"when they asked the warden, Robert Ward, if they could take a break from execution work, he said they could lose their leadership roles if they didn’t do it, the men said. ... So they kept going. They both valued their managerial roles and needed them to support their families."
They did it for the money and status.
They chose to do other people's dirty work in a corrupt and utterly indefensible system. No one forced them to be killers. This is what people are like.
Someone strongly pressured them to be killers, and they lacked the moral courage to say "no". But maybe we'd be better off not creating systems where people need that moral courage?
My opinion is simple. We should just never kill people except when there's an imminent threat. The death penalty doesn't deter crime, and life in prison is significant enough punishment. As far as I can tell, the death penalty mostly just serves to satiate the appetite of those who want revenge. Does it provide victims with enough solace to justify its downsides? I doubt it.
What would you say to people like myself who view "life in prison" as essentially the death penalty with 'entropy' chosen as the method of execution? Is the purpose of prison punishment or reform? If the latter, there is no reason for life in prison; what use is reformation to someone who's stuck in prison for their entire life? If the former, then life imprisonment is a terrible punishment from an economic standpoint. Incarcerating an inmate can cost anywhere from $80,000[0] to $200,000 per year. Death row inmates can double that amount. Looking at the situation from a completely cold-blooded perspective, life imprisonment is a worst-of-both-worlds compromise. It maximizes the suffering of the individual prisoner and wastes the maximum amount of the people's money. How many other people's lives could that money save if we weren't subject to identifiable victim bias?
If prison is so expensive, stop putting people there for no-victim crimes like smoking some weed. Then the money can go to humanely incarcerating real criminals without giving them the easy way out of death.
Question; if, upon finding a defendant guilty of a severe enough crime, they were instantly and automatically transported to a foreign island not under the control of the state, would the government have a duty to deliver food and other amenities to them? That is to say, are the people of a nation morally obliged to provide for people that they no longer want to be part of their community? If your answer is no, and no other country will take in the person found guilty of the crime, then what is the government supposed to do? If your answer is yes, that's quite a strange position to me. It prioritizes the needs of criminals above that of law-abiding citizens (as, with rare exceptions, a law-abiding citizen is unlikely to have their physical needs met in such a manner by the state). Why should your tax dollars go towards the care and housing of a person who has proven themselves eager and able to murder you if the opportunity arose?
Also, you have either misunderstood or altered my premise. Regarding the first part, It's not that the life of an inmate has no value; my premise is that said life costs more to preserve than the education and healthcare that could be provided to dozens or hundreds of people for every year that said inmate languishes in prison. I'm comparing the QALY's of a prisoner with others. Life imprisonment as an intervention fails to maximize social utility and fails at the task of killing fewest people because, after all, (regarding the second part) everything that a government does kills people. A state that spends 2 billion dollars on housing death row inmates is choosing not to spend that money on improving its education, infrastructure, social programs, healthcare systems, and everything else it can do that save lives. Hence why I mentioned the identificable victim bias; people on death row feel more like victims than the hundreds of people that will freeze to death in the streets because of a lack of housing, or when wildfires consume their homes, or because higher taxes and regulations have stalled out the economy and left them destitute and hopeless. They are killed by neglect rather than direct action, but they are dead all the same.
The American prison complex is an inhumane travesty, and life imprisonment is one of its worst failures. It is the worst compromise possible between those who see the system as fundamentally reformatory, and those who see it in talionic terms. It is maximum punishment at maximum cost.
Absolutely. And let's not forget innocent people do get convicted and even if there is a 99% accuracy the state still kills innocent people. You can't get years behind bars back, but at least you're still alive if your conviction gets overturned.
>> life in prison is significant enough punishment.
What is the point of keeping a human behind bars for 50, 60 years?
Especially in a clear-cut case like a mass shooting. Those guys are still alive, behind bars, forever, unless they shoot themselves when they are done.
My local grocery store cards everyone for alcohol, even people obviously in their 90s. It turns out it's really hard to determine what counts as "clear-cut", and there are consequences for fucking it up.
Personal opinion - the governor themself should be the one to push the drugs/button/trigger that kills the death row inmate.
