Public Execution and Justice on/off the Elizabethan Stage: Shakespeare s First Tetralogy

Abstract: The Elizabethan regime in its last fifteen years faced many socio-political tensions. Although disorganised at first, as time passed, tensions increased and attempts were made to voice aloud socio- political criticisms, but use of the repressive state apparatus of the judicial system suppressed these. Accordingly, public execution was employed to exert the executive powers of the monarch against dissent. Deserved punishment in the theatre’s public executions could create a cathartic effect, reducing tensions about injustice that was felt by the Elizabethan playgoers in real life. Yet, the arbitrariness of justice in the executions on and off the stage complicated the creation of such a catharsis, as displayed, especially, in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy (ca. 1589-1594). Accordingly, this article analyses the politics and poetics of public execution and it suggests that scenes of executions in theatres increased the socio- political tensions caused by the injustice of the Late Elizabethan Period. Keywords: Shakespeare, History Plays, First Tetralogy, Public Execution, Politics, Poetic

Capital Jurors in an Era of Death Penalty Decline

The state of public opinion regarding the death penalty has not experienced such flux since the late 1960s. Death sentences and executions have reached their lowest annual numbers since the early 1970s and today, the public appears fairly evenly split in its views on the death penalty. In this Essay, we explore, first, whether these changes in public opinion mean that fewer people will be qualified to serve on death penalty trials as jurors, and second, whether potential jurors are affected by changes in the practice of the death penalty. We conducted surveys of persons reporting for jury duty at the Superior Court of Orange County, California. What we found was surprising. Surveys of jurors in decades past suggested ten to twenty percent of jury-eligible individuals would be excludable due to their substantial doubts about the death penalty. Despite Orange County’s status as a redoubt of death sentencing, we find that 35% or more of jurors reporting for jury service were excludable as having such substantial doubts about the death penalty that it would “substantially impair” their ability to perform their role as jurors. Indeed, large numbers went further: roughly a quarter said they would be reluctant to find a person guilty of capital murder knowing the death penalty was a possibility. A final question asked whether the fact that executions have not been conducted in California for a decade impacts whether jurors would be favorable towards the death penalty. We found that, across all types of attitudes towards the death penalty, that fact made jurors less inclined to sentence a person to death. Rare punishments may seem more arbitrary, even to those who find them morally acceptable. We conclude by describing how this research can be useful for scholars, litigators, and judges concerned with selection of jurors in death penalty cases, and we discuss why, as social and legal practices change, more study of public attitudes towards punishment is needed

‘The Great Portion of the Scum of Society’? Representations of Execution Crowds in the Lancashire Press, 1830-1868

From 1830 to the abolition of public executions in 1868, there was a growing critique of the execution crowd among elite commentators. To date, however, most, if not all, discussion of this critique has focused on the metropolis, elite groups and decision makers and on national newspapers such as The Times. The aim of this article is to shift the focus away from the metropolis towards the provinces, by exploring how the execution crowd was represented in the provincial press. While there have been several analyses of how executions were represented in the provincial press during the period, there has been little sustained discussion of how the crowd were represented. Drawing on a sample of 145 accounts of executions published between 1830 and 1868 it will explore how the execution crowd was presented in four Lancashire newspapers, the Liverpool Mercury, Manchester Times, Lancaster Gazette and Manchester Courier. It will show how the majority of reports depicted the crowd in neutral terms, passing no commentary – either negative or positive – on their composition or behaviour. One newspaper, however, the liberal Liverpool Mercury, consistently reported execution crowds in negative terms as part of its broader critique of capital punishment and public executions

Too Sick to Be Executed: Shocking Punishment and the Brain

Capital punishment, to be lawfully delivered, must occur without needless cruelty. Cruelty, defined in the setting of punishment, will naturally evolve with the maturation of civil society. Cruel punishment will always be a relative standard, and punishment cannot exceed what is morally shocking. In the setting of public executions, observers and victims share an aspect of the experience of punishment. The inmate has little opportunity to evaluate and report back on cruelty in the moments before death. Once dead, the inmate is necessarily silent on the matter. Empathy allows observers to evaluate punishment as cruel or not. Attempts by the state to block unfettered observation of all aspects of an execution deny Eighth Amendment protection, which stipulates that inflicted punishment shall not be cruel and unusual. Observation necessarily involves more than what a casual observer can surmise. Execution, as a form of killing, is a technical matter and, as such, requires more than casual knowledge of the details of that killing. Lethal injection is now the standard method of execution and while never a medical act, co-opts the tools of the medical trade and engenders comment. Ethically, professional medical societies, including the American Medical Association and the American Board of Anesthesiology, object to physician participation in lethal injection. As a consequence, physicians find themselves caught on the horns of a dilemma: How can the balance be struck between the benefit of some sort of technical evaluation that would reduce cruelty in executions, while refraining from instructing the state on how to kill without cruelty

Waxing Revolutionary: Reflections on a Raid on a Waxworks at the Outbreak of the French Revolution

[First paragraph] Parisians from all walks of life were already accustomed to watching heads roll before the Revolution of 1789. This is not a reference to public executions of the time (beheadings were reserved for the nobility and were rare events) but to another cultural spectacle of late eighteenth-century Paris, one which was sufficiently well-known to become the object of a satirical print in 1787. Entitled ‘Avis au public: Têtes à changer’, the print by P. D. Viviez lampoons the unceremonious updating of fashionable or celebrated waxwork figures displayed in the popular entertainments district of the Boulevard du Temple [See Figure 1]. It shows wax heads being handed down from shelves; heads being replaced on models; one head about to be struck off with a chisel; another head lies discarded on the ground, being sniffed at by a little cat. All of this takes place in front of a crowd of curious, chatty onlookers

Muscle Memory and the Local Concentration of Capital Punishment

The modern death penalty is not just concentrating in a handful of practicing states; it is disappearing in all but a few capitally active localities. Capital-punishment concentration, however, still surfaces more as the subject of casual observation than as the object of sophisticated academic inquiry. Normative and doctrinal analyses of the phenomenon are virtually nonexistent, in part because the current ability to measure and report concentration is so limited. This Article is the first attempt to measure capital-punishment concentration rigorously, by combining different sources of county-level data and by borrowing quantitative tools that economists use to study market competition. The analysis yields three major findings: (1) capital sentencing is concentrating dramatically; (2) executions are concentrating more gradually; and (3) both trends persist within most capitally active states. Certain normative and doctrinal conclusions follow from the empirical findings. The causes of concentration are likely to be more bureaucratic and path dependent than they are democratic and pragmatic, reflecting what I call the “muscle memory” of local institutional practice. If local muscle memory indeed explains concentration, such concentration violates basic punishment norms requiring equal treatment of similar offenders. This problem notwithstanding, existing death penalty jurisprudence does not account for local concentration. For concentration to have any influence on the outcome of constitutional inquiry, the Supreme Court would have to revise its working definition of “arbitrariness.