What historical literature can tell us about the cruelty of the death penalty Enlightenment thinker Cesare Boccaria wrote about the problems of state executions in “On Crime and Punishment” in 1764. It can take your money, steal your time, send you to war, but, my god, don’t let it kill you. We Americans are in a strange position of building highways, national parks, middle schools and electric chairs. The United States currently has 2,000 inmates on death row, which ought to prompt a moral emergency on the basis of repudiating human sacrifice and oppressive state power. The history of capital punishment is not confined to the vibrating bolt; gas chambers were introduced in the States in 1924 as a humane method of execution compared to hangings. Murdering prisoners is woven into American history. However, if the United States would have indulged WWI poet Wilfred Owen’s “ Dulce et Decorum Est ,” where he describes his comrades as drowning “under a green sea,” while fumbling to fasten o...
Striving for a World without Capital Punishment