penalty advocates is that the death penalty isn't a maximal punishment, it's a cap on what the maximal punishment can be. Many people (including those on the anti-death side!) say that they wish much worse on the worst offenders, and I frankly agree with the gut reaction, but setting the maximal penalty available as putting a heavy-caliber round through someone's heart is not intended to maximize punishment, but to offer the best justice possible while retaining the dignity of the executioner and society. Anything that slips in the direction of sterilization of the proceeding or just hurting the condemned more than necessary is based on a misunderstanding or disagreement on the purpose of the death penalty.

There are always people with the stomach to be executioners; “society” can remain squeamish, you just need a few moderately fucked up people willing to do it, and they definitely exist.

If you're completely unwilling to face what you're doing, you shouldn't do it.

Excellent point.

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