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.