Witness the Evil We Command

Whereas the Romans displayed their executions as public spectacle, our killings are done behind curtains, almost always under dark of night, within soundproof booths to which only 12 persons are, by law, allowed access. As such, executions have become quiet and occasional blips, set down in the newspapers in an understated and economical style, as if to impress upon us that the execution itself is of little note, standard and inevitable. Perhaps to return to the death penalty some of the awe it deserves--to afford its proper place as a gauge of our civility--we should broadcast the next execution.

Bearing witness to an execution affords a perspective crucial to deciding the merits--or lack thereof--of capital punishment. It was a witness to one death game, Telemachus, who threw himself between two gladiators in hopes of stopping the killing. While the spectators in the Colosseum promptly killed Telemachus for his interference, it was not long afterward that these fights were banned. The public understood what they were seeing and ultimately rejected it.

Americans are heading in the opposite direction. We’ve managed to kill more than 300 men since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, but have not allowed public access to even one of those executions.

We revel in the jargon of it all; theories of deterrence, retribution, empowerment of victims. But in the final analysis, we are no more knowledgeable about the act of execution than we are of flying a rocket ship or inspecting the inside of a volcano.

Perhaps a televised execution would lead to an irrevocable embrace of the practice; perhaps an American public already hungry for violence will demand an hour’s worth of killings every week. There is no arguing that the moment the decision is made to actually broadcast an execution, America will have touched on some perverse synergy between our love of violence and our addiction to television. Clearly, the rest of the world would wonder: What has America come to?

But perhaps the broadcast would, in one evening, do more to convince the public of the barbarity of the death penalty than would a yearlong public awareness campaign and a barrage of commentaries. It takes much cynicism to believe that the images of death would not be met with sufficient outrage and disgust as to put an immediate end to capital punishment--Pedro Medina’s smoldering carcass, David Lawson’s last-minute screams for mercy, Raymond Carl Kinnamon’s efforts to loosen his restraining straps, Emmitt Foster’s convulsing, the gelling of scalps, the search for a vein in which to insert the catheter and the look in the convict’s eyes during that sometimes protracted moment.

As it stands, Americans have no fundamental appreciation of the act of execution--its details, its processes, its reality. As long as that remains the case, we fail to understand exactly what it is we are doing.