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"Honored delegates,
I thank you for your speed and wisdom in voting to recommend a new Lord Mayor. The Committee on Urban Order has prepared two more proposals for today's floor session. Our first proposal is this:
It being in the public interest that the people are reminded of the fruits of crime, and to ensure that criminals have not been unduly punished leading up to their execution, executions shall be done in public, except when safety or security concerns render this impossible.
It is the practice of nearly every country in Avistan to conduct executions publicly, and this was likewise the practice in Arodenite Cheliax. I could not hope to list every benefit of this practice, but at the core of it is this: that it is better for our people to know with certainty what sentences our courts are carrying out.
It is better for a would-be criminal to know with confidence what punishment his misdeeds will bring than to mistakenly imagine that lawbreakers have secretly been spared. It is better for his victims' loved ones to know that justice has been done, and that they need not fear him any longer. It is better for all those who support Her Majesty's wise decision to ban the use of torture for interrogations if they can confirm with their own eyes whether this decree is being obeyed. It is better for those who mistakenly believe that Her Majesty's courts have secretly continued to employ the execution methods of the Thrunes to be able to reassure themselves that we have genuinely abandoned that barbarity. It is better for our subjects to see that we are taking the terrible crimes of the Third seriously.
But all this can only happen if executions are carried out in public for all to see. Our subjects are not used to an honest crown, and we cannot expect them to trust our word alone, if we have given them no reason to believe it.
I know that I do not see eye-to-eye with every delegate in this room on the matter of what forms of execution ought be permissible. But no matter what the sentence, we should not hide it away in secret and leave the details to our subjects' imaginations."
