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Notes -
This is usually justified by death penalty proponents as giving privacy to a dying man as the only mercy available. The punishment is death, it isn't suffering, it isn't humiliation.
On an additional practical note, public executions in this day and age would be attended by dueling sets of activists and maintaining security can present a potential problem. In the 19th century it was also noted that public executions were sometimes used by deranged condemned to put on a spectacle.
I think deranged it a bit much. Part o& the reason for a public execution is the lack of mass media that is widespread enough to get the message out as the state needs it out there.
The message would be essentially three things: person is found guilty of a crime, the state is able to catch try, and punish people, and the state has decided that the crime is serious enough that a harsh sentence is warranted. In our era, coverage of the crime is pretty solid, and at the time of trial, most of the details are known. You know they’ve been arrested, you hear about the crime, and you hear the sentence. There’s really no need to publicly execute the person on top of that because we have news to tell us. Go back 150 years or more and it might take time to get news to all of the surrounding communities that someone had committed a crime worthy of death. Go back 250 years and getting the same news out gets harder still. But people would gather for the execution and of course talk about it (and the more of a spectacle you make, the better) which makes a public execution a way to leverage a sort of virality to make sure that people don’t do the kinds of crimes that get them executed.
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