At every State execution, a doctor and a priest are present. It is a long-standing custom. The doctor confirms the body is dead; the priest confirms the soul is saved. Both act as witnesses — one for the State, one for the faith.
The doctor’s role is to ensure the process appears clinical. The use of medical personnel gives the illusion of hygiene and professionalism, as though death can be administered with the same precision as a vaccination. Medicine, whose purpose is to preserve life, becomes the guarantor that life has been properly taken.
The priest’s role is to soothe conscience. His presence suggests divine approval, that the act can be forgiven because it was performed according to law. He provides comfort to onlookers, not to the condemned.
Between them, they convert killing into ceremony. The procedure becomes “justice,” and the participants can leave believing that what has happened was necessary, even moral. Together they form a duet of deception: Science to legitimize, Religion to absolve. Both lend their authority to the fiction that this isn’t murder, just “justice administered.” The same institutions meant to heal and console are repurposed to validate death.
But the facts remain: a human being is deliberately put to death by the State. The claim that such an act deters others has no credible evidence. The claim that it brings closure is emotional, not empirical. The condemned man dies, but so does honesty. The audience can leave comforted, believing the killing was clean, necessary, and blessed. Yet no amount of ceremony can mask what it is — a human being executed for ritualized revenge.
What endures is the ritual — the medical precision, the moral blessing, the paperwork — all to convince ourselves that this is something other than what it is. We call it justice because we can’t bear to call it killing. But every syringe still needs a doctor — and every doctor still needs a priest to say it’s okay to kill.
Reg the Fronkey Farmer 1 week, 6 days ago.