We are treated to a pan-imperial history of judicial killing which reveals the relationship between capital punishment and the broader culture of empire. The parallels with penal practice in early modern Europe are clear, not least in the physical inscription of sovereign power upon subjected bodies. The symbolic messages conveyed by execution and attacks on the dead criminal body were as central to nineteenth-century colonial executions as they were in Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Moreover, the very 'logic' of capital punishment and the treatment of the criminal corpse in the colonies was bound up with British understandings of the impact of execution upon specific cultures and religions, particularly local beliefs about the body, death and the afterlife. Executions and the methods of executing were thus in many instances intended as direct violations of local beliefs in order to enhance capital punishment's value as a deterrent and to strike terror into the hearts and minds of colonised subjects.
In this way, then, given the influence of local contexts , it is impossible to speak of 'colonial' practices and ideas as any kind of single entity. Why was the punishment of the executed body believed to be a terrifying and shameful fate that could serve the ends of state authority and crime control? In order to address this question we need to unravel some of the social and cultural meanings which were attached to the criminal corpse and to the body, death and the afterlife more generally in early modern Europe.
For although we have a detailed knowledge of the practice of capital punishment in this period, uncovering the underlying attitudes to execution and the executed body presents a much more difficult task. Our evidence is overwhelmingly of what the ruling elite thought of popular beliefs towards post-mortem punishment, much less popular belief itself, or the views of those who actually suffered such punishment. The voices of the criminals who suffered and of the crowd who witnessed such spectacles are almost always at one remove. In the course of the seventeenth century, many of the pre-mortem, physical torments of capital punishment were largely abandoned or at least mitigated. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the burnings, breakings and dismemberments came to fall with few exceptions upon the dead, rather than the live, criminal body. The death penalty moreover constituted an elementary particle in the early modern state's efforts at crime control and the meting out of justice in respect to a wide range of offences.
Indeed, in the course of the early modern period the emphasis shifted from capital punishment's role in marking out state authority to punishing and preventing crime. Europe's rulers undoubtedly still had recourse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to spectacular and brutal executions in the interests of state security at times of serious social and political unrest, as several of the chapters in this volume reveal. But it was also the product of a strongly held belief in the efficacy of making examples and of deterrence by terror.49 To this end, then, the punishment of the criminal corpse was above all else designed to be terrifying, exemplary and shameful. In the opening substantive chapter of this volume, James Kelly provides a welcome addition to the limited number of studies we have of Ireland's penal history, through a survey of execution and the executed body over the course of the eighteenth century. The practice of capital punishment in this period followed no simple linear pattern, nor the kind of dramatic, wholesale shift suggested by Foucault.
On the contrary it fluctuated back and forth, applied with greater or lesser force in response to outbreaks of criminality and political subversion. The recourse to exemplary sanctions actually increased over the middle decades of the eighteenth century in the face of serial killers and agrarian disorder. And the direct threats to ruling Protestant authority in the 1790s prompted an even greater resort to aggravated executions, not least the display of severed heads in public places. Finally, utility emerges as an additional function of the punishment of the criminal corpse, particularly with the rise of punitive dissection in the eighteenth century.
In sum, therefore, executions and the punishment of the executed body served a range of functions. The dead criminal body was harnessed for a variety of sometimes competing, but at other times complementary, ends. A comprehensive account of execution and the executed body in Europe between the late Middle Ages and the nineteenth century is beyond the scope of this Introduction.
A number of distinctive features mark out executions and the treatment of the criminal corpse in the long eighteenth century from the centuries immediately preceding it, and these need to be highlighted. Most crime-scene executions ended with the corpse being hung in chains on the same spot, the gallows doubling as a gibbet. As in the case of Ireland described by James Kelly, so too in England the middle decades of the eighteenth century (c. 1740s–70s) saw a substantial increase in the use of hanging in chains, for murderers and robbers in particular. Hanging in chains had been practised in England since the late fourteenth century upon a common understanding – not enshrined in law – that the bodies of executed felons were at the disposal of the king.
