For a sizable majority of the world, capital punishment is a remnant of barbarism from an increasingly distant past. Its persistence in the United States is an example of the dark side of American exceptionalism. According to Amnesty International, the U.S. is one of only a handful of countries that still regularly carry out executions (aligning us with China, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Vietnam, and Yemen). But even for proponents of capital punishment, turning an execution into a public spectacle has long been regarded as improper if not depraved.

According to a pair of death-penalty scholars, public executions in colonial America were part of a system in which virtually all punishment of crime was corporal and conducted publicly. But after the American Revolution, the “walled-off penitentiary replaced the pillory and the whipping post, and most states abolished the public festival of hanging,” though the practice persisted in sensational cases. The last public execution in the U.S. was held in Kentucky in 1936, when tens of thousands gathered to watch a Black man be hanged for allegedly raping a white woman. The association of public executions with appeals to bigotry was not that unusual. I can remember my rural Georgia grandmother singing “The Ballad of Mary Phagan,” a popular song........

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