What’s wrong with public executions?

There are few more apt representations of the current United States administration under Donald Trump than the image of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier, his “We the People” tattoo conspicuous on his forearm, announcing that America is bringing back the public execution — and that it will be livestreamed.

The broadcast death by firing squad of Major Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 unarmed US soldiers and wounded more than 30 others at the Fort Hood military base in 2009, will be the first public execution in the US in almost a century. In a rare show of unity, Australia’s political parties have decried the livestream as “barbaric”, and the eSafety Commission says it cannot block its broadcast here.

But what is it exactly about a public execution that is morally wrong?

Make no mistake, conducting a public execution isn’t a small step for a liberal state to make. It signals something stark about the nature of the state and its leaders. It says in no uncertain terms that it is abandoning the liberal commitment to use violence as a last resort, instead using it to send a message to its perceived enemies, including its own citizens. Because signalling is what it’s all about.

Related Article Block Placeholder Article ID: 1238502

Public executions have a long history. Imperial Rome lined its famous roads with crucified criminals. Fascist regimes strung up dissidents or shot them en masse in town squares. To this day, Afghanistan and Iran make a production of executing not only criminals but also enemies of their oppressive regimes. While different in scale, ISIS also employed public executions as a means of intimidating and terrorising onlookers, domestic and foreign. 

The whole point is the production. There is a highly theatrical nature to public executions, with roles to be played and a script to be followed. There’s a narrative embedded, one of the evil victim being brought down by a righteous state. But part of that narrative is that the state is the ultimate wielder of violence, and whomever it declares to be its opponents — domestic or otherwise — should be in no doubt about its willingness to use it.

As the American lawyer Steven A. Blum puts it, “A public execution is the ultimate act of asserting authority by terror.”

Those who support the state will watch on with a grim satisfaction that the terror is directed at their enemies. But those who oppose the state in any way will become acutely aware that they could be next. The last public executions to take place in the US disproportionately targeted black men. Meanwhile, white men were typically spared execution even after committing similar crimes. The African-American community was under no illusion about the implications of this disparity. It’s no accident that Hegseth made a point of Hasan’s Islamic faith when announcing his execution.

But even loyalists can become the target if the regime changes, as regimes are known to do. Consider revolutionary France in 1791. Public order was breaking down after the arrest of Louis XVI. The National Assembly raced to restore that order to prevent chaos. As one representative said to the Assembly, “A terrible spectacle is needed to keep the people in check.” Out came the guillotine. But, as those members of the Assembly discovered only a few years later, it didn’t take much for the terror to be directed back at them.

But while public executions corrupt the liberal state, they also corrupt the spectator. Ours is a species prone to violence. It has taken centuries of self-domestication to push that violent nature to the fringes and promote our more pacifist tendencies. But red blood still runs in our veins, which is why many of us are fascinated by violence and may be drawn to it even despite our apprehension.

Related Article Block Placeholder Article ID: 1237921

Charles Dickens wrote of the “brutal mirth” of the crowd attending a public hanging in London. Such mirth turns punishment into perverse entertainment, replacing what ought to be revulsion with titillation. We shouldn’t underestimate how easily such arousal can rekindle the darker aspects of our nature. There are ample cases of degrading and dehumanising behaviour following public executions. One example is the 1936 hanging of Rainey Bethea in Kentucky, after which part of the 10,000-strong crowd stormed the gallows to fight over souvenirs from his body.

This is not the way a liberal state ought to operate. There’s a core premise that’s built into the very foundations of liberalism that the state should have a monopoly on violence. That’s part of the unwritten compact between the citizen and the state: we will give up our right to use violence to settle our disputes, and the state will agree to use violence only as a last resort. If anything, the modern liberal state goes to great pains to performatively demonstrate a reluctance to use violence.

So, the announcement of the US bringing back public execution isn’t just another weird thing the Trump administration is doing. It’s yet another sign that America is shifting further away from being a liberal state and steering towards a more overt illiberalism that is a threat to its own citizens.