Killing time.

(From Philippine Daily Inquirer)

Byline: Randy David

MY daughter, Kara, who covers prisoners on death row for the TV network, GMA-7, anxiously sat in the van that was taking her to the New Bilibid Prisons. In a few minutes, prison officials were to raffle the media slots for the Jan. 30 executions. But there she was, hopelessly strapped to a seat, in the middle of traffic, killing time. An early morning accident held vehicles at a standstill on the South Luzon Expressway. Her bosses would be furious if the network did not win a seat in the viewing room of the lethal injection chamber.

As fate would have it, she didn't make it to the raffle. Relatives of the convicts, Roberto Lara and Roderick Licayan, had wanted her so much to sit with them during the execution. They had noted the quiet compassion of her reports and offered to bring her in as a member of the family. She herself had taken an instant liking to these unschooled peasants who had run out of tears pleading for the lives of their loved ones. She was frantic when she found she had missed the raffle, but something else in her mysteriously rejoiced.

Later that evening, I told her she was lucky to have been spared from a potentially brutalizing experience whose long-term effects on her sensibility as a journalist would be hard to predict. The main reason, I said, executions began to be withdrawn from the public square and conducted in the privacy of the death chamber was not so much to preserve the dignity of the condemned as to protect the humanity of the public. I don't know why you should jostle for a seat in that room, I said. It is never a privilege nor can it be an agreeable experience for a normal person to watch the meticulous killing of another human being.

Yet over the years, advocates of capital punishment have tried to make the deed acceptable by making it more humane, more quick, and painless. This misplaced concern has only fueled the search for more efficient killing contraptions; it hasn't made judicial executions less violent or more moral.

For a long time, the death penalty was synonymous with the electric chair. Electricity was the epitome of technological progress at the turn of the 20th century. It was logical that the quest for technological sophistication in executing condemned persons would stumble upon electricity as an efficient and humane means of carrying out the capital punishment. It was the famous inventor, Thomas Alva Edison, the developer of the DC or direct current system, who aggressively espoused the use of electricity as a modern means of executing people. This is a fascinating story of how science and technology is implicated in social policy debates, and how nations still their moral doubts by reducing them to technological problems.