Self Serving Capital Punishment May 2, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern , trackback
Where are our modern executioners? Most people would have problems answering this because there are no modern executioners as such, at least in the US. There are guards (who get overtime), there are governors, there are wardens, there are doctors and, outside some death chambers, there are members of the general public and journalists. It might be argued that all of these take part and so bear a responsibility (good or bad) for killing. Yet, of course, there is still someone who presses the button or flicks the lever. Some will push/flick with equanimity, but some will go home and have a bad night’s sleep and there is anecdotal material to suggest that there are not many volunteers for the squelchy part. And there has been a long history of trying to deal with this kind of reluctance.
The gibbet, for example, of Halifax (England), a type of proto guillotine, worked, in the seventeenth century, by animal: an animal (commonly a sheep) was attached to the blade’s brake and then scared by the crowd into bolting and ending the criminal’s life. This is just an early example – and there must surely be earlier ones – of trying to get rid of the executioner. But this reluctance has been applied to more modern forms of killing. All of us have heard of firing squads where blanks are included in the guns handed out: the soldier always has the doubt whether or not he killed. Several months ago Chris from Haunted Ohio Books included this interesting application for the electric chair:
In this apparatus, behind the chair in which the condemned man is to take his seat—and by means of which, as we need not explain in detail, his body is placed in circuit with a powerful coil—there stands a conventional figure of justice with bandaged eyes holding the balance in her left hand and the sword in her right. The criminal having taken his seat, the presiding functionary is supposed to run over the record of his crimes and the sentence of the law. This ceremony completed, he folds up the document and places it in the scale pan, the arm of the balance descends, closes the circuit and all is over. 1886.
In 1891, meanwhile, one Mr Dudley (Canon City, Colorado) employed a system for hanging that included hydraulics and that dispatched a criminal named James Joyce. When the man to be hung stood on the platform he ‘set free a jet of water that by releasing a weight jerked the victim three feet into the air.’ Had James been warned?
Of course, there is a lot of pedantry in all this. In the end if it is not a man in a black cap who does the killing it is the man who attaches the sheep, the man who throws the document into the pan, the one who ties the noose around the criminal’s neck… Maybe capital punishment is right and maybe capital punishment is wrong but isn’t there something worrying about a society that can sentence someone to death but then not find anyone to do the killing willingly? The only authentic way to break the circuit of blame would be to convince the prisoner that they should commit suicide and give them the tools to do so. Thinking, though, of some of the Narcissists that end up on death row that might prove rather difficult: not many seem to have the making of a Socrates…
