Contemporary Western society is built upon respect for personal freedoms. The taking of human life, especially, is generally considered outside the reach of the state. However, even the most liberal and tolerant of societies do have armed police forces, militaries equipped with deadly weapons and incarceration establishments - and (almost) all states regularly kill and imprison humans. The use of deadly force against a human, as also illegal detention, is controlled by preventive customs and judicial retribution after the act.
Sartre, in one of his short stories (from the collection, "The Wall") describes a scene in a makeshift prison in wartime Spain. An official comes over to a room containing three prisoners and informs them that they are to be executed at dawn. One of them cries piteously and says that it cannot be true, it must be a mistake. The official checks his list, confirms the name of the young man, and asks, not unkindly, how can it not be true, it is, after all, on the list.
The official here is not evil, as most caricatures of evil men go. He is performing his duty, and according not just to the laws of his time, but also the ethics of ours. He assumes that his "list", typically typewritten, perhaps on official notepaper, and occasionally with the signature of another official, is the result of due diligence. But he cannot possibly know it, with any very high degree of conviction.
Wielders of keys and weapons tend not to be present in courtrooms, or even be aware of the checks and balances in the judicial process. The "convicted" may be a complete stranger, as might be the "victim". The case might be false in some aspects, or even entirely hypothetical. Without being privy to the details of the violation, the circumstances of those involved, and the reasoning offered by the lawyers and judges, the guard outside a prison door takes upon herself or himself a heavy ethical burden.
Now, one of the arguments against the warden or the executioner being too personally involved in their wards is that these professions, like many others in our society, call for specialization. Alternately, they demand non-specialization. It makes little economic sense to have an expensively-educated lawyer spend a winter's night outside of a prison cell, doing a crossword puzzle and listening to the captive sing of loved ones. The other argument holds that the executioner could not possibly kill someone if he or she knew more about the man or woman kneeling by the guillotine, more about what makes a person human, the story of a life, of schools attended and dreams followed. A similarly involved jailor might countenance the escape of a prisoner, except in systems where such collaboration is dealt with brutally.
Both of these arguments fail when we consider the high value put on human life, freedom and justice.
To restate the problem: jailors and assassination squads carry out their society-sanctioned duty of robbing humans of freedoms and life on the basis of externally provided information, which they are not expected to question or understand. It would appear that they prefer the terseness and coldness of a written transfer or execution order to the screams of a tortured person, one desperately claiming the right to live and breathe the outside air. Without believing in the veracity of their orders, or, expressed better, without having cause to believe in their veracity, the servants of the state carry out their dreadful tasks.
Without possessing a reasonable, uninterested, personal conviction of the legal guilt of the prisoner, the jailors and assassins place themselves open to the charge of enslavement and murder. The uniform and pieces of paper in duplicate cannot offer an ethical exoneration.
Till we find a way to enable a high degree of information parity across the length of our punishment systems, let us be more tolerant of those captors and killers who allow themselves to be kinder to their wards than their official handbooks stipulate.
The principle of the citizenry being considered innocent until proven guilty must, therefore, be extended to the legal guilt being proven anew to every new prison warden. Note that we are here only concerned with legal guilt, and not whether the laws themselves treat the human body and mind with respect. We assume they do. Indeed, they must, before this ethical problem can be tackled.
