Indeed they should. One of the justifications of the death penalty (supposedly) is deterrence. Executions should be publicly broadcast. Indeed, perhaps tickets should be sold and the money given to the victims. In any case, in the *absence* of public broadcasting of the executions, one should be opposed to the death penalty. It is farcically hypocritical to proclaim a deterrent effect and then to conceal the action which generates the alleged effect. People who support the death penalty should see exactly what it is they support. Prime time, open to kids too.
However, I note: that in England in the 18th century there were a dozen executions a week in London and they were little more than entertainment for the multitudes. They evidently had no deterrent effect or they wouldn't have been needed year after year. Defoe's Moll Flanders gives some insights into the whole judicial system.
On vengeance: I won't be dismissive of its theoretical value, but it is not what I had in mind in describing the 49% of me that sees some justification for the death penalty. Some cases are just beyond hope. Rabid animals, vicious dogs that have attacked children, are put down not because we desire revenge against them but because there appears to be a doubtful utility to warehousing them in some kind of facility until they die of other causes. Some crimes are so horrendous that it is highly questionable that the individuals involved are salvageable in any sense of the term, even from the point of view of simple warehousing; indeed, they make the warehouse they are in a worse place for everyone in with them--even others of their own ilk--and proximity to those like themselves can only guarantee a living hell.
Moreover in the case of a vicious, non-rabid dog that has attacked children, I question whether lifetime confinement would be more humane than execution, and I similarly question whether it is in fact more humane to imprison someone than to kill quickly. When I picture prison, I imagine my three years in junior high school, where I was routinely beaten and intimidated and where all the racial elements were in full play; it was life in non-stop fear. And prison of course is far worse. The only thing that got me "through" those periods of terror was the promise of eventual release, and the fact that I was paroled from the system after hours and during weekends and other vacations. If I were imprisoned indefinitely and continuously under such conditions, as would likely be the case were I guilty of capital offense, I could rationally prefer death and would view life imprisonment as inhumane.
(A lifelong asthmatic, I had severe worsening of conditions in junior high. A dozen years later I participated in a study of asthmatics in Boston where they showed us millisecond flashes of something designed to invoke a subconscious fear response and then measured our breathing. At the end of the study the doctor laid out to me the reasoning that they were trying to link anxiety to asthma. I pointed out that the link seemed profoundly real, but that millisecond flashes of something like "Mommy is leaving me" wasn't the kind of trigger. I recounted my junior high experiences. The doc observed that was the idea but that you can't treat human subjects that way. No indeed, you can't. But you can treat students in the public schools that way, and you can treat prisoners that way.)
In short the question of eliminating animals that have "crossed the line" raises, as does euthanasia for pets, the question of why we recoil at the same practices for humans. My only point here, I reiterate, is that it is possible to carry out such a sentence not with satisfaction and revenge but with regret. And in my view, execution would be preferable to living in a brutal environment where terror and physical intimidation, not to mention rape, are the norms. Another alternative, heavy sedation real sick-os for life in confinement, does not seem too appealing on humanitarian grounds, either.
All this said: I repeat that on the whole I oppose the death penalty, because the prosecuting entities do not seem competent to meet their own criteria of proof in too many cases, and also because those who back the penalty seem ashamed of it, and don't fulfill the public commitment to display the execution, which would, I think, give the public a full opportunity to decide if it preferred this alternative.
But I remain unhappy with any suggestion that the alternatives are *necessarily* more humane, as if life imprisonment were so compassionate. And even more, I would point out, that were there to be some kind of surgical mind-altering procedure whereby they altered your brain and made you "well," that it would be seen as a horrendous concentration camp kind of violation of human rights. Which means: we're going to warehouse you under brutal conditions, maybe because we made a mistake, but also because we don't want or don't know how to make you better, and because we're too chickenshit to kill you.
Life imprisonment has never sounded too humane to me; it's only virtue is that for those later found innocent it is reversible. I've always wondered about the certainty of life-imprisonment advocates on the preferability of a life sentence to the death penalty. But then they didn't go to my junior high school.
-- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 12222
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