I promised the kids that if they work extra hard during harvest, we’d take a horse carriage into town and watch an execution.
Well, we did that, and especially my youngest son (5 winters old) was excited to see his first execution. And guess what?
All they did was just drop the guillotine blade on the thief, and that’s it. No screams, no splatter, just one quick chop and everyone heads home.
In “The Year of Living Biblically” Jacobs describes asking someone he had learned was an adulterer if he could stone them. He then proceeded to toss very small pebbles at them to make sure he was following the proscription from the Bible. Nobody was harmed.