Welcome back to another Question of the Week here at The Confusing Middle!

As always, the questions come from Gregory Stock’s The Book of Questions, and this week we’re leaving the restaurant behind. If you’ve been here for the last two weeks, you’ve earned it. We’ve spent enough time in that dining room. This week, Stock takes us somewhere considerably darker, and asks the kind of question that most people probably don’t let themselves think about for very long.

This week’s question:

Under what circumstances, if any, would you want to watch a public execution in person? What about a graphic video of it posted online?

Take a breath. We’re going in.

The History Nobody Wants to Own

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that Stock’s question forces us to sit with: the desire to watch an execution isn’t some aberrant impulse from the fringes of human psychology. For most of recorded history, it was considered perfectly normal. It was civic. It was entertainment.

Public executions in England drew enormous crowds at places like Tyburn and Newgate Prison, right up until Parliament banned the practice in 1868. The crowds that gathered weren’t made up of monsters. They were made up of people who brought their families, staked out good spots early, and watched. Charles Dickens, one of the most prominent voices calling for an end to public hangings, attended several himself before turning against them. His opposition wasn’t born in the abstract. It was born from witnessing the actual crowd.

And the United States held on even longer. The last fully public execution on American soil took place on August 14, 1936, in Owensboro, Kentucky, when a man named Rainey Bethea was hanged before a crowd of nearly 20,000 people. Vendors worked the crowd selling hot dogs and sodas through the night as people waited. The press coverage was so embarrassing that Kentucky outlawed public executions two years later. There’s a strange footnote to that story for anyone reading this from Roanoke: Bethea was born there, in my hometown, before his life took the turns that ended in that Kentucky field. History has a way of reaching closer to home than you expect.

Today, public executions still take place in countries including Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and Somalia. The rationale, where one is offered, tends to be deterrence. The honest answer, most observers suggest, is control.

The point of all this context isn’t to make the question feel more exotic than it is. It’s to establish that the impulse Stock is asking about is not new, and not rare. It is, in fact, deeply human. That’s what makes it worth sitting with rather than dismissing outright.

So. Would I?

My honest answer is no. I would not want to watch a public execution in person. Not under any circumstances I can realistically imagine.

But I want to be careful about why I’m saying that, because I think there are at least a few different answers masquerading as one.

There’s the answer that comes from moral conviction: that the state-sanctioned killing of a person is not a spectacle to be consumed, that witnessing it as a form of entertainment or curiosity would make me complicit in something I’m not comfortable being complicit in. That’s a real part of my answer.

There’s also the answer that comes from something simpler: I’m not built for it. I’m an introvert who avoids conflict and flinches at confrontation. I’m not one to look away during surgical scenes in medical dramas. But the idea of standing in a crowd and watching a person die isn’t something my nervous system could handle gracefully. That’s also a real part of my answer.

And then there’s the harder, more uncomfortable part: I’m genuinely uncertain whether those two things are separable. Is my moral objection doing the heavy lifting, or is it the more convenient framing for what is fundamentally a visceral aversion? I don’t know that I can fully answer that, and I think that uncertainty is worth naming rather than papering over with high-minded language.

Where I land, after sitting with it, is this: even if I believe in capital punishment in some cases, and I hold complicated and unresolved feelings on that subject, I don’t think witnessing the execution would tell me anything true about justice. I think it would tell me something about finality, and about what it actually looks like when a life ends by design. And I don’t think I want that information living in my memory.

The One Circumstance I Keep Returning To

Stock asks about circumstances, which leaves the door open a little, and I don’t think he does that by accident.

The answer that keeps surfacing for me, the one I can’t entirely rule out, involves accountability rather than spectacle. If there were a scenario where witnessing served a genuine civic function, not entertainment, not deterrence theater, but something closer to what witnesses at executions are sometimes called to do today, being present so that something is documented and verified and human, I could construct an argument for that version of attendance. Oversight. Testimony. The insistence that the state be seen doing what it claims to do.

That’s a long way from the hot dog vendors in Owensboro. But it’s the closest I can get to a yes, and I think Stock would appreciate the distinction.

What About the Video?

Stock’s follow-up question about graphic video online is worth addressing, though I think it’s a shorter conversation than the first one.

Watching a video of an execution online sits in different psychological territory than being present in a crowd. There’s a removal, a mediation through a screen, that makes it feel more permissible to some people even when the content is the same. There’s also the particular culture of the internet, which has desensitized a lot of us to imagery that would have been unthinkable to encounter in ordinary life a generation ago. If you’ve spent any time in the less curated corners of the internet, you have almost certainly encountered things you did not go looking for.

My answer there is still no, but for a slightly different reason. The in-person question is about what I would choose to experience. The video question is about what I would choose to consume. Consuming graphic death as content feels to me like it asks something of the person being consumed, something they don’t get to weigh in on. It turns a person’s death into a clip. That bothers me in a way that goes beyond squeamishness.

There are exceptions in journalism and documentation that I recognize as legitimate. There is a difference between footage that exists to bear witness and footage that exists to be watched. I am not always certain where that line is, but I believe it exists.

Your Turn

This one is genuinely worth thinking about before you answer, which I suspect is exactly what Gregory Stock intended.

Would you watch a public execution, under any circumstances? Does it matter whether the person executed is someone convicted of something you consider genuinely monstrous? Does the historical normality of public execution change the way you think about your own reaction? And what about video?

Leave your thoughts in the comments. I genuinely mean that invitation this week, more than usual. This is the kind of question where the range of honest answers is probably wider than any of us expect.

Until next week, this is Aaron, at The Confusing Middle, thinking about the Owensboro crowd and what it means that so many of them probably thought of themselves as perfectly ordinary people.

Feature Photo by Ron Lach