Franz Kafka
Kafka also sees the death sentence as a very brutal type of punishment.* In the Penal Colony is a perfect example of his expression of this idea. A man is sentenced to die after sleeping on duty and bad mouthing his superior. Kafka's character the explorer is quite disturbed by this sentence sepecially when he finds out from the execution officer that teh man does not even know what is about to happen.
The process by which the officer is to execute the man is an unbelievably cruel one. He has this machine set up so that needles will actually carve the alleged crime into the offender's [or even victim's] body. This action is so painfully unbearable that the prisoner must be gagged.
Kafka believes that this is not just. We see this at the end of the story. What happens is that the officer finds that he will never be able to perform this feat again, so he plans to commit suicide using the beloved machine. he orders teh machanical monster to script the words: Be Just. As the machine starts the art work, it begins to breakdown. It is a complete malfunction. The officer is brutally murdered because the device has no capability to "be just". The few that saw were stunned. They had never seen something so horrific in their lives.