Should executions be livestreamed?

If you asked me to name the most important political value I hold, my answer would be simple: I am pro-life, in nearly every meaning of the term.

It seems clear to me that the single most important goal of society should be the preservation and perpetuation of human life. Life is precious, from the moment it begins until the moment it ends; to end a life prematurely is the single gravest thing that a person can do. To kill another person is to rob them of the most precious gift they have ever been given, to freeze them in place permanently, to remove their chances of experiencing further joy or bringing further joy into the world. The first murder is one of the first stories in the Bible for a reason.

In short, if you are going to kill someone, you need to have an unimpeachable reason to do so.

Given all this, I grapple with capital punishment more than any other political issue. Christian views on the death penalty are diverse and complicated, as our coverage of the failed execution of Christa Pike showcased. The Catholic Church — the largest Christian body in the world — officially opposes it. Pope Leo XIV distilled the church’s opinion on it in a social media post last weekend, writing, “The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person. The common good can be safeguarded and the requirements of justice can be met without recourse to capital punishment: effective systems of detention have been developed that protect citizens while at the same time do not completely deprive those who are guilty of the possibility of redemption.”

I’m not a Catholic, but I still recognize the Pope’s formidable role in interpreting Christian moral teachings. And his emphasis that redemption is possible for any person, myself included, hits home for me.

Even so, I can’t shake the feeling that the death penalty is permissible for the most serious of crimes, and that the potential abandonment of capital punishment — indeed, our abandonment of older understandings of justice — could be detrimental to us. Amid a debate over capital punishment just after World War II, C.S. Lewis argued that to abandon the retributive theory of punishment, to instead prioritize theories of rehabilitation and deterrence, is to dehumanize the criminal and give concession to tyranny. If we pathologize all of a person’s wrongdoings, we imply that the person lacks the capacity for reason; if we solely focus on deterrence, we open ourselves to justifying the punishment of the innocents just to “set an example.” For those reasons, Lewis argued, society can’t abandon the concept of giving a criminal his “just deserts.”

If we accept that premise, then we must ask what sort of deserts are required by different crimes. Here, Lewis argues, we should rely on the principles of justice developed over centuries of legal theory and the judgments of juries of a convict’s peers. Capital punishment has been a part of this legal system since time immemorial; our ancestors understood it to be necessary, to some extent, and they further understood it to be a just desert for certain crimes. 

Of course, just because the death penalty was once understood to be necessary does not mean that its proponents were right then, or that they are right now. After all, governments have killed and still kill people for crimes that we recognize today as unworthy of the death penalty, and I think that getting the death penalty wrong — by applying it erroneously or incompetently — is the most egregious act a government can commit. Not only that, but the state making the final decision to deprive any person of the chance of redemption genuinely makes my blood run cold. 

Nevertheless, I still find myself thinking that death is the only appropriate punishment for some crimes — mass shootings among them. 

The Fort Hood shooter killed 13 people and injured 32 more, all in the name of fighting America on behalf of radical Islam. In the years since the massacre, the shooter has expressed no remorse and has in fact continued to hold fast to the extremist ideology that drove him to murder. I believe this man must choose redemption if he is to have it, but he has spent nearly two decades refusing it and doubling down at every turn. Execution, in the end, fits the bill of just deserts. In this case, the biggest miscarriage of justice is the fact he sat on death row for well over a decade.

But my support for the death penalty — even in the case of the Fort Hood shooter — is contingent on an important factor: It must be carried out with the solemnity and sobriety that such a punishment requires. We mustn’t take pleasure in ending another person’s life. Instead, we must treat it as a terrible duty, and we must afford the convicted every dignity we can, for our own consciences if not for his comfort. 

So for that reason, when I heard the Pentagon declared that the execution (by firing squad, no less) would be livestreamed, I was filled with anger. I understand the case for public executions — part of the solemnity of execution includes our understanding of the gravity of what we’re doing, and I think that modern, medicalized executions intentionally obscure and desensitize the public to the gruesome finality of the act. But there’s a difference between displaying an execution with dignity and treating it as a show of force or a spectacle. When the enactment of justice becomes a spectacle, people begin to lose their sense of justice, giving way to cravings for revenge fueled by an incendiary mob mentality.

And in my view, offering it on livestream worsens this problem. Viewing violence through a screen evokes a certain desensitization: You’re removed from the full embodied experience, making it feel unreal, like a video game or movie. Easy access to that sort of violent imagery has been found to inspire radicalization and even terrorism — it’s the very reason that the Islamic State, the group that this shooter pledges loyalty to, publicizes its killings. And the livestreamed execution of a paraplegic Islamic terrorist would do their work for them, turning the convict into a martyr and providing evidence of America’s brutality. 

Secretary Hegseth seems either unaware of or apathetic toward these problems. Neither attitude would surprise me. The secretary likes to flaunt Scripture when he thinks it emphasizes strength and bravado, but he’s just as likely to flout its demands for dignity and grace. And that misuse of Scripture, in service of such an egregious betrayal of dignity — carried out by a civil servant in a secular government, no less — makes a mockery of the idea of justice.

My hope is that the better angels in President Trump’s and Vice President Vance’s natures prevail here, and that they shoot down Hegseth’s ill-formed idea. Because if they don’t, in my view, it would be better to have no death penalty at all than to have it so abused.

Staff concurrence. Isaac Saul Executive Editor

Audrey and I disagree about the utility of the death penalty (I’ve written in stark opposition to it, including as recently as last week). But I was relieved to see we landed in the same place on the value of a public execution. While I’m almost compelled by the argument that we should have public executions to make the country reckon with what we’re allowing behind closed doors, I’m conscious of the fact that, as Audrey argued, violence begets violence (to say nothing of the fact that this particular killer wants to die a martyr). And turning it into a nationwide watch party feels like I’m stuck in an episode of Black Mirror.   In a surfeit of hypocrisy and violence, this is the same administration that has an HHS campaign bringing together researchers, tech companies, and advocates for a symposium on screen-related harms. Now, it’s guaranteeing a government-sponsored killing goes viral on the internet, inevitably making its way to devices across the world. If it weren’t so nauseating to imagine teenagers firing up the livestream from their phones and computers across the country, it’d be comically absurd to consider. Which, honestly, is a good way to describe Pete Hegseth’s entire term as Defense secretary.