The passage of the Murder Act in 1752, which for the first time put hanging in chains onto the statute books, might then be seen as the formal coming of age of gibbeting. Through a detailed case-study of the smugglers hung in chains in the 1740s, Dyndor highlights the ways in which the location of the crime, the background of the offender and the particulars of landscape, space and place dictated the choice of gibbet locations in different contexts. She reveals the specific messages and functions that the exposure of the criminal corpse was designed to convey and fulfil within each particular gibbet location typology. And just as spaces and places gave meaning to instances of hanging in chains, so in turn the gibbet made its mark through place names, folklore and memorials. The criminal corpse has been – and, in some contexts, continues to be – a significant site of state power, criminal justice, scientific anatomy and popular medicine.
Died In Spanish Google Translate As the chapters in this volume show, various factors were at work in the practice of execution and the treatment of the executed body in the past, assuming different forms at different times and places. Across many of the historical contexts studied here, attacks on the dead criminal body were a key means by which states sought to convey messages about, and shore up, their authority in the absence of alternative forms of social control. On many occasions this came into conflict with ruling-elite sensibilities about the sight of pain, suffering and death. The influence of popular beliefs about the body, death and the afterlife (and of the ruling authority's understandings of such beliefs) on the forms of execution and post-mortem punishment put in practice likewise comes through in several of the chapters. So too, finally, does the agentive power of the criminal corpse; its ability to resist or even invert the intentions of those who try to claim a monopoly over it, either though the subversion of the execution crowd or through popular memory. These common themes of course mirror the several metanarratives described above which have each sought to provide overarching explanations for penal practice and change in Europe and wider afield.
But the chapters in this volume suggest that technologies of social control, sensibilities and religious and cultural attitudes have acted in distinctive ways within different historical contexts. By following the bodies and voices of the condemned as they were mediated through the staging of capital punishment, he seeks to understand how the death penalty changed, even before physical death, the very nature of the offender and their reinvention under the ceremony of justice. The bodies and voices of the condemned, it becomes apparent, were conceptualised in very different ways in London, Paris and Palermo.
In France, unlike in England , the criminal hauled onto the scaffold moments before execution was in an important and very meaningful sense already dead. As Bastien notes, in eighteenth-century Europe civic life and biological life were two distinct realities, and the staging of capital punishment in Paris sought to end the offender's life socially as well as biologically. The voice of French felons was 'confiscated'; fragmented and then re-scripted by the court clerk.
Penitents spoke for offenders in Palermo, a 'doubled' speech which might either support or challenge the condemned's social exclusion. In England, by contrast, felons were expected to speak for themselves on the gallows, to make their peace with God and the injured community. Many admitted their guilt and accepted the justice of their sentence, but some did not – in either case, the Tyburn speech was 'free'. Anderson concludes her chapter with a word on the remarkable shortness of British imperial memory and its sense of moral superiority. An essential element of this 'politics of imperial separation and superiority' was thus a discourse of Chinese legal despotism, a notion of a cruel 'other' created and nurtured by the British and its fellow civilising imperial powers.
It is to the origins of this Western discourse of Chinese legal despotism – which can be found in the infamous execution of two Western sailors at the hands of the Chinese in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – that Song-Chuan Chen turns in Chapter 7. Yet this was far from the view taken by the British at the time, who, shocked by the manner of the executions, set the tone for a narrative that was sorrowful and distrustful of Chinese law. Ensuing, and highly sensationalised, representations of the two cases in the British press in the 1830s cemented the idea of Chinese legal despotism even in the face of voices to the contrary, such as that of the Chinese legal expert George Thomas Staunton. Indeed, this was a selective and sensationalised memory which in an important sense kept the two executed sailors 'alive' and out of context.
