To the editor,

Do you remember when America held itself up to the world as a beacon of democratic morality and hope? Our conduct was far from perfect, yet it seemed that we were trying.

We may wonder what has happened to us in the meantime.

Recently we watched aghast as Tennessee, with the go-ahead of the US Supreme Court, failed in its attempt to execute Christa Pike, a victim of childhood rape and abuse who’d already spent 30 years on death row. The crimes committed against this woman, who murdered a classmate at 18, might have mitigated that punishment in a more enlightened state. But Tennessee was eager for the kill, and woefully botched the execution by lethal injection, after which Christa Pike spent 10 days in hospital before being returned to prison.

Around the same time, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that, with President Trump’s approval, Nidal Hasan, the convicted murderer of 13 service members at Fort Hood, Texas, will be publicly executed by firing squad for viewers to livestream. Even Republicans oppose this return to execution-as-mass-entertainment, with Republican senator Thom Tillis likening the planned execution of Hasan to those under dictatorships in Afghanistan and Iran. “It should not be happening in America.”

Public executions in America largely ended after the outcry against Kentucky’s hanging of a 26-year-old black man, Rainy Bethea, in 1936, which drew a crowd of 20,000 in Owensboro.

Hasan, by the way, is a paraplegic. Do we really want our country to be judged in the international court of opinion by the spectacle of soldiers shooting a disabled man in a wheelchair? Can you imagine more effective recruiting propaganda for future terrorists?

Authoritarian regimes use public executions to silence critics under threat of same. I don’t think we’re (yet) that kind of country. It's time to call out the violence of authoritarians like Hegseth and Trump who would rule with extreme cruelty and a death penalty that should long ago have been abolished by this nation as barbaric and unworthy of our professed valuation of human life.

Thomas R. Smith

River Falls