Considering the Term Execution

I got a letter from a man named Roy Brady saying, “I recommend for your attention two terms that have become pandemic in the media: execute and execution style.

“Execution is an act of putting to death as a legal penalty. One could argue endlessly as to what ‘legal’ means in that context, but certainly terrorists cannot ‘execute’ anybody. In any civilized system of government they are illegal, yet execute is the word most often used when they murder someone.

“In many minds ‘execution style’ seems to conjure up pictures of tying someone’s hands behind him and shooting him in the back of the head, an image reinforced perhaps by pictures on the 6 o’clock news of evil commies blowing away blameless peasants. Actually execution has no style. It may be done equally well by shooting, hanging, gassing, poisoning, crucifying, guillotining, burning at the stake, exposing to driver ants, or by surfeit of tripes a la Strasbourg goose.”

In the course of considering the word execute, I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary. One of their early specimens of the word is from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale” (1386): “The destine. . . . That executeth . . . the purveans, that God hath seye byforn.” I bring this to your attention only because it helps to explain why Artemus Ward once said that Chaucer “was the wuss speller I know of.” Admittedly, it sheds little or no light on the question of executions, legal or illegal.

Execute ‘ s principal meanings today are “carry out or accomplish,” “perform” and “inflict capital punishment upon.” In its time it has also meant simply “kill”; nevertheless, for this discussion let’s hold it to that legal stricture of “capital punishment” in the sense of killing as a legal process. If we agree that execution means, as Brady puts it, “an act of putting to death as a legal penalty,” we can reasonably say that terrorists and other outlaw groups don’t execute; they murder. But now we’ve opened up a can of squirmy worms: Brady says, “One could argue endlessly as to what legal means in that context.” The argument is, indeed, endless, and it involves the sanctity of life, the morality of capital punishment, the existence of what is sometimes postulated as a “higher law,” and who is to discover the nature of that higher law.

I’m afraid I can’t condemn the use of the phrase execution-style to describe some of the killings committed by some terrorists and other gangs that operate counter to established authority. If the use of “execution-style” conferred legitimacy on the killings, I’d be opposed to its use in the news media; but I think it doesn’t. I think it simply describes a modus necandi . (Since we’re talking about the law, I wanted to find out how to say “way of killing” in Latin, so I called Richard Mitchell, a.k.a. “The Underground Grammarian,” who is also a Latinist. He gave me modus necandi . ) Execution-style denotes a way of killing not in citing specifics like shooting, hanging, gassing and similar horrors, but in evoking a decision made by legally appointed judges, illegally appointed judges, or even self-appointed judges. What execution-style expresses, I think, is a killing committed as the deliberate settling of a score or as the execution of someone deemed to be pernicious. The killer in an execution-style killing perceives his killing to be moral and right in the eyes of God, or at least in the name of a “higher cause,” even if not in the opinion of society as a whole. It seems to me that the victim of execution-style should know in advance that he is to be executed and, if possible, why.

Most of us would agree that killing by a self-appointed judge is simply murder, but herein lies the crux of the brouhaha over capital punishment: A great many people hold that killing by legally appointed judges is no more moral and right than killing by extra-legally appointed judges.

I’ve found myself on both sides of that question at different stages of my life, and I’ve debated myself with great conviction on both sides much too often to be self-righteous about either stand.

I thank Roy Brady for his letter. It is intelligent and intriguing; nevertheless, it would take a far more imaginative fantasist than I to conceive of a circumstance in which “surfeit of tripes a la Strasbourg goose” could be an execution-style killing.