Zachary R. Shemtob, assistant professor of criminal justice at Connecticut State University, and David Lat, a former federal prosecutor have a rancid idea:
Executions in the United States ought to be made public.
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. [...]
There is a dramatic difference between reading or hearing of such an event and observing it through image and sound. (This is obvious to those who saw the footage of Saddam Hussein’s hanging in 2006 or the death of Neda Agha-Soltan during the protests in Iran in 2009.) We are not calling for opening executions completely to the public — conducting them before a live crowd — but rather for broadcasting them live or recording them for future release, on the Web or TV. [...]
Ultimately the main opposition to our idea seems to flow from an unthinking disgust — a sense that public executions are archaic, noxious, even barbarous. 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.
No mention from these gentlemen about how long it would be before certain elements in our society started lobbying for some twisted version of American Execution, in prime time, with commercials and applausometers. Lethal injection, the current supposedly benign method in vogue in most states, would certainly not satisfy viewers (or media outlets like Fox) for long. For the audiences in 17th and 18th century England, nothing drew more ooohs and aaahs than when a poorly adjusted noose tore off someone's head (while pickpockets, obviously undeterred by the capital punishment often exacted for that crime, worked the crowds).
How long would it be before there was an unquenchable thirst for audience participation and a lottery was set like Utah authorities have used to pick the firing squad for executions in that state? Surely some clever someone could create an Internet-enabled push-button version allowing the executioners to take part from the comfort of their sofas. Zap! For a handsome price, of course.
The disgust that opponents have for the death penalty in all its forms is far from "unthinking," as Shemtob and Lat would have it. It is, most definitely, noxious and barbarous. And it's way past time to make it archaic as well.
At Daily Kos on this date in 2007:
Whatever else can be said about Senator Barack Obama's "Comprehensive Strategy to Fight Global Terrorism" speech today, it has certainly put the spotlight on foreign policy in a manner far more suited to get to the root of things than the silly media-enhanced spat over whether a Democratic President should dial up the likes of Fidel Castro, Kim Jong-il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the afternoon of January 20, 2009.
The screaming started before the verbatim transcript was to be found anywhere. You can find it here.
Among progressives, foreign policy is always difficult to discuss for more than three minutes before the shouting starts. Because progressives (that is, liberals and those of us further to the left) have divergent goals, and we don't have the same analysis, although there is considerable overlap. It's that overlap which makes us allies. Over the past few years, we've been more or less united around getting out of Iraq and staying out of Iran, but when the talk turns to the details, and when we go further afield, our differences cannot be submerged. In part, that's because some progressives choose words that make other progressives (and especially the full spectrum of Democrats) squirmy: words like "imperialism" and "hegemony."
This is nothing new obviously; it's essentially where we were during the Vietnam era. It's why many people are asking whether, say, Senator Hillary Clinton is an updated 21st Century version of a Cold War liberal or somebody with a fresher vision. It's why the term "terrorism" itself, much less "global war on terrorism." can kindle the outpouring of fierce debate we've seen today.
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