Historian Paul friedland says the growing public fascination with and curiosity about executions is on a collision course with contemporary penal theory. A culture of sensibility that insists that people can't watch this stuff without being horrified, because if they aren't horrified, they're kind of inhuman. The reactions of the crowds in a lot of these cases were vexing both the authorities and a lot of the intellectual class. They were not re acting the way that they were supposed to. Not as human beings watching cruelty to other human beings. This was kind of getting on o control.