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Your point about hanging is well-taken. I’m trying to optimize for a method that the American public could actually stomach. Hanging has a long and lindy history in Anglophone countries — although, much like my concerns about the optics of caning, hanging does of course suffer from the association with lynching, regardless of how long the practice existed both before and after the era of Lynch Law. Hanging can also be performed in a public square, using an apparatus which can be reused many times, and which can execute multiple individuals simultaneously. It is violent enough to make a point, but, at least in its long-drop form, not too gruesome to witness.
Current “medicalized” execution methods such as lethal injection are too sterile and do not carry any of the desired psychological effects, neither on the condemned nor on onlookers. The gas chamber is similarly medicalized, cannot be carried out before the eyes of the public, and of course suffers from an even more taboo optical association: that of the Holocaust.
The guillotine is far too gruesome and traumatic; watching someone get decapitated and bleed out from their neck stump is simply too much for most modern people to stomach. It also suffers from an inescapable and unacceptable association with the subversive, anarchic, populist aesthetics of the French Revolution.
As for the firing squad or other forms of execution by firearm, I feel they suffer from three major drawbacks: firstly, like the guillotine, they are simply very visually violent and not something a lot of psychologically-healthy Americans would wish to watch; secondly, it is the method of execution which, barring the old-fashioned execution by axe, might be the most traumatizing for the individual(s) tasked with carrying out the execution; thirdly, since my fervent hope is that in the long run America loses its fixation with guns, a method of execution by the state which prominently features firearms sends the wrong message.
I’m sure some enterprising inventor can (and hopefully will) develop a method of execution which more wholly satisfies the criteria I’m looking for. A method which requires the condemned to, directly before the eyes of the public, come to grips with the enormity of the consequences for his crimes, and to experience both the visible terror and the humiliating stripping of social status which are appropriate for the circumstances. I’m sensitive to avoid methods which overly select for sadism in the executioner(s), and those which risk inculcating such sadism over time. Methods like hanging which involve an apparatus, rather than a direct violent action by an individual, are preferable for that reason among others.
Public execution is already wayyy outside the realm of consideration for modern Westerners; if it should be reinstated, I'd prefer that we go the whole nine yards, as it were. Also, have you seen the comments on gore sites? Asides from stupid teenagers, I'd wager that ~everyone who frequents those sites to see anything more graphic than bodycam footage are somehow mentally disturbed.
Besides, the broader objection I have is towards the instrumental value of your formulation. When there's just not that much crime that deserves capital punishment compared to how it was in the past (at least among the blue-blood races), you don't really need to drive the point home in that way; it seems like your ought doesn't follow from the is. I'm curious: what crimes do you think deserve the death penalty (and while we're on topic, which deserve caning)?
I mean, that’s the thing: in the American context, both execution and caning would be wildly disproportionately applied to the “non-blue-blood races”. I obviously have no objection to hanging or caning a white felon; the demographic disparities are, at least in the short term, simply the reality.
When it comes to non-violent crimes, it’s more about the habitual aspect of crime. If someone commits shoplifting, I’m perfectly happy to see them caned once and then everyone can move on. If someone has committed shoplifting 47 times, this person is very obviously an intolerable burden and incapable of being rehabilitated. Career criminals are what I’m trying to focus on.
There are, however, certain non-violent crimes which I’d be perfectly willing to have someone very severely harmed for: scammers, for example. People who steal not from large impersonal entities, but from vulnerable individuals. A very close family member of mine lost his entire life savings to a scammer, who exploited his naïvety and conscientiousness. I myself had a phone stolen because a guy begged to use it to call his mother, then ran from me the second I handed it to him. These people are irredeemably sociopathic and must be culled. Generally any crimes which demonstrate a depraved mind must be dealt with through making it onerous or impossible for this person to reproduce.
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I will note that in the EEA everyone was basically fine with gore. It's the modern, intermediated society where the vast majority of people don't have to kill animals that is unnatural.
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