Ancient torture/execution method. Tie you to a boat (or trap you between two boats) and stuff you full of milk and honey, then pour some on you for good measure. The idea is that there are many biting insects and unpleasant things that will be attracted to the milk and honey. Being tied/trapped means your hands aren’t free to deal with them. Secondly, a large amount of milk and honey is a really good way to get diarrhea. So eventually, you’ll have to deal with that, and biting insects are more likely to swarm around you if you’re covered in literal shit. The victims usually die from exposure, but they will have an exceedingly unpleasant time before they expire. Very common to have… Soft tissue areas… Completely consumed before death.
As with any legal punishment, it’s always necessary to acknowledge that no matter how heinous the crime, some portion of people who are sentenced for that crime, will in fact be innocent.
I’d much much much rather not have a single innocent person be subjected to this, just so I can feel smug that some sick fuck “got what they deserved”. Lock em up where they can’t hurt anyone and call it a day. Cruel and usual punishments help absolutely no one in the end
Realistically, ever justice system is going to have to compromise between between the ease of incarcerating actual criminals and the likelihood of a false conviction, I don’t think it’d be possible to build a system where absolutely 0 innocent people get convicted of crimes they didn’t commit - unless it also was unwilling to convict actual offenders
In general making classification more sensitive will increase your false positive rate, and making it less sensitive will increase your false negative rate. Neither is preferable! The question is whether you consider the cost of a false positive or negative to be higher… I think most would argue that a false negative is far worse if that allows a child/children to be harmed. Consequently, if you are erring on the side of convicting more people, you should also err on the side of “not maiming those people” because the chances are some of them are innocent.
you should also err on the side of “not maiming those people” because the chances are some of them are innocent.
This was more or less my point, though frankly I don’t know that I totally agree that a false negative is “far worse”. Getting a false conviction as a child sexual offender is practically a death sentence in prison, and even if it’s not, it’s certainly enough to ruin that persons life forever. We’re talking about an actual human here. I’m really not sure what it is about children that make people so perfectly OK with throwing away the lives of scores of adults just to keep one child from harm.
Mind you, I’m not advocating that we should let all offenders go free for the sake of keeping any innocents out of prison, but personally I’d rather let several guilty men go free for a crime than see one innocent person have their lives ruined purely due to the bad luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and the incompetence of our justice system. Though I recognize that that’s no doubt a controversial opinion. Especially as no one ever believes that they themselves will be falsely convicted of something.
The idea is that one guilty man is capable of harming far more innocent people. You don’t want innocent people harmed because of false accusations, but you’re okay with 'several guilty mentioning free to avoid that, even though those several men will likely end up reoffending and harming more innocent people/children? Obviously there has to be a balance…
We’ve had cases of Prosecutors refusing to convict people of sex crimes if there was evidence it was actually done, due to their own… actions… and we’ve had cases of corrupt judges knowingly giving bullshit guilty verdicts because they were being paid off by private prisons
Obviously there are problems with our justice system so this isn’t realistic. That’s why I said “child molesters” and not “people convicted of child molestation”. By definition child molester means “person who has molested a child”
Do you have a way of determining with 100% accuracy which is which? Because if so, holy shit dude, you need to share that shit with the world - you could single handedly revolutionize global justic, what the fuck are you doing just posting about it on Lemmy???
Depending on what physical evidence is present you can be pretty damn sure in some cases. Adult DNA doesn’t just get into little kid orifices by accident.
Framing by the justice system happens all the time. Adult DNA doesn’t get there by accident, but DNA results can get falsified on purpose.
I get that you really want to torture people while feeling morally justified, but consider the fact that torturing convicted criminals doesn’t actually help anyone, including the victim, and that you will inevitably wind up torturing an innocent person. Period.
Like I said, lock 'em up where they can’t hurt anyone - but torturing them doesn’t do anything except make sadists happy, and I don’t think that’s what we should be optimizing for in a first world justice system.
The Persian Empire arguably trumped them all, however, when it created scaphism around 500 B.C.E.
This ancient execution method was also known as “the boats,” as victims were placed in two hollowed-out logs or boats before their suffering even began.
With their heads and limbs sticking out and their bodies trapped inside, the victim was force-fed milk and honey.
Their uncontrollable diarrhea filled the boats as executioners poured honey over the victim’s face — and vermin arrived to not only feast upon the prisoners, but enter their bodies to fatally eat them from the inside out.
The most interesting thing to me is both quoted descriptions talk of vermin and worms “springing forth” from the excrement. It was once thought that things like worms, insects, even mice and rats, would just spawn from various kinds of filth.
It was long thought that the Greek God Glycon was a work of fiction for similar reasons. That was until an artifact of Glycon worship was found and later other prints.
We know there were hundreds of Greek underworld gods but only 3 names fully survive today.
Much of what was written has been lost for various instances of destruction.
Like most of these “oh my God so brutal” execution methods, scaphism probably never actually happened or is at least exaggerated. Ctesias wrote the only first-hand account of the punishment ever being delivered and his credibility among modern historians is a bit… questionable. Plutarch’s own writings on scaphism were lifted straight from Ctesias, as well.
Even if scaphism did actually happen like Ctesias wrote, it’s not like it was a normal thing.
even if it happened only one or twice, even if it didn’t happen at all - someone had to think about it in enough detail to create a torture method beyond most people’s imagination
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