The last long goodbye

I am against capital punishment under most circumstances, but I have had to take a look at the topic again...
With all the talk of executions performed, botched, planned or demanded, maybe we could take a look at the methods involved? And try and make some sort of choice?
Before beginning: I suppose we might as well leave out the options like necklacing, theguillotine, the garotte, or the electric drill (the favourite method today in Iraq's civil war), no matter how appropriate they might appear as desirable for certain individuals.
So, what are we left with?
Hanging: The rope is still touted in many countries as the quickest, most painless method to execute someone, using a long drop calculated according to the condemned person's weight. This is because it allegedly breaks the neck, leading to instant death, or vasovagal reflex which causes rapid unconsciousness and death. But if it is botched, with a too short drop, it can cause slow and agonising strangulation. And if the drop is too long it can literally rip the person's head off.
Here is a description of slow strangulation of a prisoner where the drop was inadequate
at San Quentin in California. Clinton Duffy who was the warden there from 1942 to 1954 described the execution of Major Raymond Lisemba on May 9, 1942 as follows: "The man hit bottom and I observed that he was fighting by pulling on the straps, wheezing, whistling, trying to get air, that blood was oozing through the black cap. I observed also that he urinated, defecated, and droppings fell on the floor, and the stench was terrible". (This is not abnormal in death by slow hanging as the person slowly strangles). "I also saw witnesses pass out and have to be carried from the witness room. Some of them threw up."
It took ten minutes for the condemned man to die. When he was taken down and the cap removed, "big hunks of flesh were torn off" the side of his face where the noose had been, "his eyes were popped," and his tongue was "swollen and hanging from his mouth." His face had turned purple.
Normally, hanging causes death like this:
Hanging with no or insufficient drop typically produces death by strangulation (asphyxia) due to the weight of the person's body pulling down on the noose, causing it to tighten and constrict the trachea (air passage) and applying pressure to the large blood vessels in the neck. The condemned person usually struggles for some time after suspension, due to the physical pain caused by the noose. It can take up to 3 minutes for the person to lapse into unconsciousness in this form of hanging, as the rope occludes the jugular veins and carotid arteries but the vertebrae protects the vertebral and spinal arteries which also supply blood to the brain. However, these arteries go outside the fourth vertebrae instead of inside it, which subjects them to blockage if the pressure on the neck is high enough (usually about 40-50 lbs. for a normal person) and this can cause the loss of consciousness in less than 15 seconds. Death can also come from sudden stoppage of the heart due to pressure on the carotid arteries which can cause a lethal carotid sinus reflex or from Vagal reflex (pressure on the Vagal nerve) which causes unconsciousness very quickly. This form of hanging is typical in suicides and it quite normal for the inquest to find that the victim died from heart failure rather than strangulation.
After suspension the face may become engorged and cyanosed (turned blue through lack of oxygen). The tongue may protrude and rippling movements of the body and limbs may occur which are usually attributed to nervous and muscular reflexes. There exist many pictures of actual hangings, both judicial and suicide, which seem to show that the person died quickly and quite peacefully.
In death, the body typically shows marks of suspension, e.g., bruising and rope marks on the neck and in some cases traces of urine, semen and feces. Male prisoners sometimes have penile erections and even ejaculate while hanging.
This form of asphyxial death is known, medically as anoxia, as the brain becomes starved of oxygen. Whole body death results usually within less than 20 minutes.
Where a measured drop is used, it takes between a quarter and a third of a second for a person to reach the end of the rope after the trap opens. The force produced by the prisoner's body weight multiplied by the length of fall and the force of gravity, coupled with the position of the knot is designed to cause a virtually instant fracture-dislocation of the neck which leads to death by comatose asphyxia. Typically brain death will occur in around 3-6 minutes and whole body death within 5-15 minutes.
The cause of death is still asphyxia but the condemned person is deeply unconscious at the time due to dislocation of the cervical vertebrae and the crushing or separation of the spinal cord. The face may come engorged and then cyanosed and the tongue may protrude. Some slight movements of the limbs and body may occasionally occur and are attributed to spinal reflexes. The prisoner may urinate and/or defecate as their muscles relax. The heart can continue to beat for as long as 25 minutes after the drop.
Although it's generally pretended that the executed person feels no pain in hanging, according to Harold Hillman, a British physiologist who has studied executions, "the dangling person probably feels cervical pain, and suffers from an acute headache, as a result of the rope closing off the veins of the neck. It had been generally assumed that fracture-dislocation of the neck causes instantaneous loss of sensation. Sensory pathways from below the neck are ruptured, but the sensory signals from the skin above the noose and from the trigeminal nerve may continue to reach the brain until hypoxia blocks them". 
