Off With His/Her/Their/Its Head

Posted by WiredSisters on October 10th, 2014 filed in History, Law, Moral Philosophy, News and Commentary, Torture

Creepiness alert: this is going to be just what the title should lead you to expect. Sorry.
Public reaction to ISIS beheadings in the West seems to follow two trajectories: the political (those are our guys getting the axe!) and neurological (eeeeeeeeeeeuw!) But all of this is going on roughly in parallel with various screwups in the administration of the death penalty in the good ol’ USA. Perhaps we should look at them side-by-side.

The point of executions by “lethal injection” in the US was originally supposed to be painlessness, or at any rate the elimination of unnecessary pain, more or less in keeping with the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.” But in fact, from the outset, we had, and generally still have, no way to know whether the guest of honor at a lethal injection is suffering any pain, necessary or otherwise. What we do know is that most of the time, watching such an execution is minimally traumatic for the rest of us. More recently, we have ascertained that, when the people administering the injection get it wrong, either in the contents of the injection or the process of getting it into a vein, the result can cause the condemned person considerable pain. And in the meantime, obtaining the necessary ingredients of the injection is getting more difficult, since those picky Europeans who make one of those ingredients for some reason don’t like selling it to prison systems.

On the other hand, beheadings are deliberately set up to be as horrifying as possible for the spectators, and almost always arranged so that there will be as many spectators as possible. For more on the political theatre of beheadings, see:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-vlahos/about-beheading-there-is-_b_5953098.html

I spent a lot of my scholarly career reading up on the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe, especially England. Those guys were really into beheadings, mostly for the sake of political theatre. Ordinary criminals got hanged; criminals who pissed off the Establishment might get hanged, drawn, and quartered (for more detail, see “Braveheart.”) But high-class criminals got the axe, or, later on in France, the guillotine. Beheading was done with widely varying degrees of skill and decorum, from inept butchery to surgical delicacy. But neurological data seems to tell us that, done right¸ a beheading is as close to painless as executions get. In particular, a properly maintained and properly used guillotine is a genuinely humane way to die. At our present stage of technology, it may be the best one we’ve got.

I haven’t watched any of the ISIS videos, so I have no idea how much skill those guys exercise. I doubt that their primary goal is a painless execution, anyway. But even if they were using properly a perfectly maintained guillotine, our reaction would probably be the same—eeeeeeeeeeeeuw!. The guest of honor might feel no pain, but we spectators would be totally revolted anyway, just by the sight of a major body part being severed from the rest of the body. I suspect that a surgical amputation for life-saving purposes, under general anesthesia, would affect most of us the same way—the point isn’t why, or even how a body part is being severed, it’s the total gross-out of seeing it happen (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, anybody?). Which tells us that the main reason most of our legal authorities have insisted upon the search for “humane” methods of execution isn’t to spare the condemned person pain, but to spare ourselves a revolting sight. (And perhaps also to persuade ourselves that, despite using the death penalty, we are Nice People.)

I still want to know why the ISIS executioners wear masks. It seems to contradict all of the organization’s efforts to make the process not merely public but publicized and theatrical. If I were the Head Honcho of ISIS, I’d do the executions myself if I were physically up to it, or at least name one of my most prominent henchmen to do it for me, wearing a name tag in 72-point type so King Barack could read it without his spectacles. Can it be that, unlike John Hancock, even the Head Honcho of ISIS isn’t altogether sure they’re doing the right thing?

Red Emma