ABSTRACT

In 1985, We Presented at the American Anthropological Association meeting in Washington, DC, a paper comparing capital punishment in modern-day Florida to Aztec rituals of human sacrifice in 16th-century Mexico. Finding the usual explanations for capital punishment and its widespread support in the contemporary United States incomplete at best, we hypothesized that capital punishment in contemporary America functions as the ultimate validator of law, serving ‘to reassure many that society is not out of control after all, that the majesty of the Law reigns, and that God is indeed in his heaven’, in much the same way the Aztec rituals reassured the population that the state was healthy and the Sun would remain in the heavens.