S/he should be the one to follow through on the state mandated and sanctioned death of one of its people. They are the head of the state after all, with the power to stay the execution.
I also think death penalty by lethal injection should be illegal. It is regularly botched, leaving the victim to suffocate or experience a fatal heart attack for minutes without pain killers while also paralyzed. Seems fairly cruel and unusual to paralyze someone and then suffocate them while leaving them conscious.
There’s also something deeply unseemly about a method of execution that is quite painful but designed to make the executioners feel better about what they’re doing. If we’re going to execute people it should be via firing squad, which is honest about what is happening and much less painful for the condemned. If we’re not comfortable with that, well then maybe we shouldn’t be doing this at all then.
I think the method of execution should depend on how much the victim suffered. Killed in their sleep or never noticed the bullet? Asfixiation with an inert gas.
Abducted, raped, tortured and killed? Bring out the rack.
But then I am also okay with the death penalty for rape, but SCOTUS has already ruled that one out.
My main concern in making sure there was a fair trial and that the conviction was correct - replacing death with life in prison is not a substitute for a fair trail.
I agree with the point you're making, but there are far more humane methods than firing squad. Firing squad causes trauma issues for those doing the firing, and could easily be botched as well.
Asphyxiation by another gas such as helium is generally considered to be "better" as far as I understand – it creates a feeling of euphoria for the subject.
This is not an endorsement of any method of execution, I'm strongly against the entire idea.
I don't know exact details, but because of the chemical structure of helium, it binds to red blood blood cells without causing the body panic, like CO2 and others would.
Your brain doesn't stay conscious too long without oxygen, so it's pretty quick once you start breathing it in.
There are two things about Oxygen free environments.
First, humans can't actually detect Oxygen. We can detect CO2, largely because the build up in our blood makes it more acidic, but we can't actually tell how much Oxygen is in the air or in our bodies. The negative feeling of holding your breath isn't caused by insufficient air, but the buildup of CO2 in your blood due to metabolism. As such, humans actually can't detect an oxygen free room, as long as it isn't full of CO2 (we'd notice that).
Second, part of how we absorb gas is via the difference in gas pressure between our blood and the air. When the partial pressure of CO2 in our blood is higher than the air, it diffuses out, and when the partial pressure of O2 in the air is higher than our blood it tends to dissolve into solution. In an Oxygen free environment any O2 in our blood not already bound up by Hemoglobin rapidly diffuses away, robbing us of O2 faster than holding our breath and cell metabolism normally would, resulting in loss of consciousness very quickly.
The combination of these is why it is advised you never enter an Oxygen free environment without a self contained breathing apparatus. Industrial reports are littered with tragic stories of multiple people entering an N2 or Halogen environment to rescue their friends, only to perish themselves.
Right, but that's a feature and not a bug. You really don't want the state to be able to execute people without someone feeling morally culpable for it.
Hangings get botched fairly often. The last execution at the Old Idaho Penitentiary, now a historical site in Boise, took 15 minutes to finish. Not really an improvement over lethal injection in that area.
Beheading works, but requires a lot of specialized equipment and what not. Meanwhile a firing squad doesn't really require any special equipment and training above and beyond what the judicial system already has available.
I have a similar opinion about skin in the game for war, any politician who votes for or pushes for combat action has to go themselves into the most dangerous part of the action to help carry it out.
Yes. I 100% support the national vote for all aggressive 'war' actions, where a yes vote is also registration for selective service for that action.
I understand that system becomes vulnerable to bad-faith actors who can use PR and other means to turn public opinion against US interference to then get away with whatever they want.
At the very least, they should have to be in the room to give the executioner a final yes/no decision. Not really sure how we'd make all the states do something like that, but I think it'd really help.
The article indicates something along those lines is in place.
> The governor is always listening through a phone when people condemned to die in South Carolina take their last breath. During 13 of the state’s recent executions, the Commander was on the line with the governor.
Sitting on a phone hundreds of miles away talking to a guy in the room isn't really the same thing as being there yourself. Yes, you could stop the execution either way, but you're not seeing the consequences of your decision.
