Considering Capital Punishment as a Human Interaction Christopher Bennett From Criminal Law and Philosophy vol. 7, no. 2 (2013) In this paper I seek to shed light on the moral arguments for and against capital punishment by looking at the effect that capital punishment would have, not on offenders, but rather on executioners. My argument will not be that the decisive wrong-making feature of capital punishment is its detrimental effect on the character of those who are charged with putting someone to death. Rather I will suggest that thinking about the realities of being an executioner can shed light on the justifications usually presented for and against capital punishment. In particular I will be interested in whether the job of being an executioner is the kind of job a person could take pride in doing well, whether it could become a kind of craft or vocation. In considering this, I will draw on the depiction of English hangman Albert Pierrepoint presented in the film Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman. 1 Pierrepoint is shown as someone who does indeed seem to treat hanging as a vocation. I will argue that, for the executioner at least, capital punishment remains a distinctively human interaction. He has to enter into some sort of human relation with the offender as he leads him to death. As a result, someone concerned to carry out the duties of an executioner well will, I claim, have difficulty reconciling this Dzvocationdz approach with the idea that capital punishment is justified in purely deterrent terms. If a reasonably sensitive person seeking to do his job well cannot coherently take pride in carrying out deterrent execution, I will claim, this should give us pause for thought about whether execution on these grounds is justified. A necessary condition of punishment being justified, I will take it, is that the carrying out of that punishment involves a morally acceptable interaction with the offender. Reflecting on the experience of the person who must put the offender to death is a helpful way to think about whether deterrent execution is an acceptable human interaction. This will lead us to the conclusion that, if capital punishment is to be justified at all, it will be in retributivist terms. I conclude with some remarks about the viability of such a retributivist justification, and about the extent to which what we learn about capital punishment could be extended to punishment in general. 1. Pierrepoint: the Last Hangman Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman does not unfold a strong narrative, or a plot enlivened by twists and turns of dramatic tension. The film opens with a man undertaking some sort of practical interview for the job of hangman, and then traces some episodes in his experience of doing that job until the point where he decides to give it up. What makes this film an important one is the careful and quietly provocative way it depicts an individual taking pride in his work and approaching his Dzclientsdz with professionalism, care and attention. Sensitively played by Timothy Spall, Albert Pierrepoint comes across as a real and, in some ways at least, decent and understandable person. The film also gives us a portrait of a social institution, that of the death penalty in the UK in the middle of the last century. It shows us vividly how executions were carried out, the locations, observers, victims, and something of the emotional life of an execution. We see nothing of the process of trial and conviction (like Pierrepoint himself, the film – on the surface at least – is not particularly interested in what happens there) but we do get a fairly realistic portrayal of the capital sentence being carried out. The ethical and philosophical interest of the film lies in the way this approach helps us to engage imaginatively with the question of whether the death penalty is justifiable, and allows us to 1 Granada Television (2005), directed by Adrian Shergold, writers Bob Mills and Jeff Pope.