Why Nidal Hasan’s Execution Demands A Public Witness

Capital punishment rarely makes the news for long. Until the last two weeks.

Public controversies around the death penalty originally arose as a response to the botched execution of convicted murderer Christa Pike. In a column I wrote for National Review, I criticized the way that the modern state practices capital punishment — both in its inefficiency and its dubious attempts to sanitize the procedure into something resembling an outpatient procedure. In that same column, I made what I thought was the audacious call to reintroduce public executions. I did not anticipate that, in the same week, public execution would quickly become a public conversation.