David Lat's Executions Should Be Televised

Although in the 1990s capital punishment was popular among most American citizens, the pendulum has swung to an uncomfortable middle where people are either completely for or completely against it (“National Polls and Studies”). In Zachary Shemtob and David Lat’s “Executions Should be Televised” and David Bruck’s “The Death Penalty,” the authors believe that American citizens should be against capital punishment because it not only takes rights guaranteed to us by our nation’s constitution away from those who must suffer the eternal punishment, but also away from the tax-paying and law-abiding citizens. When examining these essays together, readers can get a glimpse of how some of their rights, such as the promise from the government that as a democracy it will remain transparent, or promises from our nation’s constitution, are being hindered.
Zachary Shemtob and David Lat, authors of
“Executions Should be Televised,” claim that executions should be publicized because they have become something cruel and unusual. The authors, who “focus on accountability and openness,” argue that while a “democracy demands maximum accountability and transparency” the government does a good job of excluding details about executions in the “vague contours [that] are provided in the morning paper” (Shemtob and Lat 53). The authors believe that the American government should be as transparent as possible to its citizens, even when the topics are as controversial and hard to talk about as the death penalty. Shemtob and Lat argue that citizens who are paying the taxes to financially support executions should be well aware of for whom, why, how, and when they are being done because our “democracy demands a citizenry as informed as possible” (Shemtob and Lat 55). Since our government does not share all the details of executions with the general public, they are not upholding their duty as a democratic government to be transparent.
In David Bruck’s “The Death Penalty”, he explains to the reader that on the criminal side of capital punishment, rights are also not being protected.
This essay shows us what we would uncover if we saw where the government was being completely transparent. In “Executions Should be Televised” the question of how some people are executed comes up. In “The Death Penalty,” Bruck answers that question when he writes about a man named Joseph Carl Shaw, a former military policeman who helped murder two teenagers while suffering from a mental illness and being high off of PCP (Bruck 490). Shaw was executed by the electric chair, a contraption that was built over 100 years ago (Bruck 490). With today’s medical advancements and technologies however, there are plenty of ways to perform an execution that does not cause severe pain. By executing a man in such a barbaric way, Bruck shows the reader how their constitutional right defined by the 8th amendment, that “cruel and unusual punishments [should not be] inflicted,” is being ignored (“Bill of Rights of the United States of
America”).
These essays make it clear that even though as a democracy our government should be transparent and should be upholding our nation’s constitution, which forbids cruel and unusual punishment, our government is failing to do so. These rights are not only being restricted to criminals who must face the death penalty but also to regular citizens who pay their taxes and obey the law.