If there's a residual ritualistic/religious component to the death penalty, then these public executions serve to flesh out the unconscious need for human sacrifice.
*Blood Rites* by Barbara Ehrenreich, page 66:
Like the Aztecs, the nineteenth-century African kingdom of Dahomey waged war for the stated purpose of collecting victims for sacrificial rites. In these rites, "the king sat on a platform among his dignitaries while the people stood below in a dense throng. At a sign from the king the executioners set to work. The heads of the murdered prisoners were thrown onto a heap; several such heaps were to be seen. There were processions through streets lined with the naked corpses of executed enemies hanging from gallows; to spare the modesty of the king's innumerable wives these had been mutilated... People fought for the corpses; it was said that in their frenzy they ate them. Everyone wanted to get a piece of the enemy dead; it might be called a communion of triumph. Human beings were followed by animals, but the chief thing was the enemy." (Canetti, Crowds and Power)
[...]
Greek mythology offers numerous cases in which humans are offered directly to a predator beast in order to save the larger community. Laomedon must expose his daughter Hesione to a sea monster sent by Poseidon; Andromeda is tied to a rock to be eaten by another one of Poseidon's monstrous envoys; in Thespiae, a young man was selected by lot each year to be offered to a dragon that was ravaging the land. These myths are not, of course, evidence that any such events actually occurred, but they do at least show that the possibility of having to appease a predator beast with a human sacrifice had powerful dramatic resonance for the Greeks.
One of the few rituals of human sacrifice to survive into modern times was, in part, an explicit attempt to appease very real predator beasts. Until Christian missionaries succeeded in dissuading them from the practice, certain of the Kondh tribes of India sacrificed a human victim, the meriah, who might have been captured or even raised locally for this purpose. Before the killing, the priest offered prayers to the "earth goddess" for "full grainaries, increase of children, cattle, pigs and poultry and the decrease or disappearance of tigers and snakes. The priest then stabbed the victim while the villagers joined him in singing:
Here we sacrifice the enemy
Here we sacrifice the meriah
The gods eat-up this sacrifice
The enemy is thus worshipped
Let there be no collective loss
Let no tigers prowl
The gods need so many bribes
So many offerings.
Later in the song, the deity being sacrificed to is identified as Durga, the goddess who is stereotypically portrayed riding on a tiger:
Durga eats
Durga eats everything.
Once sated on the meriah, Durga would presumably leave the rest of the villagers alone.
But for all the intuitive appeal of the apotropaic scenario, in which the sacrifice is designed to ward off the predator beast, there is also an intuitive problem: The beast may be temporarily appeased by the victim that is tossed to it, but it will return. In fact, the sacrificial strategy seems guaranteed to habituate the predator to seek out human encampments as a source of food.
[...]
To some scholars, the idea of hominids scavenging is almost as distateful as the idea of their being prey. But scavenging from more skillful predators takes courage and ingenuity, especially in the case of what anthropologists call "active" or "confrontational" scavenging, in which the scavenger must drive away the beast that made the kill. Hyenas scavenge from lions but are fierce predators themselves, capable of matching lions tooth for claw. Imagine, then, the audacity of our toothless, clawless, unarmed ancestors, creeping out from the underbrush to steal the leavings of the mighty leopard or lion. Imagine, too the role the predator would come to play in the prehumand and early human mind: both giver of sustenance and taker of life.
If the beast that kills also nourishes, then the idea of archaic sacrifice as a literal offering to the beast begins to make more sense. In addition to whatever apotropaic function the offering serves-- calming the beast for a moment-- it is a profound acknowledgment of human dependency. Should the predator animals leave the area in search of more plentiful game animals, the hominid band might suffer also. Thus hard times, in which game animals are scarce, might seem to demand extraordinary "sacrifices." [end of excerpt]
What's interesting about the death penalty is that it serves no purpose in reducing crime or even saving money, and the guilt or innocence of the accused doesn't seem to be particularly relevant. Al Gore (aptly named) recently justified the death penalty on the grounds that its value to the community exceeds the cost of occasionally executing an innocent person by mistake.
It doesn't matter whether the accused is guilty or not. What's needed is bodies to be executed at regular intervals (preferably through electrocution so as to cook the "meat"). If the US death penalty is essentially a sanitized and rationalized update of the ancient practice of human sacrifice, then its primary function is the compulsive and unconscious re-enactment of the sacrifice of one (to the predator beast) in exchange for the well-being of the many. The practice keeps the monster at bay, so it doesn't completely annihilate us, while at the same time luring it to stay nearby. We must not allow it to abandon us, because, after all, it is the source of our sustenance and our great worldly power.
The monster, of course, is God.
Ted Dace