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released, jerked him up into the air. Sheriffs hoped that the force of the fall—or of the hoisting up—would break the neck and cause rapid death. Professional hangmen created a formula in which rope length was a function of the prisoner's weight: the heavier the victim, the shorter the drop. But many times these delicate calculations of anatomy and gravity failed to add up. Sometimes the drop was too short, and the prisoner strangled. Sometimes it was too long, and those assembled found themselves witness to a decapitation rather than a hanging.20

There is no way of knowing how often these problems occurred earlier in the nineteenth century, because most descriptions of hangings did not include such information. The lack of detail reflected the feeling that what was important about hanging day—the ritual procession, prayers, and confession—took place before the drop. Around 1850, however, newspapers began printing details of the victim's sufferings at the end of the rope. They described the prisoner's body convulsing and twitching, legs twisting and kicking, throat gurgling, eyes bulging, face turning purple. (The press was too delicate to note that most hanged men also urinated, defecated, and ejaculated.)21

Although the American people were largely deaf to pleas that capital punishment was unjust on principle, death penalty opponents had one strong card to play: the suffering of the condemned. Edmund Clarence Stedman, a foe of capital punishment, published long articles with explicit depictions of botched hangings and criticized "the dreadful, the inconceivable physical agonies of men who are hanged." He hoped to play on the public's sympathies, and the strategy worked. The New York Times claimed that bungled hangings were "accountable for most of what opposition exists among us to capital punishment." Maine in 1876 officially abolished capital punishment after a botched hanging outraged the public. Death penalty opponents, it seemed, had found the issue that might carry the day.22

But this strategy contained a flaw. In arguing that the problem with the death penalty was the suffering of the prisoner, Stedman and others suggested that the death penalty without pain would be unobjectionable, and they implicitly challenged death penalty advocates to find a better way to kill.

*The movement made little headway in the South, whose citizens believed capital punishment to be necessary for controlling the slave population.

CHAPTER 8

The Death Penalty

Commission

THE CONCERN WITH SUFFERING that characterized the death penalty debates was a relatively new phenomenon. For most of human history violence and pain had been unremarkable aspects of everyday life. In premodern societies minor insults led easily to duels or fistfights, which regularly escalated into bloody feuds and vendettas. In medieval England homicide was as common among noblemen as among peasants, producing a murder rate twice as high as in the modern United States. Many of those who did not succumb to violence fell victim to accident and disease: Women died during childbirth; illness routinely felled infants and children; men were maimed and killed in warfare and farm accidents; plague and famine killed indiscriminately. Pain provided the texture of everyday life, and people accepted it as inevitable. Christians saw it as punishment for sin, or even as on opportunity to draw closer to the divine by sharing the suffering of Christ. Physical suffering was routine, and compassion was a precious resource, easily exhausted and grudgingly dispensed.1

By the end of the nineteenth century the situation had changed. William James, the great psychologist and brother to Henry, noted in 1901 that in the past century a "moral transformation" had "swept over our Western world. We no longer think that we are called on to face physical pain with equanimity." Compassion was now extended to all of humanity, and cruelty became the worst of sins. An 1891 advertisement for a laxative expressed the new mood in rhyme: "What higher aim can man attain than conquest over