Should a red-tape-meister actually experience misgivings, bureaucracy increases the number of people it takes to kill a killer, so lingering regret can be spread around the Department, defraying its effects. Who can feel guilt, when nobody really pulled the lever? How can you feel guilt when the execution isn't really an execution? Guilt has been pro-rated. 
Ill Humor, page 2
To that end, the State is turning public executions into something resembling therapy. Department of Corrections spokespeople say the death penalty is a way of providing "closure" for the killers' victims. (If the guy who dismembered your loved one is killed, you see, it somehow lets you accept the fact that your loved one had been dismembered.) Before Robert Alton Harris was gassed in 1992, I actually heard the warden refer to his impending death as the "execution process."
Execution processors see themselves as a nurturing presence. Gliding up and down death row, they take drink requests, and ask the doomed if they're comfortable: "Would you like a little pillow? Have you made peace with your maker? Would you like a headset? Our in-flight movie this evening is DEAD MAN WALKING..."
As they try to soothe all the haywire hairballs our culture has coughed up and condemned, we clamor for more death throes, more death rattles. Citizens are angry that it takes so long to execute these guys. The condemned men keep filing appeals! They keep talking to lawyers! They don't feel remorse!
Well, what do we expect? If psychos were capable of remorse, they wouldn't be psychos, now would they? Even if a guy shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, it doesn't mean he wants to die himself. Even baby-rapers are craven cowards when it comes to meeting the Grip Reaper. And even if you've torn the heads off the entire population of Cleveland, you still have the right to legal representation. Damn those Founding Fathers!
Here's what we want-- to see the lights dim as current surges through the chair, to watch murderers choke and stumble as pellets drop from the ceiling. We want to see dimwit thrillkillers weep and scream as the Federales aim their rifles. We want to see heads roll under the blade. We want to see feet twitch as the condemned man drops from the gallows. We want scenes from Goya. We are out for blood. If you think otherwise, you're lying to yourself. Spare me.
I might be wearing my prejudice on my sleeve, but don't get me wrong. I don't think William Bonin deserved to live. If he had been released into the custody of his victims' families, who were issued sharpened objects and given permission to do with them and him as they pleased, that would have been fine with me.
But that's just my opinion. I wish people dead every day -- not just pedophiles and serial killers, but jerks at work, people who cut me off in traffic. Should the frustrations of disgruntled citizens be translated into the will of the state?
No.
Buck-passing empty suits should not inject poison into human beings, even if they are sociopaths. We already have a problem with disgruntled postal employees. If execution processors run amok, who'll give them the needle?
