There are certain events that become fixed points in a nation's memory. People remember where they were when they happened. They remember the television coverage, the conversations that followed, and the collective sense that something had changed. For Australians of a certain age, the Port Arthur massacre was one of those moments.
I remember it vividly. I remember the shock. I remember the saturation coverage. I remember the disbelief that thirty-five people could be murdered in a place that felt so familiar and so Australian. Even now, decades later, the event occupies a strange space in the national consciousness. It exists somewhere between tragedy, warning, and historical landmark. The names of the victims still carry weight. The consequences still shape public policy. The ripple effects are still being felt.
Like most Australians, I have absolutely no sympathy for Martin Bryant. Thirty-five people lost their lives. Dozens more had their lives permanently altered. Families were destroyed. Children grew up without parents. Parents buried children. Entire communities were scarred by a single afternoon of extraordinary violence.
This is where discussions around capital punishment become uncomfortable because the real world rarely presents us with neat philosophical exercises. Most people imagine the death penalty as a binary issue. You either support it or you oppose it. You either believe killing is always wrong or you believe some crimes justify execution.
The reality is considerably messier. When people discuss capital punishment, they often default to abstract moral language. Human rights. Justice. Rehabilitation. State power. Those concepts matter, but they become far more difficult to navigate when attached to individuals who have committed unimaginable acts.
If I am being completely honest, there is a practical part of me that understands the argument for execution in cases like Martin Bryant. There is a part of me that asks questions many people prefer not to ask aloud. Why should taxpayers spend decades funding the incarceration of someone who will never be released? And why should a person who can never safely re-enter society remain alive for another forty or fifty years under state protection? What exactly is being achieved?
I don't ask those questions because I have reached a conclusion. I ask them because I think pretending they don't exist is intellectually dishonest. There are crimes that challenge certainty. There are crimes that test principles. There are crimes that force people who oppose the death penalty to confront scenarios where their convictions are suddenly less comfortable than they imagined.
That discomfort matters. Too many public conversations are built around certainty. People choose a side and then spend years defending it regardless of circumstance. Reality rarely rewards that kind of rigidity. The older I get, the more suspicious I become of people who have perfectly consistent answers to profoundly complex moral questions.
The argument for capital punishment has always been strongest when attached to extreme cases. Very few people advocate executing petty criminals or low-level offenders although my view is changing, on this issue which is a separate blog on its own merit. The argument only gains emotional force when attached to extraordinary violence, mass murder, terrorism, serial killings, and crimes so horrific that they leave entire communities traumatised.
I understand why people arrive at that position. I understand the anger. I understand the desire for finality. I also understand why some victims' families feel that no sentence short of death could ever feel proportionate. What I find interesting is that the public conversation often stops there.
The assumption is that once someone accepts the possibility of execution, they must therefore accept everything that follows. The issue becomes framed as a single question. Should this person die? There are several questions hiding beneath that one. Should they die? Who should carry out that death? How should it happen? What purpose does it serve? What does it say about the society administering it? These questions are often collapsed into one another, when in reality they are entirely separate moral considerations. It is possible to understand the argument for execution while still questioning how it is carried out.
It is possible to understand the argument for execution while remaining uncomfortable with the people advocating for it. Is it also possible to understand the argument for execution while feeling profound disgust at the culture that sometimes develops around it. That distinction has become increasingly important to me.
Australia abolished the death penalty decades ago. For most Australians, it belongs to history. It exists as something we associate with other countries. If you look at the United States, we watch discussions about executions the way we watch discussions about firearms. There is a sense of distance, a feeling that this is somebody else's debate.
Yet whenever cases like Martin Bryant enter my mind, I find myself recognising why the debate never disappears. Some crimes make abstract principles feel inadequate. Some crimes make punishment feel less like justice and more like arithmetic. Society suffers an immeasurable loss. A perpetrator is imprisoned. Decades pass. Taxpayers continue funding the incarceration. Victims remain dead. Families remain traumatised.
