…Captain Henry Nicholas Nicholls was hanged in London for sodomy.
Executed Today is an interesting blog that describes executions that took place in the past on each day of the year. Today’s entry is about Nicholas Nicholls, who was executed in accordance with British law under which homosexuality was a capital offence until 1861.
According to the London Courier,
The prisoner was perfectly calm and unmoved throughout the trial, and even when sentence of death was passed upon him[...] At 9 o’clock in the morning the sentence was carried into effect. The culprit, who was fifty years of age, was a fine looking man, and had served in the Peninsular war. He was connected with a highly respectable family; but, since his apprehension not a single member of it visited him.
I hope that one day we will look back at Charlie Lynch’s sentence with the same incredulity with which we today view Nicholls’.
(Hat Tip to Andrew Sullivan for the first link)
If “we” refers to civilized democracies as I assume it does, then probably we will. But it is going to be a long long wait unless proactive steps are taken.
There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana. $7.7 billion is a lot of money, but that is one of the lesser evils. Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I haven’t even included the harm to young people. It’s absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes. – Milton Friedman
Also, read – Legalizing Crime, if you haven’t already done so.