The death penalty arouses our passions as does few other issues. Some view taking another person's life as just and reasonable punishment while others see it as an inhumane and barbaric act. But the intensity of feeling that capital punishment provokes often obscures its long and varied history in this country. Now, for the first time, we have a comprehensive history of the death penalty in the United States. Law professor Stuart Banner tells the story of how, over four centuries, dramatic changes have taken place in the ways capital punishment has been administered and experienced. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the penalty was standard for a laundry list of crimes--from adultery to murder, from arson to stealing horses. Hangings were public events, staged before audiences numbering in the thousands, attended by women and men, young and old, black and white alike. Early on, the gruesome spectacle had explicitly religious purposes--an event replete with sermons, confessions, and last minute penitence--to promote the salvation of both the condemned and the crowd. Through the nineteenth century, the execution became desacralized, increasingly secular and private, in response to changing mores. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, ironically, as it has become a quiet, sanitary, technological procedure, the death penalty is as divisive as ever. By recreating what it was like to be the condemned, the executioner, and the spectator, Banner moves beyond the debates, to give us an unprecedented understanding of capital punishment's many meanings. As nearly four thousand inmates are now on death row, and almost one hundred are currently being executed each year, the furious debate is unlikely to diminish. The Death Penalty is invaluable in understanding the American way of the ultimate punishment. Stuart Banner's The Death Penalty is a richly detailed overview of American attitudes toward and implementation of capital punishment throughout its past. Banner decries what he sees as today's prevailing "smug condescension" to history, and states that executing a fellow human in the 17th and 18th centuries, though exponentially more common than today, was "just as momentous" an act. He traces changing technology and venues as well as the relatively constant arguments--legal, philosophical, and religious--of proponents and opponents. The book is rich with fascinating sidelights, among them the chilling practice of "symbolic" executions, the idea that dissections, viewed as a sort of punishment beyond death, were thought to act as deterrents to capital crime, and how the rise of newspapers as a mass medium hastened, in part, the demise of public hangings. The Death Penalty is free of polemic and cant, admirably disinterested, and at once rigorous yet thoroughly accessible. --H. O'Billovich Opponents of capital punishment will get cold comfort from this history of the death penalty in America. Banner (law, Washington Univ.) is not a proponent of capital punishment and in fact takes great pains to describe the gruesome details of many executions. But here he concludes that the death penalty is ingrained in the American justice system, if not in the American way of life. Banner's account focuses on how the crimes punishable by death, and the way executions are administered, differ today from earlier times. Until the mid-18th century, a death sentence was given for a litany of crimes and carried out by hanging in the public square, with sermons and confessions. Today, a death sentence is given only for murder and treason and takes place out of sight, with few witnesses. Yet the reasons for the death penalty are the same: deterrence and retribution. Banner points out that while the death penalty has been a divisive issue for the past 250 years, it has always been with us except for the few years from the late 1960s to 1976. A chilling account; recommended for crime collections in all libraries. Frances Sandiford, Green Haven Correctional Facility Lib., Stormville, NY Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. As far back as the early 1600s, Americans were being executed for crimes that, nowadays, would never merit capital punishment. Taking their cue from English law (with a healthy dose of Old Testament justice), lawmakers in the American colonies used the death penalty as punishment not only for murder but also adultery, horse theft, burglary, and more. According to Banner, it was "the equivalent of prison today--the standard punishment for a wide range of serious crimes." It was also a ritual, almost a religious ceremony, reflecting the conviction that punishment wasn't a deterrent unless it was carried out in full view. How did the death penalty evolve from an open-air ritual to a closed-door proceeding? Banner charts the course, showing how public opinion and new ideas of justice changed the way Americans viewed killing wrongdoers. The author deftly balances history and politics, craf