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Torturing Our History
Beginning of article
THE 8TH AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION PROHIBITS CRUELAND UNUSUAL punishment. Thanks to the founders (and especially to James Madison, who conjured the Bill of Rights), U.S. citizens need not fear judicially sanctioned impalements or being drawn-and-quartered in the public square... at least not yet.
The framers were especially sensitive to the issue of torture, since they were living in its shadow. Benjamin Franklin was born in 1706-just fourteen years after the trials at Salem, where for the crime of refusing to plead either "guilty" or "not guilty" to the charge of witchcraft, one of the accused, Giles Cory, had been crushed to death beneath a series of increasingly heavy …
