Secluded midnight executions undermine the stated deterrent rationale for the death penalty.

Evidence

The way in which executions are conducted is another reflection of American society’s conflict over the death penalty. Executions are usually carried out at midnight, hidden from public view. The media are banned from filming them. For utilitarians, who claim that executions prevent homicides, executing the condemned in semisecrecy defeats its assumed deterrent purpose. Stealth executions will not strike fear in violence-prone individuals. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2090

Categorization

• XREF: Secrecy as a moral-disengagement mechanism — society hides the act to avoid confronting the harm it authorizes; parallels the out-of-sight dynamics in the existing silence/noise vault work.
• SEED: The contradiction between utilitarians’ deterrence logic and hidden executions is a clean case study in how institutions maintain a policy they cannot publicly justify.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2090