Introduction The question of just and effective punishment continues to occupy legal minds and thoughtful citizens. On both sides, one submits, debate rests on the essential humaneness and concern for civil rights that impels American society. At the same time, much of what we have resolved for ourselves about corporal punishment in the judicial arena conflicts with what is practiced in home and school settings. The same sense of fair play goads us when facing outward to wonder whether the examples of enlightened penology in northern Europe are worth emulating, sweep the terrorist inmates at Guantanamo under the rug by thrusting them on other nations, and fuels a quiet rage that other cultures can be so wantonly backward inflicting corporal punishment on offenders and protesters alike. Historical and Cultural Contexts An Age-Old Practice Corporal and capital punishment are inextricably linked because in the entire recorded history of mankind, being forced to drink poison (Socrates being the most famous example) and whipping were the least painful punishments imposed on criminals. Most forms of capital punishment were deliberately cruel, inflicted a long drawn-out death, lent themselves to public spectacles so as to deter others, and generally defined justice in terms of retribution by the affected community. Examples of these include breaking the criminal on the wheel, boiling to death (a particularly drawn-out execution, favored by Chinese and Japanese), flaying, disembowelment, crucifixion, impalement, slow death by the “thousand cuts” (Chinese), crushing, stoning, burning at the stake (e.g. Joan of Arc or the numerous suspected heretics, many being forced Muslim converts, during the time of the Inquisition), dismemberment, sawing, live burial, decapitation, scaphism (the Persian practice of binding offenders to a trough, covering his head and exposed limbs with honey and letting exposure to the sun and numerous insect bites cause a gradual death), or necklacing (Time, 1983). Nor are these gruesome practices always judicial and ancient. Necklacing was invented in an era of vigilantism and inter-tribal violence in South Africa that lasted from 1985 to the early 1990s. The practice consisted of throwing a rubber tire around the victims head, dousing it with gasoline and setting it on fire. Death by inhalation of noxious rubber fumes was likely near-instantaneous and merciful. Such is the recency of cruel and unusual capital punishment that, as late as 1878, the Supreme Court was forced to abjure capital punishment employing drawing and quartering, dissection/disemboweling, or burning at the stake (Wilkerson v. Utah, 1878). It was not the Salem witch trials of 1692-93 that remained fresh in the minds of justices then (the nineteen convicted were executed by hanging) but the long period from 1484 to the 1830s when the Catholic Church sentenced devil-worshippers and, by definition, witches to burning at the stake. Late in the period, English, Swiss, French and German Protestants continued the tradition but resorted to hanging. “Barbaric” practices are not the preserve of backward peoples, either. Time magazine tells of a 19th century French tourist who witnessed a criminal in India dragged aro