An ode to Troy Davis

The following essay on capital punishment and the imminent execution of Troy Davis was penned by former CL senior editor John F. Sugg.

"Let's do it."

— Gary Gilmore's last words to a Utah firing squad, January 17, 1977

Precisely, how shall we do it? How do we dispatch thee? Let me count the ways.

We have stoned. We have pushed from cliffs. We have speared and knifed and hacked with whatever bloody instrument is handy.

We have applied a thousand tiny cuts over days, weeks, months and sometimes more than a year; the odious screams were so melodious. In some Eastern rituals, we have allowed the recipient of our affections to select the succession of limbs and appendages to be detached. Our more eccentric rites have sanctioned carving out hearts and feasting on the still-beating organs.

We have had our trained elephants use their massive feet to squish heads, and our lions, tigers and other fierce critters apply their sharp canines to rip bodies to shreds.

We have crushed with club blows to the head. We have "pressed" by slowly piling on heavy stones over many days. We have strapped our fellows to cartwheels and then swung iron bars to break, quite indelicately, every bone in the body. We have stretched on the "rack," dislocating every joint before either a confession, true or not, won a quick death or the body was pulled to pieces.

We have drowned, sometimes preceded by romantically walking the plank. Also with a nautical air, we have keelhauled and applied death's measure of lashes with a cat-o-nine-tails.

We have tossed into quagmires, a nice, tidy, cheap, low-tech option. As well, we have frugally starved, often placing the reluctant dieter in public cages so that the populace could be enriched by studying his wasting.

Our churchmen have, with great piety and ambition, burned thousands; ah, the fragrant smell of barbequed heretics and political dissidents. To speed the flames, executioners liberally applied tar to some clients before chaining them to the stake. Our genteel British associates preferred the auto-de-fe for ladies because, as opposed to the disrobing required for dismemberment, the fire preserved the ill-fated damsels' modesty.

In a particularly cathartic exercise, we have inserted the greased sharpened point of an upright stake into the rectum and allowed the honoree, by his or her own wild wiggling, to force himself or herself slowly, ever so slowly, down the pole until it pierced the heart.

Please, I'm only getting started. Humanity's imagination knows few bounds, after all.