yazadjal.com

It’s the Iranian style. And has a new supporter in Eugene Volokh. Sometime back I’d written about the death penalty and the right to life being compatible. Some of the comments, especially Ravikiran’s and Gautam’s are worth a relook.

Volokh takes the argument further.

I particularly like the involvement of the victims’ relatives in the killing of the monster; I think that if he’d killed one of my relatives, I would have wanted to play a role in killing him. Also, though for many instances I would prefer less painful forms of execution, I am especially pleased that the killing — and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging.

(snip)

I am being perfectly serious, by the way. I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness. I think it slights the burning injustice of the murders, and the pain of the families, to react in any other way.

Volokh also addresses issues of diminishing humanity

hy would my humanity be diminished by participating in the killing of a monster (he had sexually abused and then murdered at least about 20 children), or even by deliberately inflicting pain on him? It seems to me that this is the reaction to a natural, understandable, and laudable human impulse to avenge (even if in a ridiculously inadequate way) the abuse and death of so many innocents. Why shouldn’t one say that our humanity is diminished if this monster is allowed to live on, or even to die a painless death, when his victims and their families endured unimaginable pain?

and the risk of error

That’s a decent argument against the death penalty generally, though I’m not persuaded by it. And it’s certainly a great argument for fixing problems that may increase the risk of wrongful conviction — locking up the wrong man for life isn’t much better in my book than executing the wrong man, especially since the chances of exonerating the wrongfully convicted lifers are, I suspect, pretty low.

But I don’t see it as much of an argument for a painless execution as opposed to a painful one, or an execution by anonymous bureaucrats rather than one in which the victims’ relatives participate.

Strong stuff. I’m pro death penalty, but would I want to be part of the execution process if the criminal has killed a member of my family? I’m not sure. I’m not ruling it out, but I’m not sure.

Link Courtesy: Instapundit.