following the botched execution -- what should be the way to execute some one?

[politicat]

83. It's not that I have any exceptional sympathy. It's that I believe we as a society must prove that

we are better than those who damage the social fabric. I, as a citizen, am part of the state, so when the state puts someone to death in my name, the state is forcing me to be party to judicial homicide. I believe that descending to the level of the malefactor damages the entire society. It engenders callousness, and opens us up to enormous error -- should we as a society execute someone in error, we are all collectively guilty of actual manslaughter, if not murder.

I am a judicial restorationist. I believe that crimes are offenses against the individual first then the society at whole second. I believe that a crime creates tears in the social fabric, and that the best restoration possible is for the convicted to serve the society and the victim to the best extent possible. My ideal prison would have work programs to do things that are necessary but unprofitable (because un or low paid prison labor incentivizes more incarceration, and that leads to a cycle of more and more incarceration.) Thus, things like training therapy and service dogs, doing environmental restoration, serving each other in in-prison hospitals and hospices, printing Braille books, or that serve the society as a whole -- building tiny houses for disaster relief and homeless populations, rehabilitation of wheelchairs or other assistive devices, even doing the field work for agricultural science to develop better, cleaner, safer farming practices. (Some of those are not possible in maximum security, but I bet there are similar jobs.)

I believe that execution is too easy and too vengeful. An eye for an eye was, in the context of Hammurabi's code, an improvement on the state of affairs in 3000 BCE. Then, if someone put out your eye, the society didn't forbid a more extreme response. Hammurabi said that the punishment should be proportionate to the crime. We have progressed from Hammurabi's day -- we no longer sell our daughters, or practice infanticide. We deplore slavery, we are trying to be better. Execution means that we have deprived our collective social fabric of at least two contributing threads -- the victim and the aggressor -- and that the convicted has no chance to attempt to make a restoration of his/her theft from all of us.

How would I punish someone who killed brutally, in cold blood? A lifetime of service, and a lifetime of being reminded of what zie did. Daily, zie would need to listen to or view home videos of the person zie killed. Daily, zie would need to sign off on zir labor with "Murderer's name, in memory of Victim's name." Can empathy be taught? Maybe, but I think actions matter, and the dead don't act.