comment: >
  
  The problem has nothing to do with the inmate but with the people watching. That’s not something you can unsee. It damages you. I don’t agree with Percy for having done that as far as the inmate goes but putting people in a position to watch something potentially traumatic does make him a bad guy.
context: In this movie in particular I think it is less about feeling bad for the dude and more about hating Percy, the one not getting the sponge wet. >
  
  Yeah fuck percy. Little prick. You know how one character ruins an actor for you ? That's percy for me. >
  
  Tge dude says hes shocked marrying a 16 year old at 50 affected his career. He may actually be mentally handicapped >
  
  I think he had never been THAT much of a promising star. 
  I mean... He didn't have a great career. It was less than meh. >
  
  I do not disagree with your opinion on this, but I'd posit an idea to explain why others feel differently. 
  Part of the task of any story teller is to make sympathetic characters.  All the people on the Green Mile are criminals whom are slated for execution for their crimes. If they had all been snarling monsters, they would not have been sympathetic characters,  that is characters that you find some common humanity in, that you come to like and identify with and perhaps root for. Delacroix is a child rapist and multiple murderer, yes, and that serves as justification of his fate of execution,  but this isn't the part of his life that is portrayed in the film.  We see him as a kindly old convict with a pet mouse. This makes him sympathetic,  which makes his execution all the more tragic. And this makes Percy's act of deliberately bungling his execution a salient point on which to truly hate him as one of the villains in the narrative. 
  Contrast the humanizing of Delacoix with the demonizing of Wild Bill, for example. Wild Bill is also a rapist and murderer, but never displays any sympathetic characteristics.  He's still violent and unrepentant.  We don't care what happens to him and so he is a monster who's death we rightly consider just. As is the fate of Percy, the guard who, although not a convict, is nonetheless needlessly cruel and sadistic. 
  Obviously,  people in real life are mostly not fictional characters.  We have faults and flaws and are not so easily sorted into easy categories of hero and villain. But the craft of the movie is to make the execution of Delacoix sympathetic despite his crimes to emphasize the wicked cruelty of Percy. >
  
  I mean... from a legal standpoint it's a cruel and unusual punishment and was done purposefully. Morally it's not the greatest to not care but .. I mean, I am not crying either. >
  
  I think the reaction would’ve been different if they took the whole “I spit on your grave” approach. >
  
  I feel sympathy for him suffering like that, the whole point of the set up is to show that there's a difference between an ethical execution that serves justice and has to be carried out under the burden of duty and murder that satisfies a sadist's wish to see someone suffer.