Horizon

The thing I really can't understand about cases like that is how they become such immense public spectacles. It's as if people follow it like any other TV show.

Isn't the dispensing of justice the true theater of democracy? Or should I say the mob?

So in other words you consider it just an artificially extended version of the public execution; instead of just showing up to see the head cut off people are now able to follow the trial as well? Makes sense, I guess.

It's "selling postcards of the hanging" either way. That lyric has been in my head since the whole Peterson thing turned into a circus.

Just been looking at Court Tv dot com- ugh, what a crass an insane media culture you poor people have. Still, we're not far behind now. I'd probably be wanky leftist if I lived in America.
Meanwhile, though, I think in some cases the death penalty is warranted and is useful. Those people who worry about the barbarism of the death sentence never seem to be too bothered about the barbarism of crime ('just victims of society maaan.'). So, the price one pays for a death penalty is the barbarity of state execution and the price one pays for liberalizing sentencing and abandonment of the notion of punishment is increased barbarity in society. This is very clear in Britain over the last forty years. You get people in the Guardian saying it's a more humane society now; yes, for sociopaths, bullies, vandals, drug dealers, murderers and rapists.
The objection to the 'postcard of the hanging' is a fair one, though reveals the classic prissy Left ignorance of how ordinary people feel about seeing that justice be done (I am not talking about the Peterson case here because it doesn't look like he was bang to rights at all).
Ordinary people, unlike the Liberal Elite, still have what you lot here would probably call a 'traditional' view of Right and Wrong, most likely because they're living with it and around it, and not in a Missionary or Political role.
In England, where the Liberal Elite has prevailed, people are very angry about the way crime and behaviour has gone in this glorious post-60s age of enlightenment. The Left need to learn the lesson that being slack and dissembling about crime and public order (New Labour called it--sardonic tee hee--'tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime') gives people an unhealthy taste for authoritarianism and givesa specious moral power and public attention to fascist organisations.
I think the Left will learn all this the hard way, but maybe they won't, being ideologically fuelled by Upper Middle Class people still extrapolating their objections to potty training (see for example the great George Orwell even).

If justice were actually done through the death penalty, lots of us would be likelier to support it. See, e.g., this case, and this one, and you don't have to look far to find other modern-day cases, and I hope I don't have to tell you about the Scottsboro Boys, or your own fine country's origination of the expression, "might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb". If it were always the likes of Eichmann on the gallows, fine, I'd say, justice is done. Thing is, it isn't always. It's always some stupid mean lowlife who's bad enough but no worse than any number of other stupid mean lowlifes serving twenty-year sentences or running around free.

The thing about the death penalty is that it's never really about justice plain and simple; it's always the centerpiece of some kind of pageantry about the impression of dealing out justice, generally for the benefit of someone other than the parties who were actually harmed by the crime. It's always about someone -- usually not a party affected by the crime -- putting on a show for selfish reasons.

Very typically, for example, the pro-death-penalty recall campaign that unseated three California State Supreme Court justices in the 1980s was never really about doing justice to criminals: the "soft on crime" line was a shuck to get the public angry, and the folks who thought it up were a bunch of insurance executives whose actual reason for wanting the three justices out was that they'd ruled on the victims' side in too many personal-injury verdicts.

Frankly, anyway, an execution gives the criminal a moment of glory in a way that an obscure miserable death in prison never could. Look at the old ballads -- they show a sneaking sympathy for the man giving his last speech from the gallows. The theme of hangings being unjust runs deep and old, too. Look at "The Long Black Veil" for example. Hangings never were about justice, and the death penalty never will be either. There's just something so terrible about coldly, judicially, taking a life that it creates an aura of unreality around it, and the only folks who benefit are the filthy-hearted politicians who have the gall to turn that unreality into spectacle for their personal benefit. George Deukmejian, for example, headed that campaign against the California Supreme Court justices and was afterwards elected governor of California. The death penalty did more for George Deukmejian than it ever did for the survivors of Robert Alton Harris' victims.

I see what you're saying, though it speaks more about the big parade-ness which is abject in American life and history and reflects various corruptions of a legal and and political nature. We know that Lawyers and Politicians suffer particularly from a sort of moral dyslexia. The system which keeps men on death row for years is bloody barbaric- either don't pass the sentence or pass it and get on with it.
In England, when it had the death penalty, about 90 or more per cent of executions were commuted to life anyway. But it meant there was a final deterrent (men going on robberies would frisk each other for weapons before the crime to make sure nobody had a weapon as in those days it was a capial offence for all concerned if one of them murdered, which must have saved innocent lives: if it was on the books now I wonder if gun crime would be soaring as it is now in England?)and frankly people like Fred West and Harold Shipman and John Christie need to be hanged (West and Shipman hanged themselves anyway.) If Ian Huntley, the man who murdered two twelve year old girls in Soham recently, had been hanged then I would have called that justice and so would most people.
Yeah, I suppose public executions gave the hanged man a certain vainglory. So what? As for dark and coldhearted, well yes it is but then so are the crimes that warrant it. To recap, I am not proposing that the system you have is good or worthwhile but I think in some cases the death penalty is warranted and just. To have it on the books reminds criminals that civilized society still takes crime seriously.

The thing about the death penalty is that it's never really about justice plain and simple; it's always the centerpiece of some kind of pageantry about the impression of dealing out justice, generally for the benefit of someone other than the parties who were actually harmed by the crime.

You've gotten to the heart of the problem, Martha. The high value we place on appearing to act may not be a particularly American disease but we do have a bad case of it. In all areas of life, not just criminal justice (Will the intelligence reforms recently enacted have concrete results? Not important. But it looks like we're doing something.). And I bet many law enforcement people, if they were being candid, might confess that catching somebody/anybody after the commission of a crime is better than apprehending nobody.