Monday, March 21, 2005
EMAIL FROM LEE PENN
An Iranian mass-murderer and child-rapist was executed by public hanging after receiving 100 lashes and being stabbed by one of the victims' relatives:
NEWS.com.au | Child killer gets public torture then hanging (18-03-2005)
The crimes were hideous, and the punishment was what you'd expect in Iran.
What I had not expected is for a neocon/libertarian American constitutional law professor and blogger, Eugene Volokh, to approve of this ... and to suggest that we could weaken the Bill of Rights' ban on cruel punishment so that we could do the same to mass killers here:
Go to his blog, and scroll down to read his March 16 post:
The Volokh Conspiracy -
He said ... with only some prudential back-tracking in more-recent posts:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Begin Volokh quote:
"I particularly like the involvement of the victims' relatives in the killing of the monster; I think that if he'd killed one of my relatives, I would have wanted to play a role in killing him. Also, though for many instances I would prefer less painful forms of execution, I am especially pleased that the killing -- and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act -- was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging. The one thing that troubles me (besides the fact that the murderer could only be killed once) is that the accomplice was sentenced to only 15 years in prison, but perhaps there's a good explanation.
I am being perfectly serious, by the way. I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness. I think it slights the burning injustice of the murders, and the pain of the families, to react in any other way.
And, yes, I know this aligns me in this instance with the Iranian government — but even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and in this instance the Iranians are quite correct.
UPDATE: I should mention that such a punishment would probably violate the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause. I'm not an expert on the history of the clause, but my point is that the punishment is proper because it's cruel (i.e., because it involves the deliberate infliction of pain as part of the punishment), so it may well be unconstitutional. I would therefore endorse amending the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause to expressly exclude punishment for some sorts of mass murders.
Naturally, I don't expect this to happen any time soon; my point is about what should be the rule, not about what is the rule, or even what is the constitutionally permissible rule. I think the Bill of Rights is generally a great idea, but I don't think it's holy writ handed down from on high. Certain amendments to it may well be proper, though again I freely acknowledge that they'd be highly unlikely."
End of Volokh quote
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My assessment .....
This is the usual procedure for making the unspeakable a matter of public discussion, and then to make what was unspeakable seem normal. Taboo-smashers have been doing this for a long, long time. I never imagined that I would hear a constitutional law professor suggest, even tentatively, that we should amend the ban on cruel and unusual punishment. (Of course, given what we are doing in Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and in secret prisons elsewhere, we already torture and kill our enemies ... we just move them into a category of people that have no rights under Constitutional or international law, and then do what we wish.)
And then there is the matter of torture and degradation as entertainment ...
NPR : 'Guantanamo Guidebook' Brings Torture to TV
Quote:
"An upcoming British television special attempts to recreate alleged techniques used at the American prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In The Guantanamo Guidebook, former American Delta Force interrogators subjected seven volunteers to sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and intense questioning over the course of 60 hours. NPR's Madeleine Brand talks with Chris Guelff, who volunteered for the show."
End quote
So what's next ... bringing back the Colosseum?
As a context, here is what I wrote in mid-April 2004 in "When the State Becomes God" ... a story that the Spiritual Counterfeits Project Journal published just as the Abu Ghraib scandal was surfacing:
When the State Becomes God, By Lee Penn (All rights reserved, SCP)
I said then:
"The proponents of torture and hostage-taking say that these acts are necessary in wartime  especially when dealing with terrorists who might be induced to reveal the location of a ticking bomb. It is the same taboo-smashing, utilitarian logic that liberals in the 1960s and 1970s used to overturn laws limiting abortion. Those who favored legalized abortion said that it was a necessary, tragic way to deal with pregnancies resulting from rape and incest, threats to the health of the mother, and severe deformity of the fetus. Thirty-five years later, there are 1.3 million abortions a year;91 for every 1,000 babies born alive, about 250 are slain in their mother's womb.92 Given the decay of the culture, and the way that taboos fall when they are broken for the "hard cases," I venture a prediction. If we start torturing terror suspects in 2004, then torture will be widespread for "routine" crimes by 2014, and will be on pay-per-view TV (or its future equivalent) by 2024.
George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984, written in 1948, prophesied current events: "Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation. And in the general hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years  imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole populations  not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.93"
[ Note ... the numbers are footnotes. Go to the web site to read the whole article, and to see the sources. ]
My predictions are coming true, years early.
Kyrie eleison.
Lee
