Many relate to forms of execution: a creature with guns growing out of its back represents the firing squad while a glowing humanoid with syringes for eyes represents lethal injections.
Cruel forms of execution in Europe included "breaking" on the wheel, boiling in oil, burning at the stake, decapitation by the guillotine or an axe, hanging, drawing and quartering, and drowning.
Yet, while the US started to shift toward less spectacular forms of execution, they were not less public, not less symbolic, and certainly not less racially charged, as a result – until an effective moratorium on the penalty which lasted from 1960 to 1976.
We would hardly regard a king who executes every law-breaker, the jaywalker no less than the murderer, as just; nor would we feel much better if, in an effort to fit the punishment to the crime, the king should reserve the more "humane" forms of execution for the jaywalker.
"Prospective opportunities in the municipal sector may be narrower than in the past, given changing perceptions about municipal risk among buyers, lower confidence in the financial guaranty industry broadly and a trend toward alternative forms of execution," including uninsured bonds, Moody's said Wednesday.
Then the Roman military power whipped Jesus, and then crucified him, one of the cruelest forms of execution.
Still, headlines about botched executions and the legalization of other forms of execution may be eroding Americans' support for the death penalty.
In a 2010 interview with Scientific American, Teresa Zimmers, a molecular biologist at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, said "there isn't any medical evidence" to support using lethal injection over other forms of execution.
Some death penalty experts say that the push toward legalizing more draconian forms of execution is a political move, with legislatures trying to pressure the courts, including the US Supreme Court, to allow new, experimental drugs to be used.
The external algorithms are inserted into an ILP system as a special kind of predicates (lazily evaluable predicates implementing learning and classification forms of execution).
