Lynching
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Lynching is a form of violence, usually execution, conceived of by its perpetrators as extrajudicial punishment for offenders or as a terrorist method of enforcing social domination. It is characterized by a summary procedure ignoring, bypassing, or even contrary to, the strict forms of law, notably judicial execution. Victims of lynching have generally been members of groups marginalized or vilified by society. The practice is age-old; stoning, for example, is believed to have started long before lapidation was adopted as a judicial form of execution.
"Lynch law" is frequently prevalent in sparsely settled or frontier districts, where government is weak and officers of the law too few and too powerless to preserve order. The practice has been common in periods of threatened anarchy. In the early twentieth century it was also found significantly in Russia and south-eastern Europe, but especially and almost peculiarly in America.
Lynching is sometimes justified by its supporters as the administration of justice (in a social-moral sense, not in law) without the delays and inefficiencies inherent to the legal system; in this way it echoes the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, which was justified by the claim, "Terror is nothing other than prompt, severe, inflexible justice."
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