Jesse Massengale

I am getting lots of incoming questions about the public execution of Nidal Hasan, mostly because I have been outspoken on wanting public executions for over a decade. My position is simple: Executions should be public and brutal, not private and medicalized. They are the ultimate example of the state's monopoly on violence, and the only way to keep that from running out of control is to confront voters with the trade they have made every single time, that they might have appropiate confidence or revulsion in the institution. This is not new thinking. George Washington thought the same. The way we have shifted from hanging to firing squads to doctors quietly injecting chemicals that send our worst gently off to sleep is awful and dystopian, a total short-circuiting of important feedback mechanisms. It makes needless executions more likely, not less so. People who demean this as barbaric or yucky miss the whole point. It doesn't somehow become torture or inhumane (as the UN is suddenly claiming) just because we decline to hide the act behind a curtain. And then there are those who suggest any revel in the death of those who truly deserve it is an indicator of a broken or diseased mind. To the contrary. It is normal, good, and aligned with our natural and national order. That it has not been done here in 60 years is an indictment in and of itself. And that is without even getting into the fact that men were not hung for stealing horse, but that horses may not be stolen. "I would to God that one of the most attrocious in each State was hung in Gibbets, up on a gallows five times as high as the one prepared by Haman. No punishment, in my opinion, is too great for the Man, who can build his greatness upon his Country’s ruin." - George Washington, 1778