Saying that the convicted should not “get off that easy” with lethal injection, Drake wants to see people fried or shot instead. He said the idea came to him at a Waffle House in talking to a constituent. He said that the electric chair or firing squad would make inmates more scared and think about their punishment “every morning.”
He helpfully put this idea into perspective: “I think if you ask a hundred people, not even talking to criminals, how would you like to die, if you were drowned, if you were shot, and if you say you were put to sleep, 90 percent of some of the people would say I want to be put to sleep. Let’s put our pants back on the right way.”
I previously wrote about the increasing use of politicized piety and now we have politicized pain as a draw for voters.
Well, if we are putting our pants on, perhaps we should not stop with electric chairs. As discussed in this column, we used to cook people in a “brazen bull.” The Romans punished parricide (murder of a parent) by putting the condemned into a sack with a dog, a rooster, a viper and an ape — then throwing the sack into the water. Now that would keep guys up at night.
Drake may want to visit Iran where Sharia judges mete out punishment on the same theory from pouring acid into eyes to throwing people in bags down hills with sharp rocks.
When politicians start to run on the promise of pain for convicted persons, we have finally de-evolved into an unrecognizable state. Of course, promising to terrify inmates and hurt them is probably preferred to dealing with social programs being shutdown and unemployment rising in the state. What is left is the promise of gratuitous pain to satisfy some deep need. Then again, maybe it was the waffles.
Source: MSNBC