The Weirdness of our Death Penalty System

We kill people as a “deterrent” by sealing the execution away from all eyes that might conceivably see and be deterred. We demand that the one person in our civilization vowed to “do no harm” be the killer. And we talk about doing it “humanely” while thinking up ways to inflict excruciating pain on the condemned. Of course, death penalty zealots, who don’t even want to pause in inflicting the death penalty when there’s a pretty good case that the condemned is innocent and who actually believe that efficiently putting somebody to death is far more important than slowing the machinery of death to make sure its killing the guilty, will have no problem with any of this. The important thing is that somebody is killed.