Capital Punishments and the Crime of Plunder

Arthur Kennely, a Harvard professor born in India with an Irish descent and a London educated gentleman, was known for his meritorious achievements in electrical science, electrical engineering and the electrical arts as exemplified by his contributions to the theory of electrical transmission.

Neither his life began at birth nor at the age of forty but upon reaching the age of twenty six when finally he got admitted to work for Thomas Edison’s West Orange Laboratory. Though God took Arthur’s mother when he was three and, for some unspecified rationale, divine or diabolic, fate provided him in turn three maternal substitutes. His father, Navy Captain Joseph Kennely never gets tired of marrying people with nothing in mind except things that can best serve the utmost benefit of his son.

Arthur never enjoyed sharing paternal genes to his forced siblings however.

Born four years before Arthur, Harold Pitney Brown, a not-so-remarkable salesperson from the sunny weather of the State of Florida, was pitted by providence to work alongside with Arthur Kennely under one sole objective: the welfare of the great inventor-turned-industrialist Thomas Edison.

Thus they spent infinite hours extracting all possible human concepts — anything from the ridiculous to the mechanically far fetch–until to last the development of the Alternating Current.

On March 29, 1889, Matilda Ziegler, whose beauty was untimely wasted, fell to the murderous hands of her own husband William Francis Kemmler. Without haste, the United States government convicted Kemmler for murder. And in one dull morning of August 6, 1890, humanity stood silent, breathless, and flabbergasted as they witnessed the world’s greatest invention working its grip on Kemmler as the unseen current passes unhampered beneath the convict’s rosy epidermis, engulfing all of his life.

Thanks to Arthur Kennely and Harold Pitney Brown, whose gift to humanity withdrew from circulation the mystery of the wooden cross, and thus in turn introduced for the first time the nth wonder of the world: the electric chair.

The guillotine, which is the ultimate symbol of social enlightenment and awakening during the medieval ages, is nothing but a mechanical beheading device specifically designed to hurt the public’s eye instead of the culprit.

On the other hand, the electric chair is awfully different. The same employs the greatest of human discovery known to science by channeling the reversed magnificence of an alternating electrical current with unequal amount of voltage precision, imposing upon the mind of a social dissent an agony too much to bear never before conceived by any divinity.

The chair allows electrical currents to substitute the soul; an involuntary state of meditation induced by a water-like flow of excruciating pain. The burning of the insides triggers detailed recollection of the injury committed to the public, and likewise simultaneously generate remorse coming from within the bone marrow. There can only be justice when pain is inflicted hard upon the unjust.

In the Philippines, it was Leo Echegaray who became the first, and also the last known “beneficiary” of an apparently painless State-sponsored death, known then as Lethal Injection.

The procedure is simple: first, they spray gas relaxant to make the limbs light and comfortable; second, injecting anesthetic elements; third, the final act of terminating life through successive introduction of poisonous substance. The convict then dies in his sleep. Perhaps smiling.

Swift and painless death as an ultimate or capital punishment is detestable. Society would rather prefer setting free the most hideous of miscreants, rather than rewarding him with eternal yet painless repose for a crime committed. Civilization, in order to sustain, must itself acknowledge the economy of pain. The fear of bodily pain would suffice as a strong incentive for a citizen to eschew lawlessness. And the actual infliction of pain unto the highest Del (unit) strengthens social immunity against the invasion of the degenerate and the wicked.

Today, people are satisfied, if not lured, into contentment by believing in the false severity of Life Imprisonment as penalty.

Because of our inability to uplift ourselves into the higher plain of moral foresight brought by the science and mechanics of pain, the State has become a dysfunctional rehabilitation machine that caters a defect rather than operate as a political incinerator of burning the socially deviant into ashes.

Therefore, since we cannot kill (as a punishment) devious crooks with a needle and has rejected the redemptive value of the electric chair, then we might just as well give more life to imprisonment. So let Plunder begin.

About the Author: Jasonjes Monteclar is a practicing broadcaster/commentator in one of the respected radio stations in Cebu City. He is a former professor in Social Sciences and loves to dip into books from Plato, Sartre, Kant and Nietzsche. He has extensive knowledge concerning one or more of the fields of ethics,aesthetics, epistemology, logic, metaphysics, as well as social philosophy and political philosophy.