Capital Punishment: The whip or the cage

Jeff Jacoby’s, “Bring Back the Flogging”, argues that flogging should be a method of corporal punishment that should be reconsidered by our criminal justice system. Within his opening argument, Jacoby uses two methods to sustain the readers’ attention: sex and violence. Jacoby describes Richard Hopkins sentence, in 1963, for selling arms and gunpowder to the Indians as being “’whipt, & branded with a hott iron on one of his cheeks’”. He also mentions Hannah Newell conviction of adultery in 1694, and her court ordered sentence of “fifteen stripes Severely to be laid upon her naked back at a common whipping post. Unfortunately, her convicted companion, Lambert Despair’s, sentence was more severe with twenty-five lashes and “that on the next Thursday Immediately after Lecture he stand upon the Pillory for… a full hower With Adultry In Capitall letters upon his brest”. However, Jacoby’s attention grabbing introduction does not make up for his unconvincing argume...