South Carolina is preparing this week to execute a man by firing squad, a capital punishment method that hasn’t been used in ...

it is inappropriate to use retribution to justify capital punishment. This argument would have no value in a society that applied the death penalty consistently for particular types of murder.

This was a key attitude behind capital and corporal punishment from the 16th to the 19th centuries and led to different punishments for different types of crime. All punishments gave retribution ...