There is a harsh practicality to the argument that many people find persuasive. I understand that. What I do not understand is what happens next. Because somewhere along the line, discussions about justice often mutate into something stranger. The focus shifts away from victims. It shifts away from accountability. It shifts away from public safety.
Punishment ceases to be enough. People begin wanting something else. They want symbolism, theatre, a spectacle and that is where my discomfort begins. Even if Australia still retained capital punishment, even if Martin Bryant had been sentenced to death, I would not want a public hanging. I would not want cameras in the room. I would not want countdown clocks, commentators, discussion panels, or audiences.
I would not want people treating a state execution as an event. Because the moment an audience appears, the nature of the act begins to change. Justice and spectacle are not the same thing. Punishment and entertainment are not the same thing.
An execution may be argued for in the language of law, accountability, deterrence, or public safety. But the moment people begin gathering to watch, another element enters the equation. Curiosity enters. Consumption enters. Performance enters.
The condemned person stops being merely a criminal. They become content, and once that happens, the discussion is no longer simply about crime and punishment. It becomes something much larger and much darker.
Christa Pike and the Failure of Certainty
For all the arguments people make about capital punishment, one uncomfortable reality tends to sit beneath the surface: time changes things. We like to imagine crime as a frozen moment. A person commits an act. A judgement is passed. A sentence is imposed. From that point onward, the story appears fixed. The perpetrator becomes permanently defined by the worst thing they have ever done. The victims remain victims. Justice becomes a matter of process. Reality is rarely so simple.
At this point I have become more suspicious, I have more moral certainty that stretches across my six decades. Human beings do not remain static. Victims do not remain static. Families do not remain static. Societies do not remain static. Even grief evolves over time. Yet our justice systems often behave as though the worst day of someone's life should exist in permanent suspension, untouched by the passage of years.
The case of Christa Pike has lodged itself in my mind recently. Not because I doubt her guilt. Not because I think her victim did not suffer. Not because the crime was anything other than abhorrent. The facts remain horrific. A young woman lost her life in circumstances of shocking brutality. Nothing said decades later can alter the reality of what happened.
What troubles me is what happened afterwards. Recently the media has been in a reporting frenzy, in recent developments the state of Tennessee attempted to execute Christa Pike. She was no longer the eighteen-year-old who committed the offence. She was a fifty-year-old woman who had spent more than thirty years imprisoned, most of them on death row. When the state recently attempted to kill her, by administering the lethal drug – Pentobarbital. It failed spectacularly and resulted in Christa being eventually transported to hospital in a critical condition. She later regained consciousness.
There is something about that sequence of events that I cannot shake. Not because it makes her innocent. Not because it erases what happened. Because it forces an uncomfortable question: what exactly are we doing?
One of the odd contradictions within death penalty debates is that supporters and opponents often end up talking past one another. Supporters tend to focus on the crime. Opponents tend to focus on the execution. Both conversations matter, yet they frequently operate as though the other does not exist. The crime matters. The victim matters. The suffering matters. But so does the process. So does the exercise of state power. So does the reality of what it means for a government to deliberately end a human life.
Much of the rhetoric surrounding lethal injection was built around a promise. The promise was not simply punishment. The promise was humanity. Clinical precision. Medical efficiency. A supposedly civilised form of execution. The image presented to the public was one of peace, dignity and certainty. Then in Christa’s instance reality intrudes. A vein cannot be found. A procedure takes too long. A prisoner struggles. An execution is postponed. An execution fails. A person survives. The machinery underneath the rhetoric suddenly becomes visible.
What happened to Christa Pike is disturbing not because it challenges the morality of her sentence alone, but because it exposes the fiction that often surrounds modern execution methods. We prefer to imagine that state killing has become clean. We prefer to imagine that bureaucracy has somehow removed the violence. We rename it. We redesign it. We surround it with procedures and legal language.
