Invitation to a Beheading

Abstract

Though capital punishment still exists in many countries, including the United States, there has been some social progress. Executions have changed from drawing and quartering, and from hanging and guillotining in public, to private executions in prisons. It has also moved from death by hanging, garroting, jolts of electricity, poison gas and firing squad, to the quasi-scientific and more “humane” practice of lethal drugs, and to the abolition of capital punishment in western Europe and some American states. After a century of genocide and Holocaust, western society has finally learned to value a single human life.