Eugene Volokh has caused something of a storm by putting forward the idea that there are certain crimes so horrendous that they not only deserve the death penalty but a deliberately painful death as well. The whole story, all attendant posts, can be found here. Given my own opposition to the death penalty (about the only thing on which I am in agreement with the Euro political elite) of course I reject what he says about the executions, but the deliberate infliction of pain part causes some thought. First, two minor points.

Maimon points to George Orwell’s criticism of what he saw as the unduly
painful hangings of some Nazis after World War II. I find much to
admire in Orwell, but I don’t share his generosity here (I speak here
of the Nazi leaders generally, though recognizing the possibility that
some lower-level military officials deserved to live, or even deserved
to die painlessly).

I recently read the autobiography of Albert Pierrepoint, perhaps the most famous of Britain’s hangmen, and one who dealt with several of the Nazis. (It’s amazing what you’ll read if you live in a non English speaking country, the shortage of decent material leading to oddities such as this being perused.) He was extremely critical of the American methods used, insisting that they were more likely to produce strangulation than the neck snapping which was the British ideal.

The second is that I don’t actually think that even neck snapping hangings are "easy deaths". Now this may be purely an error on my part, a lack of knowledge about physiology, but a little thinking about brain death makes me think it a particularly horrible way to die. In an electrocution or injection scenario, unconsciousness is the first thing to happen. The Russian style nine grams in the back of the head of course stops the brain thinking before the heart stops beating. There are those reports where heads dropping from the guillotine still blink their eyes, and this is the sort of thing I mean. Certainly, a properly conducted hanging snaps the neck at the sixth (?) vertebra, the heart and breathing stop instantly. But the brain, as we know, keeps going for three to five minutes without new blood and oxygen getting to it…so while hanging on the end of that rope,  while the doctor checks the heart beat and pronounces death,  the brain is still in there, the person is, screaming at the end of its world. I would even submit, that as hearing is the last of the senses to fade, that the dying executionee would hear the chaplain stop his prayers and whatever joke he makes to the executioner, perhaps, in the case of some American states, hear the audience comment.

No, I can’t say I do think that a well conducted hanging is an easy death.

The major point that occurs to me concerns the very basis of what the Professor is putting forward. That for certain crimes death is not enough, there must be pain too. Which leads to the uncomfortable thought (in the Professor’s view of the world) that perhaps there are crimes which are so heinous that death itself is undeserved, that such evil was perpetrated that the release from pain by dying is not to be allowed. In essence, permanent torture, a daily or hourly application of pain, with medical treatment, food, refreshment and care, so that the infliction of it can be continued in the next hour, tomorrow, next month. A sentence handed down of a week’s torture before release from this world, a month, a year.

Ridiculous? Perhaps, but I can’t see the fault in the logic, if we accept that there are some crimes that deserve the death penalty, some worse ones which deserve a painful death, then there will be some that deserve a more painful death and so on ad infinitum until a Stalin or a Hitler must be kept alive so that we can inflict yet more pain.

As at the top, I don’t accept the contention that there are crimes that deserve the death penalty, so fortunately I don’t have to accept the latter part of the argument either.