e in those two punishments is amazing. I dont know what would be worse: being executed, or being paraded all over town in order to be exposed as an adulterer! Each punishment has horrible consequences for the person involved (especially being buried alive; Im sure somewhere along the way someone was wrongly accused), and each must have affected the community relations in that given society. I know that I would never be tempted to cheat on my wife if I knew the punishment could be a premature burial. However according to Frank, the small communities in remote Russia often believed that their governments punishments of certain crimes were not harsh enough, so the townspeople took it onto themselves to persecute the criminal as they saw fit. The warranted penalties the government used didnt prevent the criminals from breaking the law. These consequences differ greatly from the punishments of the German government in the early modern period. Governments ordered corporal punishments-such as mutilation, branding, and flogging-and the pillory that meant public disgrace. The above mentioned punishments are just more examples of how different cultures in different time periods used methods of punishment that would be thought of as unnecessary and cruel in modern United States. Although some of these methods might be good deterrents for crime in modern times (I certainly dont want to be buried alive or shamed in front of my entire town), there are certain human rights standards in this country and in much of the modern world that would never stand for such atrocities and embarrassments to be used as punishments. Another article discussed that lynching or beheading was the punishment for murder in Germany in the sixteenth century, which compares to the penalty of horse theft in Russia around 1900. Though the deadly consequences of horse theft in Russia were a little extreme and out of the ordinary; the crimes that seem to be on opposite ends of ...
