I'm no anthropologist, but it seems that there usually has been a certain element of sacrality in the administration of judicial death. The 'liturgy' of execution in Papal Rome, explored in a masterful essay by John Allen, might be an extreme example, but it certainly carries the requisite anthropological resonances of the practice.
The two revolutionary states of France and America offer I think a fascinating case study of how technological change (being the principle force of cultural change in the industrial era). The invention of the guillotine is the application of mechanical ingenuity and precision to the business of execution and terror, in a world right on the cusp of mechanical revolution. (The irony that Mastro Titta used such a device is duly noted). The electric chair was invented once again on the cusp of a new era, an electrical era of light bulbs and telegraph lines. If la guillotine demonstrated to an astonished and horrified world the capabilities of a mechanized state, the electric chair was designed specifically to showcase the new power. If it can fry a man like that, why wouldn't you want to wire your towns and cities for it? Lethal injection came into its own in the late 70s, just as Big Pharma was becoming the dominant force in the American economy.
If execution was once implicated in the sacred economy of state power and cosmic justice. it is now firmly a part of the mundane economy of profit and techonological potentiality. So what new horror will be dreamed up for us next?
Life in prison without the possibility of a parole in an institution owned and managed by a hedge fund receiving a block grant for every year you evade death, from which they can extract their appropriate profit margin?
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