George Junius Stinney Jr. (1929-1944), executed 14 years old for the murder of two young girls in South Carolina. He was the youngest American to be sentenced to death and executed in the 20th century. What ties up the case and gives it its grusome perspective is that nowadays he is considered innocent of the crime that cost him his young life. We may - and should - cry for the boy who was killed by a judicial system that should protect him as a citizen, but which took his life. However, the technical problems of the execution also made me think of something else: How is it to be the assistant of a system which makes it legal to kill someone like e.g. the young and presumably innocent boy George Stinney? Or put another way, how is it to be the one who carries out the orders of someone who deems it OK to kill another person?
I read somewhere that the Nazi scum Heinrich Himmler was worried that those who had the job of murdering Jews and others in the name of an insane ideology of "pure blood lines" and many other crazy ideas would find it too trying. He didn't see the murdered victims as humans, but still, he must have recognized their humanity in looks and behavior even to consider the job of their executioners too psychologically demanding which actually turns his and his fellow Nazis' ideology into an obvious scam: They were murdering people and they knew it. That said it's interesting that to him and the executioners who worked for him and the Nazi establishment the main problem was not the murders themselves, but what they did to those who committed them.
I can't deny that I love the rumor that the executioner of the infamous murderer Ted Bundy was a woman. He himself had murdered about 30 young women and probably even more that we don't know of. If anybody deserved the death sentence it's him and to me it feels good that he may have been killed by a woman. I have no idea of what she felt by pulling the handle that set the electrocution going, but I know that he is someone I wouldn't have felt any regrets of sentencing to death or executing myself. That means that to me some killings are not murder ....
Up through history people have done awful things to each other without feeling any kind of regrets. For instance, the man who cuts open the poor man on the ladder does what he is hired to do. Maybe he hates doing it, or maybe not. We shouldn't be blind for the possibility that being an executioner or his assistant may be the dream job of certain individuals, but in The Middle Ages of Europe many of them were condemned criminals themselves. As to their job the assistants - called "rakker" in the Scandinavian languages - also had to clean up the loos, to remove dead animals, etc., etc. and they were not allowed to live with "decent citizen" who did not have to do the dirty jobs of their society. Without the "rakker" that society would go to pieces in filth and illnesses, but he himself (and maybe also his family) were set apart as "unclean". They were not allowed to live within the walls of the cities, but had to stay outside which to many must have been very scary because of their belief in ghosts, demons, etc., etc..
I don't know what the condemned man has done, but in a way both he and those who execute the verdict that put him into that barrel were alike in fate: He was condemned and so were many/most of them ....
Wikipedia
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