As I have said many times before, I am opposed to capital punishment. We should not kill anyone unless it is absolutely necessary, and if we have a prisoner securely and permanently confined, to the point he is unable to resist his execution, then he is sufficiently helpless enough that it is no longer necessary to kill him.
But I have also held that, if we are going to have capital punishment, we should stop being so squeamish about it. Executions used to be held in public, where the public could see what was being done in their name. The last public execution was held ninety years ago, when Rainey Bethea was hanged for rape in the Bluegrass State.
After that, executions were held away from the eyes of the public, in prison yards or inside execution chambers. We attempted to make executions more ‘humane,’ if that makes any sense, with the development of the gas chamber and electric chair. The use of lethal injections was adopted beginning in 1977 in the United States, though that, too, has been challenged as not painless enough. Some pharmaceutical companies have subsequently refused to sell the drugs used in lethal injection execution, forcing some states to find other lethal combinations.
Basically, the 38 states which retain capital punishment have been trying to reduce it to putting an unadoptable puppy to sleep in the pound. It hasn’t always worked.
And so we come to the scheduled execution of Nidal Hasan, the former soldier who slew thirteen innocent people at Fort Hood in 2013. Court martialed and sentenced to death, Mr Hasan is scheduled to be executed by firing squad in early December. There has never been any question concerning his guilt; he was shot and wounded by MPs during his killing spree. He is now paralyzed from the chest down.
On Monday, December 23, 2024, President Joe Biden commuted what was reported to be all but three federal death sentences to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Mr. Biden said the commutations were consistent with the standard he has imposed for halting executions “in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.” . . . .
The three men who can still face federal execution are Robert D. Bowers, 52, who in 2018 gunned down 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh; Dylann Roof, 30, the white supremacist who in 2015 opened fire on Black parishioners at a church in Charleston, S.C., killing nine people; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 31, one of the two brothers who carried out the bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013 that killed three and maimed more than a dozen others.
But, in testimony to President Barack Obama’s purported statement, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to (foul) things up,” Mr Biden, or just as likely the young woke staffers actually running the autopen and other things, forgot about Mr Hasan, sentenced militarily rather than in federal court. Oops!
And now Mr Hasan is scheduled to be sent to his 72 bacha bazi boys.
Hermann Göring and Saddam Hussein claimed, after they had been sentenced to death, that they were soldiers, and as soldiers they demanded the dignity of death by firing squad, rather than hanging, supposedly reserved for common criminals. Mr Hussein was hanged, while Mr Göring was able to commit suicide via cyanide before his scheduled execution. This makes me wonder why Mr Hasan is being executed by firing squad, especially considering that he cannot stand. If he is to be executed, wouldn’t hanging be more appropriate?
The Eighth Amendment prohibits “cruel or unusual punishments.” The members of the First Congress, which wrote the Bill of Rights, and the members of the state legislatures which ratified the Amendment, were all educated men of the late 18th century, and were very aware that capital punishment existed in the states, and that hanging was the common method, the usual method, of execution; none of them objected that hanging was prohibited by the adoption of the Amendment. And hanging, properly done, is quick, with the condemned men dying in a minute or less due to a broken neck.
Now we have the potential spectacle of the execution of Mr Hasan being livestreamed. Again, I believe these executions should be public, but I suspect that this may backfire on President trump and Secretary Hegseth. It seems obvious that there will be lawsuits to stop the livestreaming of the execution, so that might not happen. And if it does? How much will that spectacle, that snuff film, galvanize opinion against capital punishment?
That, I believe, will be the result, and that is why I want executions to be public. We are a country which supports capital punishment, but we have supported a capital punishment which is as sanitary as it can be. Lethal injection, locked behind closed doors, we could tolerate. Actually seeing people being put to death? Maybe not so much.