Instead of a boring televised trial, feed Tyler Robinson to a hungry lion

By James J. Devine

Let us, for a moment, set aside the dusty niceties of the Sixth Amendment, the tedious presumption of innocence, and the general inconvenience of a months-long courtroom slog. The people have made up their minds. The scrolling headlines have declared it.

Tyler Robinson, the young man accused of putting a bullet into the neck of Turning Point USA’s founder, is guilty as sin. We know this because we have seen the blurry footage, read the leaked affidavit, and absorbed the righteous fury of the internet. So why, in the name of efficiency, are we about to spend the dog days of July watching lawyers bicker over chain of custody and jury instructions?

Judge Tony Graf has allowed cameras into the Utah courtroom, turning the proceedings into a reality show called “Death in the Desert.” But this is a half-measure.

A compromise that satisfies neither the bloodlust of the mob nor the sacred duty of the state to deliver an ending worth the wait. If we are going to televise a man’s final legal gasp, let us be honest about what we really want.

We do not want voir dire. We want violence and revenge, and perhaps most of all in this age of Donald Trump’s tyranny, Americans want entertainment.

The proposal is simple. Cancel the trial. Cancel the endless appeals, the habeas corpus, the last meals, and the final phone calls. Instead, transport Tyler Robinson to a clean, well-maintained enclosure at Utah’s Hogle Zoo.

Release one adult male lion, starved for precisely 72 hours. Provide a single rusty spear of the kind found in a “Braveheart” reenactment. Turn on the cameras. Sell pay-per-view. Call it “The Robinson Redemption” or, more honestly, “Lunch.”

Now, before the bar associations swoon onto their fainting couches, consider the historical precedent.

The ancient Romans, a people who understood the link between good government and good spectacle, did not invent the damnatio ad bestias for nothing. For centuries, when the empire needed to dispose of a troublesome Christian or a particularly unpopular senator, they did not convene a blue-ribbon commission.

They marched the condemned into the Colosseum, let the lions loose, and the people went home satisfied that justice had a certain visceral clarity.

Is that not the very definition of a public good? A trial can be rigged. A jury can be bought or swayed with emotion. A hungry lion is an honest arbiter. He does not care about political affiliation, media bias, or the nuances of aggravated murder statutes.

A hungry lion cares about lunch.

And what a fitting tribute this would be to the late Charlie Kirk—may we call him Saint Charlie now? The man built an empire on the proposition that the modern world had gone soft.

He railed against trigger warnings, safe spaces, and the coddling of the American mind. He would have despised the idea of a sterile, air-conditioned courtroom where his accused killer gets to sit quietly, represented by a public defender, sipping water from a paper cup.

No, Saint Charlie believed in consequences. He believed that the problem with America was that we had forgotten how to make people afraid to do wrong.

What better way to honor his memory than to replace the electric chair, the firing squad, and the lethal injection with the original, God-fearing, Old Testament penalty?

You spill blood, you get fed to the beast. It is ecologically sound, wildly entertaining, and guaranteed to go viral.

Let us also address the practical benefits.

A full criminal trial, with appeals, would likely cost the state of Utah somewhere north of two million dollars. A lion, by contrast, requires a single zookeeper and a sturdy enclosure.

The proceeds from the pay-per-view—let us conservatively estimate fifty million buys at thirty dollars each—could fund the Utah public school system for a generation. Think of the children. Think of the math.

And do not lecture us about the presumption of innocence. We have already decided. You have already decided. The man’s face has been on every cable news chyron for six months.

Judge Graf’s decision to allow cameras ensures that no jury in the state could possibly be unbiased.

So let us discard the fiction. If we are going to have a spectacle, let us have a spectacle that delivers. Let us watch the accused face his fate not across a crowded room full of law clerks, but nose-to-nose with a four-hundred-pound predator who has not been fed since Tuesday.

Some will call this barbaric.

They will wring their hands and quote the Eighth Amendment.

To them, we say: Look at the ratings for the O.J. Simpson chase. Look at the public thirst for the Depp-Heard livestream. The people do not want justice. They want catharsis.

They want a moment so pure, so consequential, that they can feel their own hearts pounding in their throats. A lion in a cage with a frightened young man provides that in ways that a judge in a robe reading jury instructions does not.

So, to the Honorable Tony Graf Jr., we issue this satirical but deeply sincere plea.

You have already declared this event too entertaining to keep in the realm of justice. You have opened the gates to the circus. But why stop at clowns and tightropes?

Bring in the lion. Give the people what they secretly crave. And let us finally, once and for all, retire the boring, slow, expensive business of the law in favor of the roaring, final, and eminently watchable verdict of the wild.

Saint Charlie would have wanted it that way. And who are we to deny a martyr his due?