I am a supporter of the death penalty. So don't get me wrong when I go off on the media coverage of the execution of Saddam Hussein.
My beef is this; the difference between seeing people blown away, eaten by sharks, and sawed into little bits and pieces in the movies and seeing someone about to die for real on screen, big or little, is the emotion that humans feel. I feel that Hussein deserved to die for his crimes. I also feel that the U.S. is doing the death penalty a huge injustice by 1) delaying a death sentence for 6,10, or 20 years before carrying it out and 2) not allowing the general public to view it. Then I turned on today's news.
While the broadcasts I have seen stop short of actually showing Hussein hanging, MSNBC shows everything up until that exact moment. That is some serious shit. Then MSNBC gives a warning that they are about to show a picture of a dead Hussein and if you don't want to see it, look away. The picture of him dead was NOTHING compared to the video of him about to die. The warning should come before the process of the execution, not before the picture of a dead guy. My reaction was definitely from the pre-execution and to a human being about to loose their life. The picture of him dead was nothing. If I, a proponent of the death penalty, had this reaction, then chances are this is going to play on the emotions of some of the American public who are going to turn around and say that he shouldn't have been executed. Unable to separate feeling bad for a person who is about to die from the fact that they deserved it.
I asked myself if I would have felt differently if it wasn't a hanging, but lethal injection. I don't know for sure, but I think I might have. Maybe because lethal injection sort of has the feel of a medical procedure rather than an execution. If he was put to death via Guillotine, I would have probably felt the same as I did about the hanging. Just seems barbaric. I suppose that is the point though, right? That is probably one of the reasons why the death pentaly in the U.S. isn't a deterrent.
It's a tough call, I guess. But in the mean time, how about if the U.S. started public caning? Talk about a deterrent! Hoo ah!
1 comment:
Just catching up. For a while, your posts would come up on my Bloglines RSS feeder, but they don't anymore. That means I have to remember to come here, and I'm lazy.
I've seen both videos from the hanging (I think I even linked the second one on my blog). It was handled poorly, and the idiots chanting Muqtada, Muqtada! will only serve to create more Saddam loyalists now that he is a martyr. If you look closely, you can see him smirk right before they put the rope on his neck. It's almost as if he knew he had won, even in death.
That all said, I'm still for the death penalty, and I think they should put it on pay-per-view. None of this 2 am shit. Hang 'em at noon in Times Square from the same pole they use to drop the New Year's ball. Use the revenue to defray the cost of the trial (I've heard it's cheaper to keep someone in prison).
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