ust about anyone who sat through ninth grade Civics class can tell you that the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. But what exactly is cruel and unusual in contemporary American society? Public executions have been outlawed since 1936. No one has been executed by hanging or firing squad since 1996 (with the exception of Ronnie Lee Gardner, who was famously executed in 2010–despite a 2004 mandate by the Utah legislature to halt firing squad executions–because of his choice to be “grandfathered” under the old system[1]), and, with a few exceptions, the comparatively humane method of lethal injection is widely used in the thirty-four states in which the death penalty has not been abolished.[2]
