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From: jeff@rtech.UUCP (Jeff Lichtman)
Newsgroups: net.nlang.india
Subject: Re: Public hanging in India.
Message-ID: <790@rtech.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 14-Dec-85 03:03:05 EST
Article-I.D.: rtech.790
Posted: Sat Dec 14 03:03:05 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 16-Dec-85 04:28:17 EST
References: <416@ur-helheim.UUCP> <141700063@uiucdcsb>
Organization: Relational Technology, Alameda CA
Lines: 76

> 
> Isn't capital punishment always in public in all countries?
> 
> swami@a.cs.uiuc.edu

It certainly isn't in the United States.  Nor should they be.  Although
public execution might deter capital crime, it would also appeal to sadists.
There are quite a few sick people around, and the thought of one panting
and drooling while watching someone being electrocuted or hanged makes me
ill.

Also, one must question what effect it would have on people's feelings about
death and revenge.  I think it would make people even more self-righteous than
they already are, and more inclined to violent revenge when they think they
have been wronged.  It is well known that violent crime increases immediately
after a widely-publicized prize-fight; evidently, watching real violence makes
people more inclined to it themselves.  Public execution would probably have
even more effect on people, because it would be done by the state (with whom
many citizens identify) against hated criminals.

Finally, from George Orwell's column, "As I Please", from November 15, 1946:

"There is one question which at first sight looks both petty and disgusting
but which I should like to see answered.  It is this.  In the innumerable
hangings of war criminals which have taken place all over Europe during
the past few years, which method has been followed - the old method of
strangulation, or the modern, comparatively humane method which is supposed
to break the victim's neck at one snap?

"A hundred years ago or more, people were hanged by simply hauling them up
and letting them kick and struggle until they died, which might take a
quarter of an hour or so.  Later the drop was introduced, theoretically
making death instantaneous, though it does not always work very well.

"In recent years, however, there seems to have been a tendency to revert to
strangulation.  I did not see the news film of the hanging of German war
criminals at Kharkov, but the descriptions in the British press appeared
to show that the older method was used.  So also with various executions
in the Balkan countries.

"The newspaper accounts of the Nuremburg hangings were ambiguous.  There was
talk of a drop, but there was also talk of the condemned men taking ten or
twenty minutes to die.  Perhaps, by a typically Anglo-Saxon piece of
compromise, it was decided to use a drop but to make it too short to be
effective.

"It is not a good symptom that hanging should still be the accepted form of
capital punishment in this country.  Hanging is a barbarous, inefficient way
of killing anybody, and at least one fact about it - quite widely known, I
believe - is so obscene as to be almost unprintable.

"Still, until recently we did feel rather uneasy on the subject, and we did
have our hangings in private.  Indeed, before the war, public execution was
a thing of the past in nearly every civilised country.  Now it seems to be
returning, at least for political crimes, and though we ourselves have not
reintroduced it as yet, we participate at second hand by watching the news
films.

"It is queer to look back and think that only a dozen years ago the abolition
of the death penalty was one of those things that every enlightened person
advocated as a matter of course, like divorce reform or the independence of
India.  Now, on the other hand, it is a mark of enlightenment not merely to
approve of executions but to raise an outcry because there are not more of
them.

"Therefore it seems to me of some importance to know whether strangulation
is now coming to be the normal practice.  For if people are being taught
to gloat not only over death but over a peculiarly horrible form of torture,
it marks another turn on the downward spiral that we have been following
ever since 1933."
-- 
Jeff Lichtman at rtech (Relational Technology, Inc.)
"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent..."

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