Look to History to Avoid More Botched Executions
“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” cried the bloodthirsty liberals of the French Revolution. Those high-sounding words were the founding principles of today’s political liberalism. Death to you if you don’t like it. Assassination was the quick and low-budget way of making sure that everyone was on the same team. The guillotine ended long-established royal governments and aristocratic families.
Liberals today are less into shedding blood, but more into public crying times. Emotional posturing is now a public art form like graffiti. The recent execution of the vicious murderer Clayton Lockett is seen as just another innocent cruelly being snuffed out by society. Who cares about any other not-worth-mentioning ur-victim?
Journalist Mike Hashimoto thinks differently: “I’m sorry things didn’t go as humanely for Lockett as the state and most people would have preferred. I’m sorry death penalty opponents believe it gives them a fresh, new reason to prattle on about morality and ethics.”
Of the government’s botching of the lethal injection, Hashimoto says “And I’m sorry that his execution changes nothing, big picture or small. He ended up where he should have, just 43 minutes late.” But why even fool around with such injections or the electric chair, when proven technologies of the past are just as available–and apparently much more humane?
Bringing back the guillotine might mean that this cutting-edge technology can be used over and over again at no unnecessary extra expense to taxpayers. When heads roll, the deterrence factor is instilled more dramatically in the minds of would-be future torturers and killers, thus saving lives and suffering.
Hanging or the firing squad were both humane alternatives and a speedy closure to death penalty justice. Being alive on death row is certainly bearable for most of the condemned, that is, compared to the chilling and grisly plight of the victims. Who knows, the time may come when underemployed attorneys will find a technicality to free the newly designated innocent, now soaked in the tears of sentimentalists.
Has the once venerable ideal of due process guarantees now generated into de facto life sentences, thus thwarting the original judicial intention–and a lifelong gouging of taxpayers who foot the bill? The endless appeals now seem a cash cow to supplant the already-inflated incomes of many in the legal profession.
