That hundred and forty years after Fyodor Dostoyevsky enlightened us against capital punishment, we still persist with it in some parts of our planet, belies our insensitivity towards the sensitivities of these condemned by the justice system of our own making. What Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin said in The Idiot then is something forever, “When they announce the sentence, you know, and prepare the criminal and tie his hands, and cart him off to the scaffold—that’s the fearful part of the business. The people all crowd round—even women— though they don’t at all approve of men looking on. And I may