Yet in the end, the state is still attempting to kill a human being. That reality remains stubbornly difficult to sanitise. I suspect this is one reason death penalty debates become so emotionally charged. Nobody wants to fully examine what is actually happening. Supporters often wish to focus on the crime. Opponents often wish to focus on the punishment. Very few people are comfortable looking directly at both. The truth is that two things can simultaneously be true. A crime can be monstrous. An execution can still be disturbing. A victim can deserve justice. A state can still exercise power in ways that make us profoundly uncomfortable.
For me, the most haunting detail in the Christa Pike case is not the politics. It is the timescale. Thirty years. That is an entire adult lifetime. When someone spends three decades waiting to be executed, what purpose is being served? Is it deterrence? Someone contemplating murder is unlikely to be influenced by the prospect of an execution that may occur thirty years later.
Is it public safety? If that person has already spent three decades incarcerated under maximum security conditions, society has already been protected. Is it retribution? Perhaps. Yet retribution becomes more complicated as years become decades. The emotional immediacy that exists in the aftermath of a crime inevitably changes. Not disappears. Changes.
This is where my certainty begins to fade. If someone had asked me about Martin Bryant shortly after Port Arthur, I would probably have spoken almost entirely about punishment. The emotional shock was too close. The grief was too visible. The anger was too raw. Three decades later, I find myself asking different questions. Not gentler questions. More complicated ones.
What does it mean for a society to carry out an execution after thirty years? Who exactly is being served by it? What purpose is it fulfilling beyond symbolic completion? The older I get, the more interested I become in those questions. Because symbolism is a dangerous thing. Symbolism allows a society to convince itself that an action remains necessary long after its practical purpose has become unclear. Symbolism can transform punishment into ritual. It can transform law into theatre. It can transform justice into performance.
And that brings me to the aspect of these debates I find most unsettling. Even if someone supports capital punishment. Even if someone believes execution is justified. Even if someone believes Christa Pike deserved to die. Why on earth would anyone want to watch? That question lingers over the entire discussion. The botched execution is disturbing enough on its own. Yet it exists alongside a separate conversation, one that somehow feels even stranger. A conversation not merely about execution, but about audiences. Not merely about punishment, but about spectatorship.
That is where the discussion moves from questions of law into questions of culture. Because the most unsettling aspect of modern execution debates is no longer what governments are willing to do. It is what ordinary people seem increasingly willing to consume.
The Audience
The strange thing about public punishment is that it eventually stops being about the person being punished, but that is not how it begins. It begins with victims. It begins with grief. It begins with anger. It begins with the entirely understandable desire to see justice done. In the aftermath of horrific crimes, people naturally focus on the offender. They focus on what was taken, the damage inflicted, the lives destroyed and the consequences that should follow.
Over time, however, something begins to shift. The offender remains the official subject of the punishment, but the attention gradually moves elsewhere. The conversation becomes less about the individual and more about the people watching. What began as a debate about justice slowly transforms into a debate about spectatorship.
That is where I find myself now. Having thought about Port Arthur, Martin Bryant, Christa Pike, and the broader debate around capital punishment, my attention keeps drifting away from the condemned and towards the audience itself. What exactly are people hoping to see? That question sits at the centre of this entire discussion.
Supporters of the planned livestream of Nidal Hasan's execution often frame their arguments in terms of transparency. The public, they say, should be able to witness what is done in its name. Government power should not operate entirely behind closed doors. Justice should be visible. On the surface, that sounds reasonable enough. Democracies should not demand blind faith from citizens. Transparency does matter.
But transparency is not the same thing as broadcasting. That distinction matters. A trial is transparent. Court records are transparent. Judgments are transparent. Appeals are transparent. Media reporting is transparent - supposedly. But fucking seriously A livestreamed execution is something fundamentally different!!!
