Essay - Capital Punishment it is Tempting, on Assessing the Media Coverage...

Capital Punishment

It is tempting, on assessing the media coverage in ***** United States today, to think that the debate about capital pun*****hment is *****e of relatively recent origin. However, the ***** originated about the same time the United States became a group ***** recogniz*****ble colonies with commons, if still somewhat amorphous, codes of morality and ethics. Arguably, it originated earlier than that, in ***** England from which most American settlers came; the death penalty had long been written in***** English law although, as Levi notes (2002, p. 131), it w***** rarely carried out because the structure ***** government was such—with its dependence on ***** good will (or ill will) of the nobility—that there ***** much latitude in its applicati*****.

Another author, in an extensive examination of changing ***** penalty attitudes in the United states, ***** that in colonial America, "executions were a ritualistic exercise designed ***** part to punish crime, but perhaps more significantly, staged to reaffirm the moral and social order and the place of the members of ***** community in that order" (Cottrol 2004, p. 1641).

Moreover, such ritual murders made ***** theatre. In the colonial townships of ***** seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they were real-life *****ity plays, Cottrol contend, "in which all, particularly the condemned, played *****ir parts" (2004, p. 1641.) Cottrol also set the stage:

Executions were attended by a pomp ***** pageantry which belied their grim purpose. Executions would begin with a parade of the execution party, the condemned (usually) man, the sheriff, and his deputies publicly going from ***** jail to the place where the public hanging, or if ***** condemned ***** really unfortunate, burning, was ***** occur.

***** arrival came the execution sermon, an oration by the local clergymen impressing on the gathered multitude, sometimes numbering in the thousands, that the soon to be performed execution would be vivid reminder ***** the wages of sin. Parents brought their children so ***** the proffered morality lesson would not ***** lost on ***** next generati***** (*****, p. 1641).

Perhaps the part of this scenario which most sets it apart from the modern conduct ***** legal ***** in the ***** ***** is not so ***** in ***** almost festal atmosphere, ***** in the fact that ***** ***** were expected to speak, to offer up hearty repentance and also, preferably, a warning to others not to behave similarly considering the reward. Cottrol cites works that contends ***** entire exercise was a way for the offender, in death, "***** achieve moral re*****tegration into the *****, a reintegration that would permit a rejoining of the community in the afterl*****e if not the present one" (Cottrol 2004, p. *****.)

One need not go beyond that to recognize instantly ***** d*****ference in the conduct ***** executions then, ***** now. Then, belief in God ***** all but universal; today, it is very much ***** doubt. *****, executions seemed to be bound in "God's laws," whereas *****, they are based in the laws of man and the need ***** keep society safe