Public Executions
Should executions be televised? That is a question that the NY Times asks affirmatively here.
Right now, executions are generally open only to the press and a few select witnesses. For the rest of us, the vague contours are provided in the morning paper. Yet a functioning democracy demands maximum accountability and transparency. As long as executions remain behind closed doors, those are impossible. The people should have the right to see what is being done in their name and with their tax dollars.
The editorial goes on to argue both sides of the question but concludes.
Albert Camus related in his essay “Reflections on the Guillotine” that viewing executions turned him against capital punishment. The legal scholar John D. Bessler suggests that public executions might have the same effect on the public today; Sister Helen Prejean, the death penalty abolitionist, has urged just such a strategy.
That is not our view. We leave open the possibility that making executions public could strengthen support for them; undecided viewers might find them less disturbing than anticipated.
If executions are to be televised, should they be pay for view? A macabre question to ponder but I am in a macabre state of mind today.
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Jun '11
Re: Public Executions
Given the increasingly flamboyant tastes of devotees of pop culture, you might find an appetite out there for public executions. In America, where the big, bone crushing NFL hit happens on Sunday and gets played over and over again, you might find a hit show.
It could be a mini-series spread out over a few episodes which review the life of the prisoner and go into details of the crime. You wouldn't have to worry about the script for the finale.
p.s. - only half joking.
May '11
Re: Public Executions
michael kelley:
It could be a mini-series spread out over a few episodes which review the life of the prisoner and go into details of the crime. You wouldn't have to worry about the script for the finale.
p.s. - only half joking. · Aug 1 at 11:15am
The ultimate reality show that might produce ratings that The Bachelorette would kill for.....literally.
Sep '10
Re: Public Executions
Does this apply to taxpayer subsidized executions of fetuses?
Jun '11
Re: Public Executions
Mark Belling Fan
Does this apply to taxpayer subsidized executions of fetuses? · Aug 1 at 12:00pm
Thank you for making that point......although I am sure they would immediately invoke the Right to Privacy, the (gulp) "Right" to Choose and the General Welfare Clause.
May '11
Re: Public Executions
Mark Belling Fan
Does this apply to taxpayer subsidized executions of fetuses? · Aug 1 at 12:00pm
The politicians have attempted to keep abortion only indirectly subsidized, although that is changing and has done almost nothing to limit the frequency. I have no problem with holding the physicians who choose to be abortionists up to public scorn but I am not yet at the point where I would want to make a spectacle of the women who are in that situation.
May '10
Re: Public Executions
Only if aired on C-SPAN.
May '10
Re: Public Executions
The number of sites that displayed the muslim beheadings of last decade suggest this will not accomplish what DP opponents hope for.
May '11
Re: Public Executions
Even the NY Times agrees that the sight of executions would not necessarily sway public opinion on the issue of the death penalty. I have been trying to imagine what those public executions would look like and if that would be a good thing.
Jul '10
Re: Public Executions
No. Absolutely not. Terrible idea.
That's what YouTube is for.
Dec '10
Re: Public Executions
I hate to be the stereotypical westerner here, by I don't really understand why we quit hanging convicted criminal in the public square to begin with.
I side firmly with the NYT's inclination that public execution would not alter public's approval of capitol punishment.
I think this is especially true when a convict is executed in the locality of their crime, rather than the depths of some distant maximum security prison. I think that does a better job of linking a crime and it's punishment.
Actions have consequences, and I agree that we should have the courage of our convictions and do this business in the public eye.
Edited on Aug 1, 2011 at 4:59pmMay '10
Re: Public Executions
Yes, televise them immediately after a documentary detailing the criminal's crimes. Past ones for which s/he may have been convicted as well as the one that earned the death penalty.
Include actual crime scene photos. Interview the survivors, all of them: bereft parents, children, siblings, coworkers. Make the nature of the crime patently clear.
Re: Public Executions
The last public execution was held in Kentucky in 1936 of convicted rapist Rainey Bethea. Below is a photo.
At least 20,000 spectators descended to the town of Owensboro to watch the hanging. People reveled in the spectacle and the media denounced the proceedings as an unseemly 'carnival.' According to this NPR article, many scholars believe that Bethea's execution and the coverage it received led to the ban of public executions. But have we as human beings evolved all that much since the 1930's? I don't think so. We still feel a communal desire for vengeance, and public executions would likely enjoy the same broad appeal that they did a century ago.
May '10
Re: Public Executions
Are not most of today's executions carried out by lethal injection? Most TV series (doctor shows, cop shows) are much more bloody than a shot on the arm. Might the relative quiet have just the opposite effect? "Gee, that wasn't so bad. Maybe it's okay after all."
Apr '11
Re: Public Executions
With all the talk in Washington on raising revenue, I think the pay-per-view idea is fantastic.
Dec '10
Re: Public Executions
In particular, it would make a mockery of these court cases that argue that using the wrong chemical is "cruel and unusual" when you see somebody getting a shot in the arm and falling gently asleep.
The real problem is that it provides the convict with a platform. That's what a lot of these guys want.
May '11
Re: Public Executions
When I read the NYT editorial, what came to mind to me was the scene at the end of a fellow South Carolinian's novel, "Booth, A Novel" by David Robertson. There the protagonist, John Surratt, the son of Mary Surratt, the innkeeper embroiled in the conspiracy involved in Lincoln's death, ended up photographing his mother's execution because he was Matthew Brady's assistant. Your photograph displays the poignancy of that sort of occasion. I really don't know if there is a communal desire for vengeance. I suspect there is still a strong desire for justice but that is hard to define.
Oct '10
Re: Public Executions
RE, Diane, Public executions would likely enjoy the same broad appeal that they did a century ago. .... Likely so , Think there is a deep seated need for the public to be visually aware of justice carried out. Part of the issue does lie with the Carnival atmosphere that it creates. The French halted the very popular lopping of heads in public as the Carnival became a mob demanding more.
The concept of televised executions heaped on the public already desensitized by current film and video games would negate the effect and import.
In that context, would people attend an execution in a public square ? Perhaps families and freinds might benifit, as for the rest ?
In all a cable program dedicated to this truly speaks to the decline of a people.
Jul '10
Re: Public Executions
For once, the NYT has stumbled into the truth. Public executions are pornography for revenge fantasists. That we execute our fellow human beings is bad enough. To ask the government to start televising snuff films would turn a tragedy into an atrocity.
Nov '10
Re: Public Executions
Executions should be public, free of charge. C-SPAN4. That will rightly turn moral people against capital punishment.
I'm not against captial punishment per se, but I cannot bear the thought that innocent people, however rare, will have their lives taken from them.
Punishment by the state is not revenge, it's justice. Dostoyevski says it best in Bros Karamazov: Only the victim can forgive. The rest of us bystanders must seek justice.
Edited on Aug 1, 2011 at 7:58pmMay '11
Re: Public Executions
Actually, the NYT is advocating televising executions because they argue that we won't be moved one way or another by being exposed to that. If executions were televised, I doubt if they would look like snuff films but what should they look like? What sort of ceremonial execution is appropriate?