Scaffold Quotes
Public Hangings in America were not abolished for another six decades. See Quotation 644484 in Related Quotes.
The most common example that capital punishment does not work as a deterrent is that while thieves were being hung for their crime, other thieves would circulate among the watching crowd at the scaffold and pickpocket the observers.
Although we think is grizzley and macabre that throngs of people should attend executions adn percieve the spectators to be gross and insensitive, there was a bizarre kind of morality operating in many counties. At all times in history executions tend to bet botched with terrible and unnecessary suffering inflicted on the victim. When executioners do that with drug coctails or other methods of dispatching death, we tend to make institutional complaints. But as this quotation shows, the executioner was often turned on by the mob and in some cases were actually themselves killed.
