Comments Elsewhere

I couldn’t disagree more. This would only result in an even higher chance of being incarcerated for crimes that you didn’t commit, or crimes that were never committed at all by anyone.

Oh, well then, let’s bring back something really embarassing for the government to foul up. For example, we could kill people like this:

On 2 March 1757 Damiens the regicide was condemned ‘to make the amende honorable before the main door of the Church of Paris’, where he was to be ‘taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds’; then, ‘in the said cart, to the Place de Grève, where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds’(Pièces originales …, 372-4).

— Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 3

With these kind of punishments in place, I’ll bet the politico-legal system would be really careful not to convict the wrong person, right? Let’s hear it for de-abolition of public torture!