Translation: Yes, he does, in all but a tiny fraction of cases. Agonisingly so. In the opinion of Dr. Cornelius Rosse, the chairman of the Department of Anatomy at the University of Washington School of Medicine, the belief that fracture of the spinal cord causes instantaneous death is wrong in all but a small fraction of cases.
The Gas Chamber: Apart from the Nazi Zyklon B chambers in Auschwitz, this is a uniquely American - and uniquely sadistic - method. Also it makes the prisoner actively complicit in his own execution since his breathing makes him inhale the gas fumes. Not to speak of the expense of maintaining a meticulously hermetically sealed gas chamber with some means of removing the fumes afterwards and avoiding danger to everyone present at the execution.
Prisoners are advised to take deep breaths after the gas is released as this will considerably shorten their suffering. Easy for the Warden to say, no doubt, but much harder for the prisoner to intentionally inhale the gas designed to kill them, even if they accept the logic of the advice they are given.
A typical witnesses' view of gassing is as follows "At first there is evidence of extreme horror, pain and strangling. The eyes pop, the skin turns purple and the prisoner begins to drool."
In medical terms, victims of cyanide gas die from hypoxia, which means the cut-off of oxygen to the brain. The initial result of this is spasms, as in an epileptic seizure. Because of the straps, however, involuntary body movements are restrained. Seconds after the prisoner first inhales, he/she will feel himself unable to breathe, but will not lose consciousness immediately. "The person is unquestionably experiencing pain and extreme anxiety," according to Dr. Richard Traystman of John Hopkins University. "The pain begins immediately and is felt in the arms, shoulders, back, and chest. The sensation is similar to the pain felt by a person during a heart attack, where essentially the heart is being deprived of oxygen." "We would not use asphyxiation, by cyanide gas or by any other substance, in our laboratory to kill animals that have been used in experiments."
It's not exactly surprising that gassing is no longer a method of choice, though it remains on the books.
Lethal Injection: The world's favourite method, at least officially, right now. Sounds excellent in theory, doesn't it? The condemned person just "goes to sleep and never wakes up again". Well, as the case of Mr Angel Nieves Diaz has shown, lethal injection can get screwed up, and screwed up badly, so much so that Jeb Bush has put lethal injection executions on hold. When a Bush does something like that, you know it's not just a screw-up, it's a huge, enormous screw up showing an incredible level of incompetence. They missed the vein. 
Opponents of lethal injection believe that it is not actually humane as practiced in the United States. Opponents argue that the thiopental is an ultra-short acting barbiturate that may wear off (anesthesia awareness) and lead to consciousness and an excruciatingly painful death wherein the inmate is unable to express their pain because they have been rendered paralyzed by the paralytic agent.(Wikipedia)Yet there is a "controversy" on whether this method is too humane. I guess those people want something like the axe.Execution by lethal injection takes much longer from start to finish than any other method, typically 30-45 minutes depending on the execution protocol and ease or otherwise of locating a vein. In the U.K., a hanging took around 15 seconds to carry out in the later part of the 20th century. For the majority of this time, the condemned person is fully aware of what is happening to them and able to experience their execution. They know that they will be dead at the end of it and the fear of suffering (particularly in front of an audience) and of the unknown is strong in most of us. It is difficult to see, therefore, how it can be considered more humane, as the prisoner is subjected to far more mental anguish over a longer period.
A personal observation, incidentally: for an excellent cinematic depiction of the trauma a lethal injection prisoner goes through, watch the Sharon Stone movie Last Dance.
The Electric Chair: Here is what happens to someone who is executed by this method:
After electrocution, the body temperature rises to about 138 degrees F and is initially too hot to touch. Heating destroys the body's proteins and "bakes" the organs.
Physical reactions include heaving chest, gurgles, foaming at the mouth, bloody sweat, burning of the hair and skin, and release of urine and faeces.
The body has to be allowed to cool before an autopsy can be performed.
According to Robert H. Kirschner, the deputy chief medical examiner of Cook County,Illinois, "The brain appears cooked in most cases."
According to Judge Brennan, the prisoner's eyeballs sometimes pop out and rest on his cheeks. The prisoner often defecates, urinates, and vomits blood and drool. The body turns bright red as its temperature rises, and the prisoner's flesh swells and his skin stretches to the point of breaking. Sometimes the prisoner catches on fire, particularly if he perspires excessively. Witnesses hear a loud and sustained sound like bacon frying, and the sickly sweet smell of burning flesh permeates the chamber.
