the illusion of a civilized procedure

https://youtu.be/eirR4FHY2YY?si=EUtz57QxdB_QouXa

Jacob Geller is one of my favorite YouTubers, and he did a really insightful video about how the purpose of the death penalty has changed. It used to be pretty clearly about showing the public that if they fuck up they’ll be snatched up and killed horrifically. He supports this with both the innumerable variations people have come up with for the fairly simple task of killing someone else, and how both the execution itself and the body of the condemned were prominent in the public eye (think gibbets and things like that). He argues that now the death penalty is in this weird sort of limbo where it’s considered distasteful to make a gleeful spectacle of it but that proponents still think that the specter of being snatched up by the state and killed is important for maintaining a peaceful society so you have all these half measures and stutter steps that are ostensibly designed to be humane for the prisoner but are really there for the comfort and moral superiority of the audience. As an example he talks about the paralytic agent in the lethal injection cocktail that does nothing to relieve pain but prevents the condemned from visibly reacting to that pain. Knowingly or unknowingly, the death penalty is walking this weird line where everyone involved is allowed to pretend that they don’t want to do it but that they’re bound just as much as the condemned, there are still artifacts of the performative death penalty from days of yore left over in our processes and procedures for killing a condemned person but that proponents have recently made it soft, comfortable and hidden precisely because they recognize that continuing in the old ways will end with the abolition of the death penalty. We’ve changed as a society from “let’s pop on down to the town square after dinner to watch the hanging” to “let’s get this nasty business over with behind closed doors so as not to make people uncomfortable”.

I don’t see how anyone could possibly imagine that electricity could be a civilized way to kill someone.

October 16, 1985. Indiana. William E. Vandiver. Electrocution. After the first administration of 2,300 volts, Vandiver was still breathing. The execution eventually took 17 minutes and five jolts of electricity.[8] Vandiver’s attorney, Herbert Shaps, witnessed the execution and observed smoke and the smell of burning. He called the execution “outrageous.” The Department of Corrections admitted the execution “did not go according to plan.”[9]

Botched executions occur when there is a breakdown in, or departure from, the “protocol” for a particular method of execution. … Botched executions are “those involving unanticipated problems or delays that caused, at least arguably, unnecessary agony for the prisoner or that reflect gross incompetence of the executioner.”

That definition is rather broad. If you use that definition, I think the guy they are talking about executing has already been the victim of one botched execution.

Alabama attempted to execute Smith by lethal injection last year, but called off the execution because of problems inserting an IV into his veins.

If I am to be executed, I want a firing squad, a lit cigarette, and I don’t want anything crammed in my ass.