DEATH PENALTY

The ‘Hidden’ Third Parties as Victims
Dead Men Walking: Abolishing the death
penalty
Death work is a moral and psychological burden that must be borne
by prison staff who shoulder the role of executioner, but the real
horror is not that executions are hard on staff, though they are, but
rather that executions get easier for them over time. In the prescient
words of G. K. Chesterton, we are reminded that “It is a terrible business
to mark out a man for the vengeance of men. But it is a thing to
which a man can grow accustomed.… And the horrible thing about
public officials, even the best … is not that they are wicked … not
that they are stupid … it is simply that they have got used to it.” 61
Executioners get inured to death work because they become dead
to the prisoners they kill just as those prisoners become dead to
themselves as the execution process unfolds. Executions get easier for
many of us in society as well: for most of us, executions are increasingly
unremarkable and indeed only newsworthy when they go badly
wrong or involve inherently gruesome methods such as beheading.
We, too, are dead to the condemned in the sense that they become
lifeless statistics, before and after their deaths. We should abolish the
death penalty, then, not so much to save executioners from stress, even
disabling and dehumanizing stress. We should abolish the death penalty
to put an end to an institution that kills empathy and compassion,
and ultimately corrupts us all.
61 Quoted in Johnson, 2005, p. 121.
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