IMHO executions should be open to the public. The people ultimately responsible for these deaths are the people who voted for [politicians who support] the death penalty. They should be able to see what their votes have wrought.
Would you be upset if people showed positive emotion at the execution (cheers, etc.; think murder victim's family)
Executions have a long history of being a public event and fun/exciting/scratching a human morbid itch and satisfying cravings for justice (putting aside the innocence / false positive question for a moment) and I think a contemporary audience may exhibit some of the same historical reactions and behaviors
> Would you be upset if people showed positive emotion at the execution
I would be disappointed. I would also be surprised. I think there's a reason executions aren't public any more, and I think it's because we have largely evolved beyond the point where most of us can take pleasure from watching another person die. I think this is the reason that the reality of industrial meat production is such a closely guarded secret. If people knew what happened behind those closed doors they'd eat a lot less meat.
Setting aside the morality of the death penalty, the methods used by prisons have been grotesquely mismanaged. I’m not surprised state-sanctioned homicide, as it was characterized in the article, has left an indelible mark on anyone willing to take on such a ghastly job. For the reason that nobody wants to do this job, the methods are subjected to further inefficiencies that turn executions into torture.
The documentary, Mr. Death, by Errol Morris (who also directed Fog of War) comes to mind. Well worth a watch for anyone who doesn’t mind the gruesome topic, which I’m guessing is anyone reading this comment. It chronicles the rise of a private citizen and jailhouse worker who decided he could improve the electric chair —- despite having no background at all. Eventually he was advising on all sorts of execution methods.
Interesting. Extremely traumatizing to the executioner, despite the (theoretically) bloodless death. I do wonder why prisoners being executed aren't completely anaesthetized first so that they don't/can't feel pain. Also, compare and contrast to the attitudes of an executioner in Saudi Arabia who generally uses a sword to behead people [0]:
"[T]here are many people who faint when they witness an execution. I don't know why they come and watch if they don't have the stomach for it. Me? I sleep very well."
"There are no drawbacks for my social life."
"I successfully trained my son Musaed, 22, as an executioner and he was approved and chosen," he says proudly.
At the risk of sounding too ghoulish, I wonder if the right lens to view this through might be that of alienation from one's work. TFA's executioners are technicians, dressed up in the gloves and scrubs otherwise associated with people who save and preserve lives. Saudi executioners use a fucking sword, you know, like we always have! Of course, that cultural factor helps too.
Not that dressing up in a black hood and hanging people would necessarily be less traumatic, but maybe we'd think differently if there was a cultural continuity of hangmen hanging people which we were all casually aware of as a consequence of growing up and learning about the world.
> The film is based on the life of Britain's most prolific hangman, Albert Pierrepoint (played by Timothy Spall), from the time he is first trained for the job and accepted onto the list of the country's official hangmen in 1932 until his resignation in 1956.
Note that the original article's title was "They executed people for the state of South Carolina. For some, it nearly destroyed them." and not this, if you'll forgive my language, wishy-washy 'both-sides' thing.
I suspect this is a side effect of Christianity becoming the state religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century.
You cannot keep an empire of that size together without quite a lot of violence, especially when enemies like Attila the Hun come plundering your territory, so you find all kinds of religious justifications for war and killing even against the original intent. The alternative is defeat and slavery.
Where did you get the idea that it doesn't give authorities the power to use force? How is law enforcement etc supposed to work if there is no possibility of using any sort of force?
From Romans 13
1. Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.
2. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.
3. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you.
4. For he is God's servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God's servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.
5. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience.
6. This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God's servants, who give their full time to governing.
7. Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.
Note: those were the words of that revisionist bastard Paul. The closest Jesus ever came to saying anything like that was "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's", and even there, there's a significant range of interpretation.
Don't fall into the trap of accepting the premise. Killing was always considered evil. An evil that's occasionally necessary or justified, sure, but so is today.
"when they asked the warden, Robert Ward, if they could take a break from execution work, he said they could lose their leadership roles if they didn’t do it, the men said. ... So they kept going. They both valued their managerial roles and needed them to support their families."
They did it for the money and status.
They chose to do other people's dirty work in a corrupt and utterly indefensible system. No one forced them to be killers. This is what people are like.