The Death Penalty

While watching the news reports of the execution of Saddam Hussein by hanging it made me think about the death penalty in the United States. The death penalty is meant as punishment and more importantly as a means of deterring others from committing serious crimes.

Based on the ever rising murder rates throughout our country it is my position that the death penalty is not a factor in reducing crime. I firmly believe that the death penalty could act a deterrent if we changed the system that we use to execute condemned inmates.

In the United States, 38 states execute prisoners while the remaining states choose to incarcerate their most violent criminals which costs a ridiculous amount of money. Nebraska is the only state out of the 38 that uses electrocution as the primary means of execution.

The remaining states use lethal injection as their means of execution with a handful of states being able to also use hanging, firing squads, lethal gas. I believe that in those states that allow alternate methods of execution the condemned must petition for death by the alternate method.

What I am getting at here is that lethal injection is the primary method of execution throughout our country. Lethal injection is not a deterrent because there is no “FEAR FACTOR” associated with it. When a death row inmate is executed by lethal injection it is not a big deal because we know that the condemned is strapped to a hospital bed and put to sleep almost the same way we put down our sick or injured pets.

It is done behind prison walls with only a handful of witnesses that report back to the rest of us that the condemned was given the cocktail via injection and he/she closed their eyes and passed away.

The death penalty should strike fear in the hearts of men across the country. The way we bring back the fear associated with the death penalty is to execute the condemned by the old school methods such as hanging, firing squad, & electrocution. When you think of a condemned inmate being waked to the gallows where he ascends a flight of stairs to the platform that will soon drop him to his death with a rope around his neck, that makes you never want to be in that situation. The same goes for the condemned inmate staring down range where the firing squad will fire from or the inmate being strapped to the wooden electric chair.

Last year I visited Saint Augustine Florida which is Florida’s oldest town. There they have the state of Florida’s oldest jail which has been turned into a museum that you can tour. On the walls of the jail they have many black and white photographs of condemned inmates about to be hung from the gallows. What struck me odd was that in every picture there was a crowd of people standing around the gallows waiting to watch the execution.

What a deterrent it must have been for those people watching the condemned being led to the gallows and then dropped to his death. After you tour the jail you must exit through the back door and you can face to face with the original gallows that was used to execute the condemned in the pictures. The wooden structure was much larger and taller than I would have imagined. It was erie standing under the gallows while imagining what it must have been like for the condemned to be standing on the platform waiting for the trap door to release.

There was an interesting old article in the jail museum with pictures about the U.S. Government sending experts to the jail to study execution by hanging. The experts worked with a condemned inmate who was to be hung from the gallows at the Saint Augustine jail. The experts taught the condemned some form of sign language that he would use to signal to the government experts once he was dropped from the platform.

Apparently the experts wanted to do research on the length of time a condemned person is alive once he/she is dropped from the platform. According to the article the condemned was able to make a few hand signs before his death.

I know this has been debated in the past but I believe that televised executions would benefit our society because it would be a huge crime deterrent. would a live or delayed broadcast of an execution be any worse than the death and violence that is available through the media in the form of TV shows, movies, newspapers, magazines, etc?

Those that will argue that we cannot risk allowing children to see an execution our mistaken because they see far worse things in movies and elsewhere. Think of all the dead bodies that have been shown from the Iraq war in the newspapers, magazines, TV, and Internet. We read about death all the time and see it frequently in the media so what is the difference in showing an execution?

To stop the increasing violence in our country we need the criminals to fear the punishment that our legal system will dispense on them if they commit violent felony crimes such as murder & rape.

The Chief (www.monsterswatmonkey.com)

The author has nearly 20 years Law Enforcement experience and is the webmaster at http://www.monsterswatmonkey.com which is a Police Officer community site.