Who Can Really Say?

From the BBC:

Mohammad Bijeh, 24, dubbed "the Tehran desert vampire" by Iran's press, was flogged 100 times before being hanged.

A brother of one of his young victims stabbed him as he was being punished. The mother of another victim was asked to put the noose around his neck.

The execution took place in Pakdasht south of Tehran, near where Bijeh's year-long killing spree took place.

The killer was hoisted about 10 metres into the air by a crane and slowly throttled to death in front of the baying crowd.

Hanging by a crane - a common form of execution in Iran - does not involve a swift death as the condemned prisoner's neck is not broken.

I shared this story with three friends today, and all of them bascially had the same reaction -- good for the Iranians. Eugene Volokh to some, surprisingly agrees:

I particularly like the involvement of the victims' relatives in the killing of the monster; I think that if he'd killed one of my relatives, I would have wanted to play a role in killing him. Also, though for many instances I would prefer less painful forms of execution, I am especially pleased that the killing ? and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act ? was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging. The one thing that troubles me (besides the fact that the murderer could only be killed once) is that the accomplice was sentenced to only 15 years in prison, but perhaps there's a good explanation.

I am being perfectly serious, by the way. I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness. I think it slights the burning injustice of the murders, and the pain of the families, to react in any other way.

And, yes, I know this aligns me in this instance with the Iranian government ? but even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and in this instance the Iranians are quite correct.

Volokh makes about the best case I can think of for supporting practices like this. But the longer one thinks about it the more difficult the argument is to accept. In various times and places in our (U.S.) history public punishments, including executions, were (I'm guessing) common. We moved away from that quite some time ago and maybe I'm suffering from a lack of imagination, but I don't see it coming back anytime soon. But as a matter of "victims rights" (something I'm ordinarily not very sympathetic to), I've got no problem if, say Laci Peterson's Mom got to push the button that did in Scott Peterson when the time comes, oh some 15 or 30 years from now.

[Linked to the Beltway Traffic Jam.]