Compass Counterpoint
11 October 2026
What’s with the U.S. and the Death Penalty?
Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.
A civilisation erodes when it cultivates an appetite for executions as a form of entertainment.
That’s what jihadists do. America is better than that.
No gentlemen. You have it wrong.
It’s not primarily the decision to televise the execution of Nidal Hasan that’s barbaric.
Executions themselves are barbaric.
The US is alone among western democracies in allowing the death penalty as a judicial option. Every other western democracy scrapped state executions decades ago, when lynch mobs were still rampaging in America. Incidentally, the violent crime rates in the abolitionist countries are all far lower than in the US, which gives the lie to the deterrence argument.
Sigmund Freud and numerous subsequent psychologists held that those who harbour hidden desires or feel subconscious guilt over their own private misdemeanours are prone to vicariously punish themselves by advocating harsh punishment for others. President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew were very strongly in favour of the death penalty.
In their time, they also turned out to be two of the nation’s most high-profile crooks.
The father of psychoanalysis would have had a field day with the current White House occupant.
Nietzsche summed it up well:
Beware of the person with a strong urge to punish.
The lingering US attachment to capital punishment is loaded with irony. (When you have the capital, you’re unlikely to get the punishment).
American enthusiasts for the death penalty – overwhelmingly staunch conservatives – have more in common with communist regimes, all of which asserted the right to kill certain citizens.
When the old communist states of Eastern Europe were toppled and became democracies, all of them abolished the death penalty.
This has left the US in the dubious company of other state executioners – most notably, yes, Iran. China and North Korea are capital punishers too, but, perhaps out of shame, hide the number of victims. And, of course, there’s also Saudi Arabia, the world behead quarters.
The Political Compass asserts that the single most significant indicator of the authoritarian individual or country is enthusiasm for state execution.
While those US lawmakers took the moral high ground against executions being made public, Christa Pike, the latest victim of shockingly botched lethal injections, was being rushed to hospital to make her well enough to re-enter the death chamber.
Whether state executions are botched or televised, the real moral position is that they should never take place.
