On this date, a little over a quarter of a century ago, the last of a thousand blades fell upon the last of a thousand condemned heads. On Sept. 10, 1977, France banned the guillotine and in 1981 abandoned the death penalty entirely.
In only four years, France came to understand a philosophical truth that has eluded us as Americans, at least to the present time. The French realize they are witness to their children's history, that posterity is as unforgiving of brutality as we are and that execution, as an instrument of the state, stains our hands with blood and cruelty.
It's easy when exemplifying the guillotine to admit the brutality of the execution. It angers most of us. To cut a man's neck, even by machine, is a gruesome process-a scene of horror no state can sanitize. But equally as appalling are the methods American's have used; perforating bodies by a firing squad, breaking the neck by hanging and burning humans alive in Puritanical fires.
We condemn past generations for their brutality and yet we continue in the footsteps of the condemned. We stylize methods of killing criminals, methods that will find their way out of style as do all forms of execution.
In fact, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, the inventor of the French guillotine, boasted it was the most humane form of execution. Let the machine kill, not the man, and our discomfort will be appeased.
Some try to hide behind the chosen method of the time, as Mr. Guillotine did, and as do current supporters of lethal injection and electrocution. But claims of humane execution will always seem to the historian a frivolous pursuit of ways to kill and reasons to justify killing.
Even those who argue for the death penalty, citing reasons of cloture, justice or deterrence, admit execution should not be brutal-read in this the words of the Constitution, \cruel and unusual punishment."" The only case the executioners can make to support the death penalty, is one in which the method itself can be qualified as humane. Without this qualification, execution, for all its touted positive effects, remains a barbaric act.
If we admit that every form of execution invented has been discredited, that every method of killing has been ruled brutal, then there can be no place for the death penalty in our constitutional-and philosophical- our historical tradition. Of the last 22 death penalty cases to appear in federal court, 21 have returned verdicts of life imprisonment or acquittal.
Last week the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned more than 100 cases in three states. Courts are realizing the injustice and brutality of the death penalty. With three more cases pending trial this fall, perhaps the time to ban execution is now.
Here in America we will eventually follow the lead of the French and end the death penalty, but that will not save our children from looking back, as we do upon the French Guillotine of 1977.
Andy Murray is a senior majoring in history.
