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Article: A Tale of Two Nations: Implementation of the Death Penalty in "Executing" Versus "Symbolic" States in the United States
- Article from:
- Texas Law Review
- Article date:
- June 1, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright University of Texas, Austin, School of Law Publications, Inc. Jun 2006. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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I. Introduction
In his recent history of capital punishment in America, Stuart Banner describes a little-remembered feature of colonial justice.1 The death penalty, of course, was a ubiquitous practice. Indeed, execution was, as Banner observes, the "base point" of punishment as virtually
all serious crimes were punishable-and in many cases punished-by death.2 Yet in some cases throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, offenders were not sentenced to actual death but to the ceremony of execution. Banner describes a woman who had killed her child in 1677 and who was subsequently sentenced to a simulated hanging-to "stand a full ½ houre on the gallowes with a halter about her ...