The Executioner

Absolam · 17-08-2014 2:38pm

diveout wrote: »

Well don't expect your population where we are all created equal and have a sense of entitlement that exists nowhere else in the world not to think they too can't also carry out executions and that premeditated violence is a solution to perceived injustice.

You are aware that capital punishment does currently exist in various countries which are not awash with the entire citizenry carrying out executions and using premeditated violence as a solution to perceived injustice?

Awkward Badger · 17-08-2014 2:38pm

diveout wrote: »

Well don't expect your population where we are all created equal and have a sense of entitlement that exists nowhere else in the world not to think they too can't also carry out executions and that premeditated violence is a solution to perceived injustice.

Perhaps the issue is retributive justice itself then ? Is that not just doing something to someone in payback for a crime when that something itself is not something anyone else can or should do to other people ?

Torakx · 17-08-2014 5:27pm

Black Swan wrote: »

Is this the essence of a moral dilemma (above) for the medical professional called upon to be The Executioner? Is the spirit and intent of medicine and its practitioners in contradiction with the premeditated killing of another human being? To what extent do persons enter medicine to be premeditated killers? Given this moral dilemma, how in good conscience can other people ask their medical professional to take on this burden for them: to be The Executioner?

Part of the problem in discussing this issue is that we may be objectifying and distancing ourselves from the personal ramifications of asking another person to be The Executioner. I could not ask the medical professionals I know personally, and share friendships with, to be premeditated killers. Could you?

That was my point with making registered voters do it. I would never ask someone else to run my gauntlet. And if this country wanted to start killing people with mental and social problems, they should understand just what they are doing and who is responsible.
How can you be a conscientious objecter if you uphold this system of governance? The very system that would be killing sick or mentally ill people.
I suppose just like with war, if a person opted out they would do prison time.
In which case, pay an executioner a handsome fee and when they run out of voters afraid to do what they agreed to, then bring in the executioner.
Or offer the job and handsome reward to a non voter a political outsider of sorts.

I know I am being unrealistic. But we are living in a complete joke of a society. So my suggestions are aimed to fix the main issue,that of soecity through voting, distancing responsibility from the individual voters to the umbrella of government. If people were made responsible, we might actually see responsile decisions made and responsible voting.
If a couple of thousand people have to be shocked awake by being forced to push the button, so be it.
The people of Ireland are not carefull enough with their voting "power". It would be for their own sake.

The problem with this, is responsibility. You can't atually keep government afloat and let citizens take responsibility. That's the whole foundations gone. Which is very interesting!
If this happens to be the case, then should people without any sense of responsibility be allowed to vote? Have I created a paradox of sorts? lol

What about oter methods of absollving responsibility?
Maybe an island, where all these death row inmates can be sent to.
No rules just throw the on a large island and let them hunt or die. That at least a fighting chance. Eventually it would be fullof cannibals I guess.. But the problem of being responsible for our decisions would be avoided somewhat

Torakx · 17-08-2014 5:52pm

Awkward Badger wrote: »

Perhaps the issue is retributive justice itself then ? Is that not just doing something to someone in payback for a crime when that something itself is not something anyone else can or should do to other people ?

Yes that is retribution to me. The justice part dependent on society in theory(reality is different completely, when the government tells the masses what to think).
And so I say, if society do not understand fully, the consequences of their gorvernments actions, they are not equipped to make that decision through voting.
That's why to me, the only fair and logical conclusion is to make voters fully understand what it involves, before being allowed to pass off responsibility to another and still have the actions take place.

I suppose that's why in movies, when an aggressor is doing something bad to an enemies loved one, they might force them to watch. To fully appreciate what is being done. The voters are the only ones legally propping up government decision. They should know what beast they have in power at any time. If the citizens are really the ones in power, then the citizens willbe fully aware of what the decisions result in.
At the mmoment theyare not and the day they are fully responsible, is the day you don't need a government, in my opinion.

