Or watch one on TV? Why or why not? Would the method of execution matter ( eg hanging, guillitone, lethal injection, fire, etc)? Would the who the condemned was matter?
Probably not. I don’t support the death penalty. The methods of execution are kinda boring so it wouldn’t be very entertaining or anything. You already know what the end result will be. It would just very depressing scene to me.
If we sentenced people gladatorial combat against lions or something I might watch.
I used to think that I would watch but a recent thread about a video of a guy that died from having sex with a horse made me reconsider. I watched the video with detached interest, but later I thought, what if that were his last moments on Earth? That kind of creeped me out.
I would not. I do not agree with the death penalty and would feel like my presence would somehow signify approval of the event taking place.
Pretty much what boytyperanma said. Gladitorial style would be cool, but if I want to see someone being put under with injections I could just go watch a surgery or somethng.
There is a photo burned into my brain that was on the Internet a few years ago that showed a lynching with a crowd of people watching, somewhere in the southern part of the USA…and at the front of the photo was a young (white) teenage couple smiling at the camera with the body (bodies?) hanging from a tree.
Without the background photo, the couple looked like they could have been having a wonderful night at a school dance, but considering the background view, it was just disgusting and I simply hated those two people…but at the same time, I was oddly fascinated by the whole, horrible event.
Google “public lynching” using “images” and you will get a few photos that might make you wonder if you would want to be a part of that audience.
I’m not a native Southerner taking his routine umbrage at this assumption, but in the interest of fighting ignorance I must point out tha the lynching photo you saw with the dopey girl and her boyfriend (as well as the guy who looks like Floyd the Barber pointing at the corpses) was taken in Marion Indiana in 1930. Three young black teenagers staged a lovers-lane robbery where the man was killed (but, despite the rumor that inflamed the mob, the woman was not raped) The older two were dragged from the jail and strung up. According to the third, 16-year old, James Cameron, a woman who was possibly the Virgin Mary appeared and commanded the mob to spare him (perhaps despairing not having done this for her own son). He served four years in prison and later returned to his native Wisconsin and founded the Black Holocaust in Milwaukee, dying in 2005.
As for public executions: coincidence or not, in most societies where executions are held publicly, violent death is so commonplace that its judicial application is not a novelty.
Does the Saddam cellphone video count?
I’ve seen a few people die without the advent of an executioner so don’t see any reason to see someone killed.
Mind you I wouldn’t have minded being around when Marilyn Monroe and Michael Hutchence died. I would have saved them but still…I would KNOW.
Yes
Then yes.
For the right person.
I was saying yes I would attend a public execution, not answering your question.
Oh, my bad. Well, I would attend one, too. And I did watch the Saddam video, in case that counts.
I’m not in favor of the death penalty. If public executions were part of my society though, I would not want to close my eyes to it. I’d go and watch. Once.
The picture you’re thinking of might have been from Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America. It contains about 80 images of various lynching scenes, mainly from the early twentieth century.
A fascinating yet horrifying and macabre exhibition.
No. Not under any circumstance. Not ever.
And I wouldn’t watch video of it, either.
A public, legal, execution? Yes absolutely. Firstly, justice must be seen to be done. Secondly, to register my protest at the execution: I don’t believe in the Death Penalty.
I would attend so I could protest capital punishment.