NYT sure has a way of picking out bad titles.
I've always thought that if we are going to have the death penalty that it should be murder. There's no such thing as a "humane" murder, so why not just firing squad them or decapitate them? It's faster, cheaper, and probably equally painful. It's just uglier. Let's not try to sanitize violence, because it's a damn lie.
I disagree. I think it's a tacit recognition that it's barbaric, but that we're going to do anyway.
More the latter. Our legal system is basically a giant case of hide-the-ball, in that we create rituals that make it seem like we're not doing what it is that we're doing. Meanwhile, I disagree with the second statement. As Camus wrote in Reflections on the Guillotine:Indeed, no one dares speak directly of the ceremony. Officials and journalists who have to talk about it, as if they were aware of both its provocative and its shameful aspects, have made up a sort of ritual language, reduced to stereotyped phrases. Hence we read at breakfast time in a corner of the newspaper that the condemned "has paid his debt to society" or that he has "atoned" or that "at five a.m. justice was done." The officials call the condemned man "the interested party" or "the patient" or refer to him by a number. People write of capital punishment as if they were whispering. In our well-policed society we recognize that an illness is serious from the fact that we don't dare speak of it directly. For a long time, in middle-class families people said no more than that the elder daughter had a "suspicious cough" or that the father had a "growth" because tuberculosis and cancer were looked upon as somewhat shameful maladies. This is probably even truer of capital punishment since everyone strives to refer to it only through euphemisms.
I think that often times restraint can be a show of strength, and that expressions of violence can be a sign of weakness. Like the schoolyard bully who needs to prove his toughness over and over, the retributive justice of the death penalty gives us a story to tell ourselves about how tough we are. The state could have the same monopoly on violence and not exercise it so freely. It's a confident person who has all the power in the world and chooses not to use it wantonly.
Is no one bothered by the fact that a deputy US attorney general is trying to demonize the defense lawyers?
I think (hope) this is one of those cases of the Times publishing garbage to shed light on it moreso than to give it a platform. At least they appear, based on my very limited knowledge, to have required him to hew to facts more than they did to Tom Cotton.
The death penalty is not justice, it's retribution. And that's has value to humanity. We can be all high and mighty about the sanctity of life, and claim there is no crime heinous enough to warrant the death penalty - and be completely out of touch with the entirety of human history - but humans will invent worse crimes, and continue to do them without remorse. At some point, you just need to put a motherfucker down. Their continued existence is a blight on humanity. Set your bar as high as you want; someone will leap over it. So while I find the way we do it reprehensible, I do think the death penalty needs to exist and be used.
The US has used the death penalty liberally throughout its history, except, ironically, the one time it needed to be used, which was in the aftermath of the Civil War. Could have been a different place had we just killed Lee, Davis, Forest, et al. Personally, I do not love the idea that the state can kill people legally, setting aside the arguments about whether there are any moral justifications for the death penalty. In special circumstances, such as war or rebellion all bets are off, but for run of the mill crimes, even heinous ones, I just don't believe we should give the state that much irrevocable power.
WHAT?!? Kill traitors to our nation?!? No, nononono... we need to build them STATUES! And monuments! I think it is ONLY the state that can kill people legally. It's kinda the whole purpose of having a nation in the first place: for the protection of those within the borders. That includes putting down the one-in-a-hundred-million that so egregiously breach the social contract that they must be eliminated from society. (Sidebar: This also needs to include any police officer that kills someone in the line of duty. No more immunity; you kill someone, you go to trial as a murderer until a jury of your peers establishes the killing was in some way justified. Otherwise, death penalty. Want police accountability? Want them to find some way to de-escalate a situation without just shooting willy-nilly and killing people at random? Hold them accountable for their actions. We do it with 18-year olds in the military, so we can absolutely hold our police to the same standard.) "...Could have been a different place had we just killed Lee, Davis, Forest, et al..."
"...Personally, I do not love the idea that the state can kill people legally..."
If people object to the death sentence "on moral, religious and policy grounds", it seems like an incredible leap to argue that such executions are just. One need look no further than the BLM protests to observe that "legal" and "just" are two wholly different things.