The death penalty debate refuses to die – a bit like 17-year-old Willie Francis, who in 1946 was strapped into a chair at Louisiana State Penitentiary and electrocuted, only to wind up screaming for mercy from within his leather hood, selfishly upsetting several onlookers in the process.
The United Kingdom hasn't hanged anyone since 1964, when Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans were simultaneously sent to the gallows, in an audacious end-of-season finale. In the intervening years, the capital punishment argument has resurfaced now and then, usually in the wake of an especially harrowing murder trial, when the mob's a bit twitchy. But it has always been a bit of a non-debate.
Proponents of the death penalty – "nooselovers" or "danglefans", as they like to be known – often come across as a bit old-fashioned, as though they're opposed to progress in all its forms, and might as well be arguing in favour of fewer crisp flavours and slower Wi-Fi. This fusty impression isn't helped when every news article about hanging is illustrated with vintage black and white photographs of Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis, as if tying a rope around someone's neck and dropping them through a trapdoor in the hope of causing a fatal bilateral fracture of the C2 vertebrae is the kind of behaviour that belongs in the past.
But now the debate has returned with an exciting new technological twist: thanks to the government's exciting e-petition initiative in which any motion attracting over 100,000 signatories becomes eligible for debate in the House of Commons, the danglefans are suddenly on the cutting edge of populist online activism. Or rather they would be, if they were proposing a suitably cutting-edge method of execution. Instead, it's just a load of vague blah about reinstating "the death penalty". What sort of death penalty? The gallows? The chair? The gas chamber? Come on, this is the internet. The least you could do is rustle up a Flash animation depicting precisely how you want these people to be killed. You could even make it interactive: maybe have a fun preamble in which we shake the prisoner's hand in order to guess his weight and adjust the length of the rope accordingly. Or a bit where we get to pull a leather hood over the screaming head of a petrified teenager with learning difficulties, then pull the switch and hear his kidneys boil.
Of course, anyone proposing the use of the noose or the chair is guilty of moral cowardice anyway. Capital punishment is supposed to act as a deterrent, but it doesn't seem to have much effect on crime statistics. This is because most current executions a) employ methods that are as quick and efficient as possible and b) take place behind closed doors – almost as though the people doing it are ashamed of themselves.
What sort of half-arsed half-measure is that? Cold logic dictates that the only way to turn capital punishment into an effective deterrent is to make each killing as drawn-out and public as possible. Maximum agony, maximum publicity. Anything less is a cop-out – and death penalty supporters should have the stones to say so. Stop this placatory talk about breaking people's necks gently with rope. Go the whole hog.
Don't campaign to bring back the gallows – campaign to bring back the saw. The medieval saw. Raise the prisoner by his feet and then saw through him vertically, starting at his arsecrack and ending at his scalp. Suspending him upside down ensures a constant supply of blood to his brain, so he'll remain conscious throughout and provide all manner of usefully lurid screams. In fact with any luck he'll carry on screaming even as his throat is sawn in half, thereby creating a pleasing stereo effect for viewers with home cinema systems. Did I mention the viewers? This is all broadcast live on television, in HD (and even 3D) where available. Maximum agony, maximum publicity.
Not that the broadcast should pander to ghoulish onlookers. It should pander to ghoulish participants. This is the 21st century: public executions can and should be as interactive as possible. So this death-by-vertical-sawing isn't just broadcast live, but broadcast live from the perspective of a camera with a crossbow attached. Viewers at home control the gunsights by tweeting directions such as "Left", "Right", "Up a bit", "Fire", and so on – a bit like ye olde gameshow The Golden Shot, but with approximately 100% more footage of shrieking bisected carcass being shot in the eye with a bolt smeared with excrement. A shot in the eye, incidentally, will win you 5,000 Nectar points and a congratulatory tweet from Paddy McGuinness.
Obviously, not everyone would voluntarily tune in to watch a broadcast that graphic, which is why highlights of each execution would be randomly spliced into other popular programmes – everything from Top Gear to Rastamouse. It would also be compulsory viewing at every school in the land. And children who try to evade its salutary message by closing their eyes will have still images of the precise moment of death beamed directly into their mind's eye using Apple's AirPlay system, as soon as we can establish some means of doing that.
Maximum agony, maximum publicity. It's the only way. It's saw or nothing.