The moment cameras enter the room, the event changes character. Visibility becomes viewership. Public accountability becomes public consumption. The purpose begins to shift away from administration and towards presentation. At that point, something uncomfortable emerges. The audience. The very existence of an audience changes the nature of the act itself.
History understood this more clearly than modern societies often do. Public executions once occupied a central place in civic life. Crowds gathered. Vendors sold food. Families attended. Executions became spectacles, community events disguised as justice. Long before television existed, societies understood that people were drawn to displays of power, violence and punishment. The condemned person stood at the centre of the stage, but the audience was always part of the performance.
Over time, most developed societies moved away from that model. They did not necessarily abandon punishment, but they abandoned spectacle. They recognised that there was something unhealthy about transforming state violence into public entertainment. Executions retreated behind prison walls. The crowd disappeared. The theatre diminished. Or at least it appeared to.
Looking at the current debate, I am no longer sure the instinct ever disappeared. We simply changed the technology. A town square became a screen. A crowd became a livestream audience. The psychology remained surprisingly intact.
Supporters of broadcasting executions argue that visibility strengthens accountability. Perhaps there is some truth in that. Yet I cannot help noticing that no one proposes livestreaming ordinary bureaucratic functions with similar enthusiasm. Nobody campaigns for public viewership of prison administration meetings. Nobody demands livestreams of procurement processes or budget reviews. Nobody talks about executions the way they talk about audits, despite all of these being exercises of state power.
Something else is happening here. Executions attract attention because they sit at the intersection of justice and mortality. They force people to confront death while simultaneously reassuring themselves that the death is justified. They create moral certainty in a world where certainty is increasingly rare. For some people, that certainty appears irresistible.
Yet certainty can be dangerous. One of the reasons I remain uncomfortable with the death penalty is that history repeatedly demonstrates how unreliable certainty can be. Legal systems make mistakes. Witnesses make mistakes. Police make mistakes. Governments make mistakes. Human beings are remarkably capable of convincing themselves that they are right even when they are catastrophically wrong.
The Christa Pike case illustrates a different form of certainty problem. There, the issue was not guilt but process. The system knew exactly what it wanted to do. It attempted to do it. It failed. Then society found itself confronting questions nobody particularly wanted to answer. What happens when the machinery malfunctions? What happens when an execution does not provide the neat conclusion people expected? What happens when death itself refuses to cooperate with the script?
Those questions matter because they expose the gap between theory and reality. In theory, capital punishment is clean, ordered and decisive. In reality, it often becomes tangled in procedure, politics, delay, appeals, bureaucracy, planning and human error. The same thing occurs with the notion of televised executions. In theory, a broadcast is presented as transparency. In reality, a broadcast creates an audience. And audiences are never passive. An audience changes incentives. An audience changes behaviour. An audience changes meaning.
The moment people begin discussing ratings, viewership, public access and coverage, the focus shifts away from justice and towards spectacle. The condemned person becomes content. The state becomes producer. Citizens become consumers. At that point, I find myself wondering whether we are witnessing justice at all.
What makes me especially uncomfortable is how normal these discussions have become. The language is often bureaucratic, technical and procedural. People talk about methods, schedules and broadcasts as though discussing infrastructure projects. The human reality underneath the conversation gradually disappears.
A person will die. The state will kill them. People will watch. That should never feel routine. We should be uncomfortable. We should be asking difficult questions. We should be deeply suspicious of any culture that grows enthusiastic about public punishment. Perhaps that is where I ultimately land on the issue.
I am less interested in telling people what they should think about the death penalty than I am in asking what our attitudes towards it reveal. Capital punishment debates tend to focus on the condemned. They focus on the worst thing a person has done and whether society is justified in responding with death.
I understand that focus. But the more revealing question lies elsewhere. The execution tells us something about the condemned. The audience tells us something about us. When I look at the growing appetite for spectacle, the desire to watch, the fascination with turning punishment into content and death into programming, I find the audience far more unsettling than the person in the execution chamber.
That, more than anything else, is what disturbs me.
