Judge Alex Kozinski, a prominent and controversial judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, is a conservative appointed by President Reagan. His Court of Appeals is the nation’s largest and covers the Western United States.

Judge Kozinski told CBS News: “I think the use of lethal injection is the way of lying to ourselves, to make it look like executions are peaceful, are benign, are sort of like going to sleep, and they’re not. They’re brutal things.”

The Romanian-born judge, who hit the headlines in 2008 when his stash of sexually-explicit material was discovered on a publicly accessible website, advocates the use of the guillotine as a method of execution.

He explained: “Well, you know, it’s 100 percent effective and it leaves no doubt that what we are doing is a violent thing. If we as a society are willing to take away human life, we should be willing to watch it.”