In a post Monday on his personal X account, Sen. Mike Lee shared a Fox News post about the trial of Tyler Robinson, the Utah man charged with the murder of Charlie Kirk. Above it, he wrote “Execute Tyler Robinson. In public.”
It wasn’t a one-off. Lee had said the same thing a few days earlier.
Even for a personal account created to share provocative opinions, the strident statements have made people across the nation do a double-take, with good reason.
First there is the matter of Robinson’s guilt, which has not yet been established by a jury, as required by the American justice system. (Indeed, there is a small but noisy contingent on the internet that insists Robinson is innocent.)
Then there is the matter of the death penalty generally.
Although Utah is a red state that only allows the death penalty for people convicted of aggravated murder, its citizens are split on the issue. A Deseret News/Hinckley Institute for Politics poll in 2021 found 51% of Utahns favored eliminating the death penalty. It’s not necessarily a winning issue for a politician, although Republicans tend to favor the death penalty more than Democrats.
But you can support the death penalty generally and still blanch at the idea of public executions, no matter how heinous the crime.
The last public execution in the United States was in Kentucky in 1936. The man who was hanged was 22 years old; he had confessed to the rape and murder of a 70-year-old woman. About 20,000 people showed up for what many news accounts say was akin to a festival.
Public executions serve not just justice but blood lust. They cater to some of the worst of ancient human impulses, from revenge to suffering (both of animals and humans) as entertainment.
The sentiment behind a public execution is perhaps understandable — it is the “eye for an eye” justice of the Old Testament. To Lee, and to those who agree with him, it is logical that the person who killed Kirk should die in the same way. A public execution for a public execution, so to speak.
But there’s a reason that America doesn’t hold public executions anymore, and why America and much of the world is appalled by those nations that do. There is an underlying savagery to the business that most developed nations have rejected, understanding that violence begets violence, and that belief in human dignity demands more from us.
This is why Human Rights Watch keeps track of public executions, and why President Donald Trump recently threatened action in Iran if protesters were hanged. Iran has a history of hanging its young men and women in public without due process. That’s not the America we want, not even in our rhetoric.
Gov. Spencer Cox was the first person to announce that Utah would seek the death penalty for Robinson. Cox has said in the past that he finds the issue difficult. But he’s also talked about the twin problems of violence and rage, and rage is surely a factor when there is a call for a public execution. Lee’s posts turn up the temperature in a room that is already hot. That may be good for social-media engagement, but America desperately needs leaders willing to dial the thermostat down.
As Elizabeth Bruenig pointed out in The Atlantic a few years ago, there are both practical and moral problems with public executions, but there are also problems when executions are secretive, which is why there are always a few observers on hand. Executions are a difficult business, even when they go as planned.
Putting a young person to death, even for a reprehensible crime, is one of the most highly charged and morally fraught things that a government can do, the circumstances of which are best not arbitrated by tweet.