Mencken believes that if a criminal kills a man, that criminal deserves to be sentenced to death if he is found guilty. Mencken argues that the only thing that is cruel about the death penalty is the way that the process is dragged out. Mencken claims that dragging the punishment process out hurts not only the guilty, but the victims of the crimes as well. Mencken wants the reader to be aware of the torture that both parties undergo. The goal of Mencken's argument is to force the reader to re-think what is really cruel.
             Mencken argues that a prisoner has the right to a speedy execution, just like they have the right to a speedy trial, " The real objection to capital punishment doesn't lie against the actual extermination of the condemned, but against the brutal American habit of putting it off so long." Mencken points out that it is crueler to put a man in jail with the knowledge that he will die than it is to hang the criminal immediately. "But it is one thing to die, and quite another to lie for long months and even years under the shadow of death. No sane man would choose such an end. Unhappily, a murderer, under the irrational American system, is tortured for what, to him, must seem a whole series of eternities." Mencken claims that the psychological torture that a criminal undergoes is more terrible than their actual execution. Mencken stresses that a criminal will suffer more if he has to wait on death row years, watching appeal after appeal fail to succeed. "That wait, I believe, is horribly cruel. I have seen more than one man sitting in the death-house, and I don't want to see anymore. Worse, it is wholly useless. Why should he wait at all? Why not hang him the day after the last court dissipates his last hope?" Mencken can not comprehend why the system is designed to maximize the anxiety of the criminal. And drawing this process out not only subjects the criminal to unnecessary ...