But the show featured something I thought was unique and important: it drew a direct parallel between torturing terrorism suspects and torturing criminal suspects, something I have blogged about many times but which I've rarely seen argued by others.

I've always felt that logic dictates that if you think it's ok to torture terrorism suspects, even if only in a "ticking time bomb" situation, you cannot believe it wouldn't be right to torture a criminal suspect in similar situations. In this show, one of the characters bluntly says that he affirmatively believes in torture because when he was a cop he broke the arm of a suspect in three places to get him to reveal where a kidnapped child was being held and ended up saving her. He is disgusted by the fact that the perpetrator could not be tried because of what he'd done.

A classic example of lynching as a means of social control was reported by the Jackson Daily News in December, 1928. Before escaping from the state penitentiary at Parchman, a Negro lifer named Charley Sheppard murdered the prison carpenter and kidnaped [sic] his 18-year-old daughter, whom he took on a wild 24-hour flight through the swamps. He allegedly raped the girl. Several thousand men, including units of the

National Guard, aided by bloodhounds, failed to catch Sheppard, who finally turned himself in to a woman plantation owner. A mob, skillfully and purposely directed, then seized him. After being displayed in front of a store, Sheppard was taken on a seven-hour tour of the main roads, the cross roads, and the back roads. Several prison camps were visited. As word of the affair spread through the Delta some 3000 cars and 6000 whites, according to the reporter, converged on the scene of the revelry.

Here, with the same methodical precision which had marked all their actions, mob leaders unloaded dried wood for the cremation, built their pyre, bound and strapped the negro and poured upon him gasoline which had been carried along for the occasion.

Before the match was touched to him Sheppard's mouth and nose were partly filled with mud to prevent him from inhaling gas fumes which might cause his instant death.

As the fire blazed up, "a wild-eyed member of the mob, intent on further torture, leaped atop the pile of wood, straddled the negro's body and cut his ears off with a pocket knife." Like a knock-out in the third round, the sacrifice itself took only a few minutes but not before the shrieks of the victim had been mingled with the screams of a hundred female spectators. Sheppard "twisted and rolled in the flames, and finally rolled off the pile of flaming stavewood." He was immediately seized and thrown back, and more gasoline was applied. The orgy finished, a leg bone and the skull were claimed as souvenirs. Later the ears were exhibited at a filling station. The coroner's verdict: "Death from causes unknown."