Prisoners could be hung for stealing scraps of food, and minor infractions were dealt with by merciless floggings with cat-o'-nine-tails.
Syria: Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels tighten their grip across northern Syria, intimidating local residents with public floggings and executions.
Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times wrote last year that he counsels contestants "in the spirit of the British Navy circa 1800 — with ritual floggings and pungent insults".
Some 10,000 inaptly named Sons of Liberty ferreted out dissenters, then silenced them with public floggings, ritualistic applications of hot tar and sharp-quilled feathers, or an excruciating ride astraddle a rough-hewn fence rail with heavy weights dangling from their ankles.
Floggings with a rawhide strap were standard punishment, along with "shower baths" — a precursor of water-boarding — in which naked prisoners were tied to ladders and then sprayed in the face, chest and genitals with a high-pressure stream of cold water.
But it's not quite on a par with the lynchings, floggings and threatened executions of Pakistan.
Why exactly was I thinking of convict floggings with the cat-o'-nine-tails and corpses on the gibbet?
The Green Mountain Boys stopped sheriffs from enforcing New York laws and terrorized settlers who had New York grants, burning buildings, stealing cattle, and administering occasional floggings with birch rods.
