The Death Penalty, by Stuart Banner

Our hottest, most divisive cultural arguments are often conducted without any awareness of historical context, as the debates over abortion and capital punishment attest. But it does not have to be this way. Historians Linda Gordon and, most recently, Leslie Reagan have written excellent works on the history of abortion in the United States. And Stuart Banner has now given us a history of the death penalty.

In this dispassionate but chillingly detailed survey of capital punishment, Banner, professor of law at St. Louis's Washington University, documents and explains the dramatic "changes in the arguments pro and con, in the crimes punished with death, in execution methods and rituals . . . [and] in the way Americans have understood and experienced the death penalty."

Since there were no prisons in colonial America, Banner observes, the death penalty served as "the standard punishment for a wide range of serious crime," including murder, rape, theft, arson and counterfeiting. Generally this meant public hanging, a ritualized spectacle that often involved sermons and confessions. But while capital punishment was the norm, there were deviations. These included "symbolic" executions, such as mock hangings and dramatic reprieves at the gallows, as well as "intensified" executions--e.g., burning at the stake, dismemberment and public display of the corpse. Such punishments were reserved for particularly threatening offenders like the pirate Joseph Andrews, whose body was hung high in an iron cage on an island just outside New York City, "a Spectacle to deter all Persons from the like Felonies for the Future."