Electrocution, in fact, is the most easily and spectacularly botched method of all. Famous instances such as
on May 4, 1990, in the case of Jesse Joseph Tafero in Florida. According to witnesses, when the executioner flipped the switch, flames and smoke came out  from around the helmet and mask on Tafero's head. Twelve inch blue and orange flames sprouted from both sides of the mask. The power was stopped, and Tafero took several deep breaths. The superintendent ordered the executioner to halt the current, then try it again. And again.  The helmet used artificial sponge (which was initially blamed for the problem) because it is uniformly conductive as it has a uniform thickness.  The subsequent enquiry found that the solder joint on the head electrode had separated causing a major high resistance connection.  This was proved in court by the two burns on Mr. Tafaro'shead.  The electrodes had not been checked but this was “hushed up” by the state. According to the state prison medical director, Frank Kligo, who attended Tafero’sexecution, it was "less than aesthetically attractive."
Another electrocution in Florida went seriously wrong in 1997 when Pedro Medina was executed on March 25th. Witnesses saw a blue and orange flame shoot 6-10 inches out of the helmet covering Medina's head. It burned for about 10 seconds, filling the chamber with acrid smoke and the smell of burning flesh.
An investigation by prison officials blamed the flare-up on a corroded brass screen used in the helmet.
Michael Morse and Jay Wiechart, both experienced in electric chair design and operation, blamed the malfunction on a dry sponge used in conjunction with a wet sponge in the helmet.
Although it is not considered, by the US legal system, cruel and unusual punishment, it's not that much of a surprise that it's hardly used.
Shooting: Ah, my personal favourite. I'd have loved to be executed this way, but there is another alternative I'll talk about right at the end of this post...something better. Anyway, this is probably, all told, the most actually used method worldwide.
Shooting can be carried out in two ways: in the first, by a single executioner who fires from short range at the back of the head or neck as is the case in China. The intention of shooting at short range is to destroy the vital centres of the medulla (lower brain stem). Although, of course, denigrated in propaganda terms because of its use by China (I do agree that forcing the condemned person's family to pay for the bullet is unnecessarily sadistic), it is actually far less messy and probably infinitely more humane than the other method, the firing squad. Firing squad executions are much more famous but have sharply declined in popularity these days because of the difficulty of gathering enough willing individuals and finding a place to carry out the execution without risking other peoples' lives by stray bullets. (Thailand used to use a hybrid method, a single executioner firing a machine gun, as shown here.)
The firing squad is the favourite military method of execution (photo here), but many countries continue to use it (all, in fact, that continue to shoot condemned prisoners, except China and Uzbekistan) on civilians.  
The traditional firing squad is made up of 3 to 6 shooters per prisoner who stand or kneel opposite the condemned who is usually tied to a chair or to a stake. Normally the shooters aim at the chest, since this is easier to hit than the head. A firing squad aiming at the head produces the same type of wounds as those produced by a single bullet, but bullets fired at the chest rupture the heart, large blood vessels, and lungs so that the condemned person dies of haemorrhage and shock, not a destruction of the brainstem as in the Chinese method. It was not unusual in earlier times for the officer in charge of the firing squad to have to give the prisoner a "coup de grace" - a pistol shot to the head to finish them off after the initial volley failed to kill them, and this is still standard in Vietnam. Persons hit by bullets feel as if they have been punched - pain comes later if the victim survives long enough to feel it. 
One of the myths surrounding firing squad members is that there is one rifle handed out at random which is loaded with a blank bullet, so each individual member (typically a volunteer) can tell himself he did not fire the fatal shot. In reality, the recoil produced by a blank is so much less any experienced rifleman ought to be able to tell the difference unless he is wilfully deluding himself.
When all goes well, shooting can provide a quick death but there are many recorded instances of it failing to kill the condemned person immediately. There are also instances of people surviving their execution. Probably, one of the problems of the firing squad is that it is, typically, composed of volunteers rather than professional executioners and it is a task that many people would not find easy to perform when the time comes to actually squeeze the trigger (though they're always  eager enough to volunteer when it comes to that). While shooting is always a gruesome and bloody death, Americans who have a lifetime of hunting behind them should be able to bear up better (my two cents here).
OK, so which would you prefer? One for the people you would execute, and one for yourown execution? Truth time folks...as I said, for myself, I have a better method than shooting.
And that is extreme sexual exhaustion. 