I suppose then, in my view the executioners themselves, taking the work, could be seen as a bad parent, when lumped in with government decision.
The hand of the government.
Don't do as we do, do as we say....
Making it easier for the tough decisions to be made, by taking responsibility in part away from society. They probably suffer a lot for that personally too, in most cases I guess anyway.
I guess I see the executioner role as socially and morally irresponsible, in the long run.

Pat Mustard · 17-08-2014 6:00pm

Slightly off topic, but executioners seemed to have got paid a pittance.

This account says that Albert Pierrepoint's fee for execution was £15, in 1956.

Pierrepoint resigned over a disagreement about fees in 1956. He had driven to Strangeways on a bitterly cold day in January 1956 to hang Thomas Bancroft. He arrived at the prison only for Bancroft to be reprieved later in the afternoon. He claimed the full fee of £15,

According to this website, if you adjust that for inflation, Pierrepoint was getting £343.41 per execution.

There may be some uncertainty regarding the number of people that he executed, but let's assume that it's 400.

In today's terms, that's £137,364, earned over a lifetime. (400 x £343.41)

It's not enough money on which to live. However executioners were regarded, they were not well paid, and they must have had other jobs in order to survive. Albert Pierrepoint worked as a delivery man, and became a publican later on, after making some extra money, carrying out executions of war criminals in Germany.

Back on topic, on Pierrepoint's personal views:

"A condemned prisoner is entrusted to me, after decisions have been made which I cannot alter. He is a man, she is a woman who, the church says, still merits some mercy. The supreme mercy I can extend to them is to give them and sustain in them their dignity in dying and in death. The gentleness must remain." He would not tolerate anyone making macabre or lewd remarks or jokes about the body, and never did so himself, even in the convivial atmosphere of his pub.

When his autobiography was published in 1974, it was the first time he had made his views on capital punishment public - a decade after its abolition. "If death were a deterrent, I might be expected to know. It is I who have faced them last, young men and girls, working men, grandmothers. I have been amazed to see the courage with which they take that walk into the unknown. It did not deter them then, and it had not deterred them when they committed what they were convicted for. All the men and women whom I have faced at that final moment convince me that in what I have done I have not prevented a single murder. And if death does not work to deter one person, it should not be held to deter any."
Yet there is nothing he ever wrote suggesting that he felt any regret or remorse at the central role he had played; nor any explanation of why and when he had reached that startling conclusion. There are no indications that he found it morally difficult to try to reconcile his feelings about the efficacy of hanging with the job he did with such pride. He was capable of analysing his own contribution in a vacuum, divorced from the national debate on the larger issue. Perhaps he only discovered his intellectual objections to the death penalty long after he had ceased being the hangman; he does not tell us.

If Pierrepoint felt any strong emotions about the people he executed, he did not admit to it. He showed no signs of being affected by, or indeed interested in, the details of the crimes committed by those whose lives he was to end; he seemed untouched by knowing that some of the men he had executed had been innocent - Timothy Evans, for instance. Others may have made a mistake; it was not his concern. Even when Pierrepoint tells the story of having to execute someone he knew - a regular customer and his singing partner at the pub, who had killed his girlfriend in a jealous frenzy - he expresses no particular sorrow, only satisfaction that he had made the condemned man's last few minutes more bearable by addressing him as a friend, by his nickname, Tish.

Torakx · 17-08-2014 7:13pm

Maybe he eleviated the guilt of responsibility, by telling himself he did not make the judgement of death, but carried it out. A way of denying he was responsible for the death. Acting as the hand and blaming the head.

He does seem to see the futility in death sentences as a solution.

Absolam · 18-08-2014 12:26am

Torakx wrote: »

That was my point with making registered voters do it. <...> But the problem of being responsible for our decisions would be avoided somewhat

Wouldn't the biggest problem with this be that most people in Ireland don't seem to want capital punishment?

