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Topics: Technology, US News, Crime, Social Media
William Morgan
Topics: Technology, US News, Crime, Social Media
A billionaire has called for the return of public hangings as a means of deterring crime, almost 90 years after they were banned.
43-year-old Joe Lonsdale, an acolyte of Peter Thiel who joined him and others to found datamining and surveillance firm Palantir in 2003, bizarrely called for this and the return of 'masculine leadership' in a divisive social media rant.
The conservative venture capitalist, who according to Forbes is worth around $3.6 billion, made the controversial statement in support of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth after a boat alleged to contain drug traffickers was blown up, with the survivors being killed in a second strike.
"Sinking narco boats publicly helps deter others. As does hanging repeat violent criminals," Lonsdale wrote on X, despite decades of research and social science showing no correlation between capital punishment and offending rates.
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While this strike on an alleged drug boat had widely been described as a violation of international law, including the Geneva Convention, Lonsdale argued that opposition to bombing drowning sailors was actually the true cause of 'violence and evil' in the world.
He asserted: "Killing bad guys is DoW job. He should brag more. Masculine truth: bold, virtuous men deter evil."
A major Republican donor and funder of the conservative policy thinktank the Cicero Institute, Lonsdale then laid out how he thought the system should work.
"If I’m in charge later, we won’t just have a three strikes law," he said. "We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others."
Many states do not have a three-strikes law, where subsequent serious offences trigger longer prison terms, and areas where they are used have faced serious criticism that they cause disproportionate sentences for poor people, minorities, and the mentally ill.
However, a rough estimate based on the number of violent offenders languishing in California jails at the peak of the three-strike era in the early 2000s shows that 10,000 people could meet this criteria.
This prompts the terrifying question of how, or where, thousands of people would be hanged for the public to see.
The last legal public hanging carried out in the US was 26-year-old Rainey Bethea in Oklahoma in 1936. It's estimated that a crowd of 20,000 people in Owensboro witnessed Bethea's execution after his rape and murder of a 70-year-old woman drew national attention.
In the decades that followed, all states began carrying out executions in private, in part because of public mayhem whipped up by the media and because electrocution and lethal injection had become the dominant methods of capital punishment.
In Europe, this had already been illegal for some time after public executions had become a form of entertainment and led to some criminals becoming famous, with crowds more likely to empathize with them as a victim rather than a perpetrator.
As a result, many countries outlawed public execution by the mid-19th century, with capital punishment largely ending across the continent within 100 years.