The Executioner's Song

From Nov 2009:

There is a story I read in one of those collections of tales of murder and mystery Alfred Hitchcock used to introduce, mostly published back in the 1950s and 60s, well before I was born. My dad was an aficionado of those stories, which is why my bookshelves are loaded down with those books.


This story I mentioned was about a man who shot himself, and the relevant fact was that the author talked about the “other fingers” that he said were on the trigger, in this case the finger, specifically, of his jilted girlfriend’s sister. It wasn’t much of a story, except for that.


Now, I read on the net about the execution of the Beltway Sniper, John Allen Muhammad, for the shooting and killing of ten people in 2002 and the wounding of several others. I remember, at the time, watching the somewhat breathless TV coverage of the Beltway Sniper Attacksand wondering how on earth one madman (as then thought) with a gun could run rings round the self-professed Leader of the World. It was quite an interesting sociological phenomenon, anyway, to watch Police Chief Moose (if I recall his name right) pontificating on camera (as seen on BBC News) about how the shooter was a “weekend warrior” who had a full time job during the week, and white, since most victims were white. A lot of criminological theories probably quietly bit the dust when Muhammad and his teenage associate Lee Boyd Malvo were arrested; two of them, black, and unemployed to boot.


Since I had watched the whole thing unfold on TV, I was interested in what happened to John Allen Muhammad in a way I wouldn’t be in the case of most Thomases, Richards and Harriettas who end their lives at the receiving end of the US penal justice system. The only other equally interesting, to me, case was of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, who was as fascinating, and, I’m convinced, part of the same syndrome as the Beltway Sniper.


Before I get any further, let me lay out my position on the John Allen Muhammad case. I, personally, am convinced the man was guilty of at least some of the killings of which he was accused. You don’t have a sniper outpost built into the boot of your car, complete with scope-sighted high-powered Bushmaster rifle, if you’re innocent.


OK, let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it was some kind of bizarre coincidence; Mr Muhammad was playing out a fantasy of going around the country shooting people from the boot of his car while – absolutely independently – a completely separate psychopathic sniper was at work shooting people at random. Fine, you just might be right. Unlikely, but you might be right. Coincidences do happen.


