Timothy McVeigh’s execution will be on closed-circuit television for families of the bomb victims to watch. I believed for a long time that all executions should be public – because I thought, perhaps naively, that forcing people to see the consequences of their decisions (in this case, allowing the state to kill people for killing people) would make them reconsider whether the death penalty was something they really wanted to get behind. But now, with Survivor and especially Series 7, I’m not so sure. Would it just be another step down the road to pop culture hell?
There’s a great scene in “Dead Man Walking” where Susan Sarandon talks to the prison nurse who attends to the “patient” being executed. The nurse talks about how grateful she is they switched from the gas chamber to lethal injection, since the former was just too hard on her. Aren’t we trying to find more “humane” ways of executing people (not a really classic humane act) so we can disassociate from our own part in the execution?