Dead Wrong: Violence, Vengeance, and the Victims of Capital Punishment

Attitudes toward the death penalty have changed dramatically throughout the course of history, evolving from times when public executions were occasions of solemn and pious ritual to excuses for raucous entertainment, and finally to the modern era of private, bureaucratized, mechanized, and sanitized executions that are out of sight and out of mind. Conforming thus to modern sensibilities, state—sanctioned killing is somehow more acceptable to us than public hangings would have been, becaus...