Executions Should be Broadcast Live?

Last week Zachary B. Shemtob an assistant professor of criminal justice at Central Connecticut State University and David Lat, a former federal prosecutor wrote in the New York Times that executions should be broadcast live.

Shemtob and Lat wrote in part:

There is a dramatic difference between reading or hearing of such an event and observing it through image and sound. (This is obvious to those who saw the footage of Saddam Hussein’s hanging in 2006 or the death of Neda Agha-Soltan during the protests in Iran in 2009.) We are not calling for opening executions completely to the public — conducting them before a live crowd — but rather for broadcasting them live or recording them for future release, on the Web or TV.

Shemtob and Lat continued:

Ultimately the main opposition to our idea seems to flow from an unthinking disgust — a sense that public executions are archaic, noxious, even barbarous. Albert Camus related in his essay “Reflections on the Guillotine” that viewing executions turned him against capital punishment. The legal scholar John D. Bessler suggests that public executions might have the same effect on the public today; Sister Helen Prejean, the death penalty abolitionist, has urged just such a strategy.

That is not our view. We leave open the possibility that making executions public could strengthen support for them; undecided viewers might find them less disturbing than anticipated.

To read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/opinion/sunday/executions-should-be-televised.html