that Iraq executes within 30 days while we take as long as 20 years?
Of course, our legal system favors erring in favor of sending a guilty person free than sending an innocent person to jail or to the gallows. But this is not what too many Americans feel, even though we have seen so many men who were in prison for 10 and 20 years and then set free when their innocence was proven, mostly through DNA.
No matter. Americans want to watch hanging or the electric chair up close and personal. I don't think that we've changed much since the late 19th Century:
From
http://www.ocweekly.com/culture/books/twisted-system/22897/In April 1899, white residents of Newman, Georgia, gathered for that festival of Southern virtues, the lynching. "The event assumed a familiar format," writes historian Leon Litwack. "As in most lynchings, the guilt of the victim had not been proven in a court of law. As in most lynchings, no member of the crowd wore a mask, nor did anyone attempt to conceal the names of the perpetrators; indeed, newspaper reporters noted the active participation of some of the region’s most prominent citizens."
At their center was Sam Hose, an African-American. "After stripping Hose of his clothes and chaining him to a tree," Litwack writes, the crowd "stacked kerosene-soaked wood around him. Before saturating Hose with oil and applying the torch, they cut off his ears, fingers and genitals and skinned his face." Then they burned him alive. But the scene doesn’t end there. "Before Hose’s body had even cooled, his heart and liver were removed and cut into several pieces, and his bones were crushed into small particles. The crowd fought over these souvenirs." One proud citizen took a slice of heart to present to the governor. Hose’s severed knucklebones were prominently displayed in the front window of an Atlanta grocer.
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