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WillowOne's Positions

Televised Execution

My Positions

  1. Any state that retains and enforces the death penalty should be required to televise its executions.
  2. The voting public should be fully informed of the consequences of the policies enacted in its name.
  3. If a society sanctions the taking of human life as an instrument of justice, it should not be shielded from the reality of what that entails.

Notes

  1. This is not an argument for the death penalty, which I oppose. It is a condition on its exercise. Where a state has decided to kill in the public's name, the public is the party responsible, and responsibility without sight of the act is a comfortable fiction.
  2. The usual objection is that a broadcast execution would be degrading, a spectacle, or useful to the state's enemies. I take the first two as information about the policy rather than about the broadcast. If the act cannot bear to be watched by the people who authorised it, that tells them something they are entitled, and arguably obliged, to know.
  3. Opinion polling on the death penalty is a poll on an abstraction. A public that has seen what it votes for is in a better position to vote on it, whichever way it then goes.
  4. The occasion for this note was the October 2026 proposal to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, withdrawn within a week after most of the American public said it would rather not watch. The facts are in Nidal Hasan - Fort Hood Massacre and Proposed Televised Execution.

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