The death penalty arouses our passions as does few other issues.
Some view taking another person's life as just and reasonable
punishment while others see it as an inhumane and barbaric act. But
the intensity of feeling that capital punishment provokes often
obscures its long and varied history in this country. Now, for the
first time, we have a comprehensive history of the death penalty in
the United States. Law professor Stuart Banner tells the story of
how, over four centuries, dramatic changes have taken place in the
ways capital punishment has been administered and experienced. In
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the penalty was standard
for a laundry list of crimes-from adultery to murder, from arson to
stealing horses. Hangings were public events, staged before
audiences numbering in the thousands, attended by women and men,
young and old, black and white alike. Early on, the gruesome
spectacle had explicitly religious purposes-an event replete with
sermons, confessions, and last-minute penitence-to promote the
salvation of both the condemned and the crowd. Through the
nineteenth century, the execution became desacralized, increasingly
secular and private, in response to changing mores. In the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries, ironically, as it has become
a quiet, sanitary, technological procedure, the death penalty is as
divisive as ever. By recreating what it was like to be the
condemned, the executioner, and the spectator, Banner moves beyond
the debates, to give us an unprecedented understanding of capital
punishment's many meanings. As nearly four thousand inmates are now
on death row, and almost one hundred are currently being executed
each year, the furious debate is unlikely to diminish. The Death
Penalty is invaluable in understanding the American way of the
ultimate punishment.
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