A billionaire has stirred controversy by advocating for the reinstatement of public hangings as a method to deter crime, despite such practices being banned nearly 90 years ago.
Joe Lonsdale, a 43-year-old entrepreneur and follower of Peter Thiel, co-founded Palantir, a firm focused on data mining and surveillance, back in 2003. He recently sparked debate by calling for the return of public executions and ‘masculine leadership’ in a contentious social media post.
Lonsdale, a conservative venture capitalist with an estimated net worth of $3.6 billion as reported by Forbes, made these remarks in defense of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. This statement came after a boat allegedly carrying drug traffickers was destroyed, and surviving crew members were killed in a subsequent attack.
“Sinking narco boats publicly helps deter others. As does hanging repeat violent criminals,” Lonsdale stated on X, despite substantial research indicating no link between capital punishment and lowered crime rates.
The attack on the alleged drug vessel has been widely criticized as a breach of international law, including the Geneva Convention. Lonsdale, however, claimed that opposing such actions against sailors who were in distress is what truly fuels ‘violence and evil’ globally.
He stated, “Killing bad guys is DoW job. He should brag more. Masculine truth: bold, virtuous men deter evil.”
As a prominent Republican donor and supporter of the conservative policy think tank, the Cicero Institute, Lonsdale elaborated on his vision for the system.
“If I’m in charge later, we won’t just have a three strikes law,” he declared. “We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others.”
Many states lack a three-strikes law, which typically imposes longer sentences for recurring serious offenses. Even where these laws exist, they face significant criticism for resulting in disproportionately harsh sentences for the poor, minorities, and mentally ill individuals.
Estimates based on the peak era of the three-strikes law in California during the early 2000s suggest that around 10,000 individuals could fall under such criteria.
This raises the daunting question of the logistics and ethics of executing thousands in public view.
The last legal public hanging in the US was conducted in 1936 when Rainey Bethea was executed in Oklahoma. His execution, attended by an estimated 20,000 people in Owensboro, followed his conviction for the rape and murder of a 70-year-old woman, drawing significant national attention.
In the years that followed, US states transitioned to private executions partly due to the chaos public hangings incited, the media frenzy they generated, and the adoption of electrocution and lethal injection as predominant execution methods.
In Europe, public executions were outlawed earlier because they had become spectacles and sometimes led to criminals gaining notoriety, with audiences sympathizing with them as victims rather than offenders.
Consequently, many European countries banned public executions by the mid-19th century, with capital punishment largely abolished across the continent within the next century.