Is Justice Burning?

This chapter begins with a survey of several of the explanations historians of capital punishment have put forward for the end of public executions in the West starting in the mid-nineteenth century. Besides well-known arguments of Foucault and others, I cite Victor Hugo’s observation from 1832 that moving the scaffold away from public view was an admission of shame in the practice. Against the background of secrecy laws proliferating around the U.S. death penalty today, I read Robert Coover’s 1977 novel The Public Burning, which restages the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 as an immense public spectacle in Times Square. The novel, I argue, crosses the two senses of its title; by dragging the execution into the public square it also brings out a shameless public sexual display, a public that is burning.