THis is only half in jest. In a tribal society, someone would have the role of acting out the feelings of the tribe about a member who has transgressed all the boundaries. We don't have that in our culture of tangled myths and religions, but Americans, in particular, as opposed to Canadians, who share the same part of the continent, have something riding them and they need to get that monkey, that loa, off their back. A lot of crazy stuff happens in the U.S. that really doesn't happen much in other places, and it's not just because guns are readily available. We are a restless, itchy people. Some of my ancestors were on the Mayflower,(the ones that weren't getting away from the potato famine and the Welsh coal mines,) I know that if my homeland is anywhere it's in the U.S., but I felt a stranger in my home town, and I've felt that way every place I've lived in the U.S. I don't think I'm a special case-I think that's what it's like to be an American. Almost all of us are children of one diaspora or another. Well fed and housed to be sure for most of us, but still...something seems to make us want to kill and hurt each other. People seem to think that capital punishment is valuable in that it provides a form of closure, but the condemned rarely play the part well. Professional actors could play the roles of condemned men for maximum effect-we had an actor for president and people really loved him.- why not use an actor for people to hate? The problem with most people about to be executed is that they don't often give us what we want and need-remorse, apologies, pleas for forgiveness, or barring that, some appropriatly dramatic ending to their lives and to the suffering of everyone else. Most killers are pretty ordinary people, they just live and then they die, whether by the hand of the state or not. I say announce that he (or she) is going to be officially dead at a specific time, and then people can tune in and watch Wesley Snipes,Laurence Fishburne,John Turturo,Joe Pesci, Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel or some other actor do the death scene for them. Our culture is addicted to images, so why not use it. After the execution, the miscreant is declared dead, we see a coffin going into a hearse on TV, and everyone can go back to what they were doing before. The real miscreant is in a prison somewhere, where he or she can pursue legal appeals, DNA testing without a death date time constraint. I'm surprised they're not doing it already. Seth from China