“In case we’re not sure exactly what happened here, Pinker explains that Harrison was ‘partly strangled, disemboweled, castrated and shown his organs being burned before being decapitated.'”
Now that’s what I call capital punishment. And I’m guessing Harrison wasn’t sedated during this. (The event took place at Charing Cross, London, in 1660.)
From the Scientific American blog Cross-Check reviewing Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.