But then you have to ask just how Mr Muhammad and his teenage friend happened to be in the area when the shootings happened, how his voice was on a phone call to the cops, and suchlike evidence. You have to explain why the shootings stopped when he was arrested. You have to explain away the other evidence in the case. You’ll probably have to explain away too much. There is such a thing as too many coincidences.


The logical answer is, therefore, that Mr Muhammad was guilty of some or all of the killings that were attributed to him, although one can’t really shrug off the possibility that one or more of the killings laid at his door might have been the work of copycat killers or were actual random coincidences. Even if so, for the majority of the murders, Mr Muhammad is by most standards of logic, guilty. He was the Beltway Sniper.


Well, then, we get back to the question I heard that story ask: how many  fingers, other than his, were on the trigger?


Let’s take a look at Mr Muhammad’s life history. Wikipedia’s entry on him (I wonder if I’ll ever have a page of my own on Wikipedia!) says Mr Muhammad was a US military veteran with service in the anti-Iraq war of 1991 and holder of an expert rating as a marksman. He was also trained as a metalworker, which must have come in useful when it came to fixing up his car as a sniper post. His service training practically fitted him to become the sniper he was, but of course it can’t be blamed for making him a sniper.


Now I’ll probably stick out my neck when I say this: there is such a thing as delayed random blowback. If you put young men into a high stress conflict environment where they have to kill and see people getting killed, often in acts of random senseless violence, you can’t expect them not to be scarred by this. As the Vietnam War’s veterans so clearly demonstrated, the war doesn’t stop when it officially stops. It lives on in the minds and the hearts of the survivors of the war, and surfaces, sometimes many years later, in random and ugly ways. You might call it post-traumatic stress disorder, you might call it psychosis, or you can go ahead and call the person exhibiting it a sociopath. Whatever it is, one finger of those on the trigger would be that of those who send soldiers off to an unnecessary war with no thought to what happens to them afterwards.


(And there again you have the connection to Timothy McVeigh, another veteran who called his victims “collateral damage”. In the context of recent US military activities, you would have to say that from his standpoint he was quite right.)


Then again, one might ask, would Mr Muhammad have been able to embark on his killing spree if he hadn’t been able to lay his hands on high-performance weaponry? I’ve repeatedly raised this question on this website and elsewhere: where does the right to own lethal weaponry stop being a good idea and become a dangerous and stupid one? Michael Moore and Bowling For Columbine apart, even if Mr Muhammad had fantasies of going on a lethal rampage, what could he have achieved if he had been unable to purchase a weapon? Run amok with a bread knife? So, there you have another finger on the trigger: that of the gun-supporting lobbies.


While I’m on the subject of lethal rampages, there seems to be a major contradiction in Mr Muhammad’s motives for his murder spree. One the one hand, he was supposed to have begun the killings only to camouflage the planned homicide of his ex-wife in order to secure the custody of his children. At the same time, here’s what his associate revealed about Muhammad’s plans which

consisted of three phases in the Washington, D.C. and Baltimore metro areas. Phase one consisted of meticulously planning, mapping, and practicing their locations around the DC area. This way after each shooting they would be able to quickly leave the area on a predetermined path, and move on to the next location. John Allen Muhammad's goal in phase one was to kill 6 white people a day for 30 days (180 per month). Malvo went on to describe how phase one did not go as planned due to heavy traffic and the lack of a clear shot and/or getaway at different locations.
Phase two was meant to be moved up to Baltimore. Malvo described how this phase was close to being implemented, but never was carried out. Phase Two was intended to begin by killing a pregnant woman by shooting her in the abdomen. The next step would have been to shoot and kill a Baltimore City police officer. Then, at the officer's funeral, they were to create several improvised explosive devices complete with shrapnel. These explosives were intended to kill a large number of police, since many police would attend another officer's funeral.
The last phase was to take place very shortly after, if not during, Phase Two. The third phase was to extort several million dollars from the United States government. This money would be used to finance a larger plan. The plan was to travel north into Canada. Along the way they would stop in YMCAs and orphanages recruiting other impressionable young boys with no parents or guidance. John Allen Muhammad thought he could act as their father figure as he did with Lee Boyd Malvo. Once he recruited a large number of young boys and made his way up to Canada, he would begin their training. Malvo described how John Allen Muhammad intended to train all these boys with weapons and stealth, as he had been taught. Finally, after their training was complete, John Allen Muhammad would send them out across the United States to carry out mass shootings in many different cities, just as he had done in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore
   
