Alabama’s Governor, Kate Ivey, is seeking a pause in Alabama’s series of signature executions because they tried three times to execute their latest offender and the bastard just wouldn’t die. Gov. Ivey is quite upset and is demanding a pause in planned executions so that there can be a top-to-bottom investigation to learn what Alabama is doing wrong, saying “For the sake of the victims and their families, we’ve got to get this right.”

Her indifference towards the candidates for execution is, I suppose, only to be expected in Alabama. And her concern for “the victims and their families” is quite revealing. Does it matter to the victims and their families that a criminal survives repeated efforts to kill him? We encounter this sort of thinking often enough in death-penalty cultures. Of course, the “victim” is usually dead, and unlikely to be affected by the execution one way or another, but “the family,” the unidentified kinfolk of the victim, must be satisfied, as must the state of Alabama, with “justice,” that is to say, with their revenge.

In this light, capital punishment may be seen as state-sponsored vendetta.