The fear elicited by post-mortem punishments was therefore at least in part that it might in fact involve a physically painful end. But the fear and dishonour also resulted from popular understandings of death and the afterlife – a belief that torments could indeed extend beyond the final breath of life. 'Why should inhumanity lay her butchering hands on an inoffensive carcase?
And in terms of shaming and dishonouring the offender, much of this worked through the denial of customary burial and the exposure of the corpse in liminal and 'criminal' spaces which were both symbolically and literally outside of the community. Brutal forms of execution which inflicted physical pain and attacked the dead criminal body had long existed, and were further extended in the sixteenth century. And yet the rise of machine learning makes it more difficult for us to carve out a special place for us.
If you believe, with Searle, that there is something special about human "insight," you can draw a clear line that separates the human from the automated. It is understandable why so many people cling fast to the former view. At a 2015 M.I.T. conference about the roots of artificial intelligence, Noam Chomsky was asked what he thought of machine learning.
He pooh-poohed the whole enterprise as mere statistical prediction, a glorified weather forecast. Even if neural translation attained perfect functionality, it would reveal nothing profound about the underlying nature of language. It could never tell you if a pronoun took the dative or the accusative case.
This kind of prediction makes for a good tool to accomplish our ends, but it doesn't succeed by the standards of furthering our understanding of why things happen the way they do. A machine can already detect tumors in medical scans better than human radiologists, but the machine can't tell you what's causing the cancer. As Caroline Sharples shows in the final chapter of this volume , British occupying forces in post-war Germany likewise struggled over the disposal of the material remains and consequent immaterial legacy of their enemies, in this case the bodies of executed Nazi war criminals. Focusing on the prison precinct of Hameln, the centre for executions in the British zone of occupation after 1945, Sharples traces the burial and reburial of executed war criminals and the petitions of grieving relatives demanding to know the post-mortem state of their loved ones. Even before the first convictions had been reached, the British were clearly in a state of uncertainty about how to proceed, torn between the need to show justice done and the desire to eradicate all physical reminders of the Third Reich. In the end they opted for secrecy; burying the executed in unmarked graves, first within the grounds of the prison, and later in an annexe of the local cemetery, refusing to disclose the location of the graves to relatives.
But the desire of next-of-kin to know the final resting place of their loved ones prevented any possibility that the Nazi past would be so easily buried. The British wall of silence and rejection of local burial customs opened the way for widespread criticism, spearheaded by the German press in the 1950s. The burial of the executed at the hands of the British would thus come to play a part in competing narratives of the Nazi past, including notions of German 'victimhood'. Later reburials of the remains in more respectable locations by the Federal German Republic attempted, again, to bury the past and allow the nation to move on.
The corpses of executed Nazi war criminals as such formed a key element of an almost cyclical process of remembrance and forgetting of Germany's recently turbulent past. The post-execution history of these perpetrators, as Sharples concludes, continues to resonate. There are also obviously questions about how we might define a 'post-execution/post-mortem' punishment. Does this include, for instance, bodies left hanging from the gallows for a few hours after execution, or the brief holding up of severed heads to the watching crowd before interment?
Should any form of execution which prevented the customary burial of the condemned be considered a postmortem punishment? Do we need to draw a distinction between the pains of intention and the pains of neglect? No simple answer can be given to such questions, and any definition would of course be specific to the particular historical context in consideration.
Contributors have thus been free to examine the penal practices which they feel fit within the remit of execution and the criminal corpse, including extrajudicial forms of execution. The late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century also witnessed significant changes in the form of executions and the punishments that were inflicted upon the criminal corpse. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in particular saw a conspicuous shift towards aggravated forms of execution which attacked the dead, rather than the live, criminal body.
In short, if the ruling authorities of eighteenth-century Europe were increasingly unwilling to publicly inflict the kinds of pre-mortem, physical torments which had come to prominence in the sixteenth century, they were, however, willing to impose similar sanctions upon the criminal corpse. Post-mortem punishments continued to be enacted, and in some respects were even extended, throughout the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Minsky's criticism of the Perceptron extended only to networks of one "layer," i.e., one layer of artificial neurons between what's fed to the machine and what you expect from it — and later in life, he expounded ideas very similar to contemporary deep learning.
