There are times when the absence of Jonathan Swift is acutely felt. One such moment came at the end of last month with the botched execution of a woman in Tennessee called Christa Pike.

Pike has been in prison on death row since 1996 when she was convicted of the torture and murder of a classmate when she was just 18. She had originally been sentenced to death by electric chair. But society has become more benevolent since the 1990s and so, at the age of 50, Pike was prepared for execution by lethal injection.

If society sanctions the ultimate punishment, it should not look away from what that punishment looks like

The injections went ahead but they did not work. Pike survived two rounds of pentobarbital and, since she was still alive after the second dose, the executioners had to call 911 and request an ambulance. The emergency services rushed her to hospital to save her life. She has since regained consciousness and there is now a considerable debate in the US about what to do with her.

Even before this incident, capital punishment in the US is such a long drawn-out process that it is almost inevitable that a certain amount of sympathy ends up accruing to the perpetrator while the horrors of their crimes recede. There does seem something inhumane about someone spending their whole adult life awaiting the inevitable appeals and other legal processes to determine the day on which they should die.

Now there have been inevitable calls for Pike to be granted some kind of reprieve after what she has been through. In the past, when hanging was more in vogue, it was accepted practice in Britain, among other jurisdictions, that if a man survived a hanging, his sentence would be commuted to life imprisonment. This happened most famously in the case of John “Babbacombe” Lee, who was due to be hanged in 1885. After the trapdoor three times failed to open his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

But the Pike case comes at a time when another prominent crime has reentered the news. This is the case of Major Nidal Hasan, a jihadist who went on a shooting spree at Fort Hood, Texas in 2009, killing 13 soldiers and injuring dozens more. This month, the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, announced that Hasan – who has spent a mere 13 years on death row – would finally be executed by firing squad. To add color to the proceedings, Hegseth announced that the execution would be live-streamed.

Between the cases of Pike and Hasan, a set of interesting questions emerge. It seems to have been decided that lethal injection is the most civilized and placid way in which to execute someone. Such execution chambers have the aura of a medical facility or a veterinary surgery. Here the healing arts and the killing arts become effectively indistinguishable, other than in their intended outcome. There is no fear, as with the electric chair, of someone’s eyes popping out or of their hair setting on fire. The whole thing is ordered, effective, almost caring, and sequestered behind closed walls. Society carries out the ultimate punishment in a way that is hidden from society and so need not unduly trouble the public’s conscience.

Of course, the live-streamed execution of a convict by firing squad stands at the opposite end of the scale. Although it turns out to be a faster way to die than by lethal injection, it is clear that the US government wishes to make this piece of justice as public and cathartic as possible.

Even those of us who are morally opposed to capital punishment must acknowledge that there are some arguments for the route that Hegseth and co. are wishing to take. If society sanctions the ultimate punishment then perhaps it should not look away from what that punishment looks like. The medicalization of capital punishment in the US has its own problems. An execution which can be watched by millions allows a society to face the reality of what it condones.

Yet the best objection to public executions is not that they will provide some public relief or reveal the full majesty of the law. It is that a portion of the public will always enjoy them.

If the atmosphere in the lethal injection chamber is of doing society’s dirty work behind closed doors, the atmosphere at public executions provokes the opposite.

In a letter to the Times in November 1849, Charles Dickens related his impressions of the public execution of Marie and Frederick Manning, a couple who had been found guilty of the murder of Marie’s ex-lover. Thousands gathered at Horsemonger Lane in London to see the spectacle, including “thieves, low prostitutes, ruffians, and vagabonds of every kind.” Before the act Dickens was appalled to see “fightings, faintings, whistling and imitations of Punch, brutal jokes” among other demonstrations of “indecent delight.” When the two convicts were dropped and left “quivering into the air” there was, said Dickens, “no more thought that two immortal souls had gone to judgement, no more restraint in any of the previous obscenities, than if the name of Christ had never been heard in this world, and there were no belief among men but that they perished like beasts.”

Dickens’s argument followed that of Sir G. Grey in parliament that “the infliction of capital punishment” should be “a private solemnity carried out within the prison walls.” Making an execution public does less to the accused than it does in coarsening the public. Yet medicalized execution behind the prison walls has its own obscenities and hypocrisies. As does a country like Britain, which pretends that we are more morally elevated by keeping our worst criminals in incarceration until they die of old age or are released early due to overcrowding.

There seems to be no definitive answer to any of this – and never could be. Because we are such strange beings. We want vengeance one moment and mercy the next. In one age we endure hypocrisy and in the next moment we demand openness. Shadow and light, you might say. Which is what we all are.