The two meanings of 'torture' - to twist words and to inflict suffering - are shown to be allied in this indispensable historical and juridical study of the Eighth Amendment phrase 'cruel and unusual punishment.' Originating in the English Bill of Rights (1689), the phrase was perverted in the American slave codes to establish structures of racism. The perversion has been developed in our own time by twisting attention from the pain of the victim to the intentions of the tormentors. -- Peter Linebaugh, author of The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century
Colin Dayan is Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of, most recently, Haiti, History, and the Gods and is completing Held in the Body of the State, forthcoming.
[Dayan] builds her argument around one basic principle: that in a society of laws, we frame cruelty in terms of intent. Thus, she writes, we always have a loophole; it's not what we do but what we mean.... The argument may be somewhat overstated, but with its implicit sense that cruel and unusual punishment is an ever-shifting standard, it can't help but raise compelling questions, forcing us to reconsider our founding documents and what they say about us.—David Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Review
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