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Instructions unclear. Started compassionately guillotining terminally ill cancer patients.
Surely the indignity of the guillotine is that it turns someone's execution into a humiliating blood spraying spectacle? You can almost look cool standing in front of a firing squad, blind folded (obligatory: smoking a cigarette). Nobody looks cool on their knees with their head in a guillotine stockade, even with a cigarette.
OTOH, with a firing squad, you probably look much less cool suffocating to death from all of the holes ripped through your lungs; not sure what I'd pick.
The gore is a feature, a token of our respect for life. We’re not “putting people to sleep” here. Each juror should get a splash when the blade falls. They shouldn’t eat meat if they can’t kill the animal.
Because as worthless as it may be, it’s still a life, and we should not get comfortable taking it with the simple push of a button.
On the specifics of the case, I have a problem condemning multiple people to death for a single murder. It’s blowing past the balance of lex talionis, into this exponentially growing orgy of bloody vengeance.
It’s the principle of exact retaliation, not three eyes for an eye.
Think of the justice system’s goal as keeping vengeance contained. Let’s say three men kill another. Their family, their clan, reckon they should walk, because the murdered man, was of an unpleasant sort. If you have them all executed to satisfy the murdered man’s family, and they take revenge in the same disproportionate manner by killing nine relatives, it results in total war and the wipeout of one of the clans. Whereas if you just execute one, they can let it go under the win some, lose some principle. Or if they still retaliate, at least it’s a slow-burning vendetta, not a massacre.
What’s the limit then, a hundred? What if a political party manages to convince a judge that a hundred political rivals conspired to kill one of theirs, so they’re all executed? Disproportionate retaliation encourages the manipulation of state power via the justice system as a weapon against rivals.
If in the course of our crusade against murder, we end up killing more people than actual murderers kill, I’d take it as an ‘are we the baddies?’ moment. There should never be a doubt as to whose hands are cleaner. Through our displays of superior mercy, even the condemned's supporters have to recognize our verdicts as unimpeachable.
legal or practical? No legal limit, but there is a practical limit with how many people can be responsible for murder enough to qualify for such sentence
(though yes, if 1000 people gathered for ritualistic murder and planned and did it together for express purpose of murdering someone? I am OK with throwing murder charge on all of them. If death penalty is on books I would not have greater problem with it than in regular murder case)
You forgot about indirect impact. If Vatican has zero murder rate and Swiss Guard killed someone to prevent murder it does not mean they are baddies.
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