6.6 Other Sentences: Physical Punishment
Lore Rutz-Burri; Kate McLean; and Chantel Chauvin
Corporal Punishment
While the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1977 ruling in Ingraham v. Wright upheld the use of corporal punishment against public school students, sanctions such as paddling or flogging are not constitutionally approved sanctions for criminal offending in the United States. Nevertheless, such methods do play a prominent role in the history of punishment in the U.S. and England. Nonlethal corporal punishments, such as flogging, were used extensively in English and American common law for non-felony offenses. The misdemeanant was taken to the public square, bound to the whipping post, and administered as many lashes as the law specified:
“An American judge during the early American Republic was able to select from a wide array of punishments, most of which were intended to inflict intense pain and public shame. A Virginia statute of 1748 punished the stealing of a hog with twenty-five lashes and a fine. The second offense resulted in two hours of pillory (public ridicule) or public branding. A third theft resulted in a penalty of death. False testimony during a trial might result in mutilation of the ears or banishment from the colony….We have slowly moved away from most of these physically painful sanctions. The majority of states followed the example of the U.S. Congress, which in 1788 prohibited federal courts from imposing whipping and standing in the pillory. Maryland retained corporal punishments until 1953, and Delaware only repealed this punishment in 1972. Delaware, in fact, subjected more than 1600 individuals to whippings in the twentieth century. This practice was effectively ended in 1978 when the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the use of the strap, “offends contemporary standards of decency and human dignity and precepts of civilization which we profess to possess” (Lippman, 2016, p. 57).
Capital Punishment
While the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed constitutional approval for the death penalty (most recently in Glossip v. Gross, decided in 2015), the use of the death penalty in the United States remains controversial. Even as a majority of Americans continue to support the use of capital punishment for murder – 60% as of 2021 – this figure actually represents a historical low; the same survey, captured by the Pew Research Center, also found that 78% of participants agreed that there was some risk of innocent individuals being put to death (Pew Research Center, 2021).
As of 2020, the United States is the only country in the Americas (North and South) which continues to employ the death penalty, and one of only two countries (alongside Japan) in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an association of highly-developed nations worldwide. U.S. “exceptionalism” in this realm reflects the many questions other cultures have asked about capital punishment, such as
- Is the death penalty a deterrent?
- I