Torakx wrote: »

Maybe he eleviated the guilt of responsibility, by telling himself he did not make the judgement of death, but carried it out. A way of denying he was responsible for the death. Acting as the hand and blaming the head.

Maybe he felt that as the hand of the State, which is the embodiment of the will of the people, he shared collective responsibility with everyone who was a part of the State and was simply determined to fulfil his appointed task as humanely as possible?

Pat Mustard · 18-08-2014 1:07am

Torakx wrote: »

Maybe he eleviated the guilt of responsibility, by telling himself he did not make the judgement of death, but carried it out. A way of denying he was responsible for the death. Acting as the hand and blaming the head.

He does seem to see the futility in death sentences as a solution.

Maybe he rationalized things to himself in this way. I don't know a lot about the man.

From reading a little about him, Pierrepoint took pride in his work and was regarded as being a quick and efficient hangman. Fred Leuchter (mentioned previously) was very concious of the need for efficient executions, in order to minimise the suffering of the prisoner. Perhaps Pierrepoint held a similar view, and reasoned that if he was not the one carrying out the executions, that the executions would be carried out less skilfully by some other person, thereby causing needless additional suffering to condemned prisoners.

After all, the prisoner would have been sentenced to death by a court; somebody would have to execute him anyway. That being the case, it would stand to reason that a skilled executioner would be well placed to ensure the minimization of a condemned prisoner's suffering.

Perhaps that is how he rationalized it.

Valmont · 18-08-2014 1:12pm

Awkward Badger wrote: »

Is this the only issue you take that morally absolute approach to though ? Take for example incarceration. Is it wrong to lock someone up who was not in the process of attempting to harm you or your property where the last wrong doing they did could be some years previous ?

Yes, I think it may very well be wrong. However, minus our machinery for justice there would have to be some other consensual system in place. Perhaps along the lines of a contract for living in a certain city stipulating your acceptance of the fact that you may be locked up for x, y, or z.

Awkward Badger · 18-08-2014 9:20pm

Valmont wrote: »

Yes, I think it may very well be wrong. However, minus our machinery for justice there would have to be some other consensual system in place. Perhaps along the lines of a contract for living in a certain city stipulating your acceptance of the fact that you may be locked up for x, y, or z.

I wonder is such a contract already implied on some level simply by living in any given state. The state itself is already obligated to protect you and provide you access to certain services and opportunities. Therefore as an individual choosing to live in that state it can also be inferred that you accept that you must in turn live within the law and agree to the states authority over you and their ability to hold you accountable for any breaches of the law.

Black Swan · 18-08-2014 11:25pm

MOD: Hey folks, it seems that we may be drifting away from discussing the particulars associated with The Executioner. If you wish to open a new thread to discuss capital punishment, its associated crimes, and alternatives to the death sentence, that would be welcome. Thanks.

Awkward Badger · 18-08-2014 11:54pm

Sorry Black Swan. Its a tough topic not to stray on as I believe there are many angles with which to approach the question of morality of being or asking someone to be the executioner.

I think the posts by Torakx and The Mustard in relation to Albert Pierrepoint's possible justification of his work might be the closest to justifying it in its current form. That the sentence was handed down by someone else, it will be carried out regardless. And even though the executioner is the hand carrying out the act if they are doing so to ensure it is done correctly and efficiently to minimise as much as possible the suffering of the condemned who has no hope of a reprieve then it may be seen not as an act of violence but an act of compassion.

Valmont · 19-08-2014 12:46pm

What sort of uniform could the executioner wear? Black? Red? Something with a skull? Would this change how he feels about his task?

Torakx · 19-08-2014 2:04pm

I'd say as long as it covers the face. For the most part, they might not care.
But with the general population in mind, a symbolic representation of death might do the trick to instill or uphold fear of the state and its authority.
Having public executions I think were a way to remind the public of who is in control.

The Executioner

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