Saudi Arabia Advertises for Eight New Executioners as Beheading Rate Soars
Seems like a good opportunity to get a head in the burgeoning crime and punishment industry. Imagine the benefits, short hours, prestige and status in the community. How about severance pay? There should be no shortage of applicants.
As a resident of Texas, where the capriciousness and bizarre methodology of the death penalty make it more of a pseudo-religious ritual than a judicial sentence, I might favor a return to basics in the form of public beheading.
Of course, I would also require that the prosecutor and the judge and jury carry out the sentence themselves. This would preclude the sword, a method that is necessarily limited to single executioner, a fairly skilled at that. It shouldn’t be difficult though to rig a guillotine to 14 separate lanyards, with each one having to be tripped for the blade to fall. If just one juror balks, the sentence is permanently reduced to life in prison.
The citizen executioners should also be equipped with bio-hazard suits, hoses, mops, paper towels, and huge drums of detergent since the cleanup should not be a professional job either. We might also include a mortuary sewing kit (there are such products) so the deceased can be re-assembled for burial, with each participant required to add at least a few of the many stitches required.
Saudi Arabia is advertising for eight new executioners, recruiting extra staff to carry out an increasing number of death sentences, usually done by public beheading.
No special qualifications are needed for the jobs whose main role is “executing a judgment of death” but also involve performing amputations on those convicted of lesser offences, the advert, posted on the civil service jobs portal, said.
The Islamic kingdom is in the top five countries in the world for putting people to death, rights groups say. It ranked third in 2014, after China and Iran, and ahead of Iraq and the United States, according to Amnesty International figures.
A man beheaded on Sunday was the 85th person this year whose execution was recorded by the official Saudi Press Agency, compared to 88 in the whole of 2014, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). Amnesty said there were at least 90 executions last year.
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