In 1812, a burst of anti-Luddite panic law-making in Great Britain added to an already confusing series of statutes that addressed property crime.

At the height of circus animal acts in the late nineteenth century, animals who killed their captors might be publicly executed for their “crimes.”

Cotton Mather and other 17th-century American writers created a genre all their own: Puritan gallows literature, which both terrified and edified.

How New York City's tabloids sensationalized the murder case that inspired the classic film noir Double Indemnity.

A look at the American public's ambivalent opinion of the death penalty.

The sociologists Michael Radlet and Marian Borg test out six arguments for and against capital punishment.