But Hinton already knew at the time that complex tasks could be carried out if you had recourse to multiple layers. The simplest description of a neural network is that it's a machine that makes classifications or predictions based on its ability to discover patterns in data. With one layer, you could find only simple patterns; with more than one, you could look for patterns of patterns. Each successive layer of the network looks for a pattern in the previous layer.
This more or less parallels the way information is put together in increasingly abstract ways as it travels from the photoreceptors in the retina back and up through the visual cortex. At each conceptual step, detail that isn't immediately relevant is thrown away. If several edges and circles come together to make a face, you don't care exactly where the face is found in the visual field; you just care that it's a face. If elected, however, we will go further, and I will not seek an execution date for any person already on death row. I will also embark upon a thorough review of every existing death penalty case from Los Angeles County.
Most importantly, I will work collaboratively with various stakeholders to get as many of the 229 people currently on death row from Los Angeles County resentenced to a sentence other than death. Given all the flaws in the death penalty system, there is a serious risk of executing innocent people. Since 1973, at least 167 persons facing execution have been exonerated with evidence of their innocence, including five in California. Some of these condemned men and women were exonerated within mere days or even hours of their scheduled executions. Vicente Benavides, who was released from death row in California in 2018, served 25 years on death row for a crime he didn't commit. If not for the legal delays caused by challenges to lethal injection, he could have been executed.
Several investigations have also provided substantial evidence that innocent people have been executed. These include Cameron Willingham, who was executed in Texas in 2004 despite the existence of new evidence showing that the fire that caused the tragic death of his three daughters was actually an accident, not arson. The Brain researchers had shown the network millions of still frames from YouTube videos, and out of the welter of the pure sensorium the network had isolated a stable pattern any toddler or chipmunk would recognize without a moment's hesitation as the face of a cat. The machine had not been programmed with the foreknowledge of a cat; it reached directly into the world and seized the idea for itself. The cat paper showed that machines could also deal with raw unlabeled data, perhaps even data of which humans had no established foreknowledge. This seemed like a major advance not only in cat-recognition studies but also in overall artificial intelligence.
A "back-translation" is a translation of a translated text back into the language of the original text, made without reference to the original text. Comparison of a back-translation with the original text is sometimes used as a check on the accuracy of the original translation, much as the accuracy of a mathematical operation is sometimes checked by reversing the operation. But the results of such reverse-translation operations, while useful as approximate checks, are not always precisely reliable. Back-translation must in general be less accurate than back-calculation because linguistic symbols are often ambiguous, whereas mathematical symbols are intentionally unequivocal.
In the context of machine translation, a back-translation is also called a "round-trip translation." When translations are produced of material used in medical clinical trials, such as informed-consent forms, a back-translation is often required by the ethics committee or institutional review board. What did the states of early modern Europe aim to achieve through executions and attacks on the executed body? As Garland argues, the distinctive political and penological context of early modern Europe meant that capital punishment was absolutely central to the emergent states with respect to two functions in particular – state power and crime control. Through brutally violent and spectacular executions, emergent sovereign states physically inscribed their power on to the bodies of those put to death.
The intense pain inflicted on the criminal body was of course intended to cower the population into submission through ruthless examples; a shock-and-awe assertion of the state's might. Yet the punishment of the body and the pain inflicted was also intended to convey wider messages beyond the state's ability to crush its enemies.47 Early modern executions were highly ceremonious, ritualised and symbolic events which sought to display the natural authority of the state. How frequently was capital punishment carried out in early modern Europe, and how did this change over time? Whilst the evidence is patchy, a broad pattern can be identified across much of Western Europe. Levels of execution fluctuated greatly, but not in any simple or linear way.
