Relevant to how we see life in the US, Mark Shea (Catholic Apologists) shares the following:
Consider: One of the major arguments for the death penalty is that it is, allegedly, a deterrent. So how do we implement this "deterrent"? We could get the first ten people out of the phone book to be executioners. If it comes to that some of my blog readers were (disturbingly) eager to execute criminals. We could make them executioners. Instead we get "qualified medical professionals" to execute people. Why? Because you need a college degree to do it? Nope. It's not that hard to kill a man and an eager butcher from the local meat store could do it as painlessly as any "qualified medical professional". But instead of hiring my zealous comboxers or the local butcher and doing it the old fashioned way, with spurting blood in the town square or on TV (which is the only conceivable way the death penalty could really act as a deterrent), we now cloak the whole thing in white coats, sterile fields, and gleaming lab-like environments that are absolutely invisible to everybody but the condemned, his executioners, and a couple of witnesses. No boozy headsman with an axe or noose. No spurting blood and no jerking struggles at the end of a rope to scare the living daylights out of potential criminals. Above all, no cameras please. We want people who look neat and clean and professional to go into the little room and do the job with maximum sterility and we don't care that we are forcing the one profession that specifically takes an oath to do no harm to commit the ultimate act of violence to a human being.
In short, we care more about aesthetics than about consistency. And we do it for every form of death we administer from the prison to the Schiavo hospice to the abortuary, because we have this hope that by privatizing and sanitizing our violence, it will make us feel better about committing it. None of that is to say that capital punishment is equal to euthanasia. It is to say that it shows a deeply divided conscience about our culture of death.
So do I want to see a return to the town square running with blood? On the contrary, I agree with Pope John Paul II that the death penalty should only be enacted when absolutely necessary. And I think that, at some level, so does most of our conscience-haunted culture. There is no other word to describe our strange insistence on hiding the violence we do than "shame".