   
Read over this again. Does this (assuming Malvo was telling the truth) sound like the product of a rational mind? Do normal thought processes produce drivel like this? Somehow, I don’t think so.


And, if we arrive at the conclusion that a person thinking along these lines isn’t sane, should he be executed? Are mad people guilty for the actions they commit?

And, dare I ask, did executing Muhammad bring his victims back to life?

So, finally, we arrive at the death penalty. I’ll say this right away before going any further: as some of you, those who have been long-term readers of mine undoubtedly know, I have a hang-up about capital punishment. One of my recurrent dreams (described here, for instance, and here) is about my own execution, always in unpleasantly vivid terms and always without any indication of what it is that I’m supposed to be guilty of. I am, therefore, unable to be objective about the death penalty. Everything I say from this point on will be coloured by my own, quite personal, abhorrence of capital punishment.


Still, biased or not, these are my objections to capital punishment, per se (I won’t talk about methods here; if I’d have to choose a method, I’d put the firing squad as the only acceptable one):


1.    Capital Punishment is not, worldwide, applied equally across the board. Whether one is guilty or not, one’s chances of being sentenced to death and of the sentence being carried out increase drastically if one is poor or from a religious or ethnic minority.


As an illustration, the last person executed in India (which has many persons on death row but is now observing a de facto moratorium on capital punishment) was one Dhananjay Chatterjee, convicted and hanged for the rape and murder of a girl named Hetal Parekh. The point isn’t whether he was guilty; the point is that another man was, within days of Chatterjee’s hanging, convicted for an identical crime and only sentenced to life imprisonment. Chatterjee was too poor to afford competent legal representation. The other man was not. And another man, Manu Sharma, who shot dead a model named Jessica Lall in front of a roomful of witnesses (including, allegedly, Hollywood tough guy Steven Seagal), not only virtually got away with his crime for years, buying off witnesses and so on, but is currently out on jail on parole and partying it up, or so say the TV channels. Oh well, he’s rich, very rich. You know how it is.


Similarly, just as in the US, the percentage of black inmates on Death Row is disproportionately higher than that of blacks in the general population, in India a convicted killer stands a much higher chance of being sentenced to death if he happens to belong to one of the “lower castes” or is Muslim.


2.    Capital Punishment may irretrievably punish the innocent. The annals of execution are loaded with tales of people who were either extremely likely to have been innocent (like Cameron Todd Willingham, for instance, who was almost certainly wrongly executedby grandstanding courts and politicians) or have been, after their execution, proven not guilty. You could release a wrongfully imprisoned person and financially (undoubtedly inadequate, but better than nothing) compensate them for the years of lost liberty. What can you do for someone who’s been executed? Issue a posthumous pardon? I’m sure his ghost would love to use that as toilet paper.


3.    Capital Punishment undoubtedly does not deter murder. If it did, nations that apply capital punishment would be either murder-free or have much lower homicide rates than those which do not have the death penalty. My knowledge on the subject may be a mite deficient, but as far as I know that is not the case. In fact, the truth may be the reverse.


While I’m on this subject, I have a sneaking suspicion that at least some murderers commit their crimes as a convoluted way of committing suicide by forcing the state to do it for them. This was undoubtedly the case of the American serial killer Ted Bundy, who deliberately searched out jurisdictions in which he was most likely to be sentenced to death and committed his crimes there.

4.    Capital Punishment may turn unsavoury people into martyrs. Remember Saddam Hussein? He was undoubtedly an unsavoury dictator and had people killed, besides being responsible, as a CIA agent in his younger days, for crimes including crushing the Iraqi Communist Party and beginning the Iran-Iraq War. But by hanging him, the occupation forces made him (by then irrelevant to the Iraqi freedom movement) into a martyr. Nothing was gained by hanging him except exposing the brutality and stupidity of the occupation and its puppet collaborators to everyone, quite apart from raising suspicions that he was killed to stop him from telling all he knew.


So far as terrorists of a particular martyrdom-seeking stripe are concerned, of course, execution is a positive badge of honour, and far from being deterred, they may actively take actions calculated to achieve it. Therefore capital punishment can actually increase your chances of being blown away.


5.    Capital Punishment is more about retribution than about justice. On death row in India sits a man named Afzal Guru. He was convicted and sentenced to death for planning a jihadist suicide attack on the Indian Parliament that took place in December 2001. Though there are such glaring reasons for suspicion about the evidence against him that the Indian Supreme Court acknowledged that it was possible that he was innocent, it confirmed the death sentence because, in its own words, the “collective conscience of the society” demanded someone be punished for a crime of this magnitude. In translation: “he should be hanged because the mob’s baying for someone’s blood.”

As a corollary, I have never understood this practice in the US of allowing “witnesses” including the relatives of murder victims to watch the convicted murderer being executed. What’s the idea? To satisfy their bloodlust? From this site, I got the following piece about the reaction of one of Muhammad’s victim’s relatives, who was flown to the execution by, of all things, the organisers of a TV show:


Several relatives are due to witness the execution. Among them is Marion Lewis, 57, of Mountain Home, Idaho, whose daughter Lori Lewis Rivera was shot dead by Muhammad and Malvo - who pulled the trigger is not known - at a petrol station in Kensington, Maryland.
He is being flown to Virginia by a syndicated television show and told The Washington Post he was looking forward to seeing the death penalty imposed.
"I want to see what he made me see. He forced us to look at our little girl laying in a coffin. I want to see justice done. I want to see him take a last breath...I want to be able to describe it to the rest of the family.
Muhammad will be given the chance to say some final words. Mr Lewis, who said he would have preferred a more "gruesome" execution method, wished he could say something too. "It would be short and simple: 'I'm here to see you die...son of a bitch'."


This is not justice. This is brutalisation and playing to the camera.


6.    A majority of murders tend to be crimes of passion, decided on the spur of the moment. In most of those cases, the killer can’t afterwards ever forgive himself or herself anyway. So if you exclude these crimes, where do you draw the line? How about the person who murdered someone who was making his or her life hell? You exclude him or her too? Then what about those who killed in cold blood? You’ll execute them? Fine. Now how are you to decide who killed in cold blood? Suppose someone’s family was slaughtered before his eyes and the state did nothing. Would you kill him for planning and wreaking revenge on the perpetrator? No? Yes? What?


7.    Capital Punishment for some crimes can actually serve to make the crimes worse. For instance, let’s take rape. If one makes rape a capital crime, as feminist groups very often demand, doesn’t it make it more likely that the rapist will kill his victims to minimise the likelihood of their testifying against him in court?


8.    Ultimately, of course, the stupidest thing about the death penalty is that the really big criminals can’t be touched by it: the politicians who send armies off to war, the capitalists who ruin entire ecologies and are responsible for the deaths of millions, the profiteers who ensure that those who can’t pay their rates don’t have access to such basics as food, shelter and clothing, and so on.


As long as they aren’t punished, what the hell’s the point of executing the killer of only a few people, anyway?  


Note: Yes, the title of this blog post is taken from Norman Mailer's book on the execution of Gary Gilmour.