You can mark you interesting snippets of text that will be available through a unique link in your browser.


lynching

Translation
lynching
See lyncher.

* * *

Execution of a presumed offender by a mob without trial, under the pretense of administering justice.

It sometimes involves torturing the victim and mutilating the body. Lynching has often occurred under unsettled social conditions. The term derives from the name of Charles Lynch, a Virginian who headed an irregular court to persecute loyalists during the American Revolution. In the United States, lynching was widely used in the post-Reconstruction South against blacks, often to intimidate other blacks from exercising their civil rights.

* * *

▪ mob violence
      a form of violence in which a mob, under the pretext of administering justice without trial, executes a presumed offender, often after inflicting torture and corporal mutilation. The term lynch law refers to a self-constituted court that imposes sentence on a person without due process of law. Both terms are derived from the name of Charles Lynch (1736–96), a Virginia planter and justice of the peace who, during the American Revolution, headed an irregular court formed to punish loyalists (loyalist).

      Historically, the fehmic courts (fehmic court) of medieval Germany imposed some punishments that involved lynching, as did the Halifax gibbet law (execution of those guilty of theft valued over a specific amount) and Cowper justice (trial after execution) in the border districts of England. Resembling these cases were the Santa Hermandad constabulary in medieval Spain and pogroms (pogrom) directed against Jews in Russia and Poland, although in these cases there was support from legally constituted authorities.

      Vigilante justice has been practiced in many countries under unsettled conditions whenever informally organized groups have attempted to supplement or replace legal procedure or to fill the void where institutional justice did not yet exist. Such conditions commonly give rise to acts of genocide. Statistics of reported lynching in the United States indicate that, between 1882 and 1951, 4,730 persons were lynched, of whom 1,293 were white and 3,437 were black. Lynching continued to be associated with U.S. racial unrest during the 1950s and '60s, when civil rights workers and advocates were threatened and in some cases killed by mobs.

Geoffrey Abbott
 

* * *


Universalium. 2010.

  
Share  

Look at other dictionaries:

  • lynching — Violent punishment or execution, without due process, for real or alleged crimes. Dictionary from West s Encyclopedia of American Law. 2005. lynching Violent punishment or execution, without due process, for …   Law dictionary

  • lynching — 1> линчевание …   Новый большой англо-русский словарь

  • Lynching — Lynch mob redirects here. For the rock band, see Lynch Mob (band). For the rap group, see Da Lench Mob. An African American hanged to death in a lynching, 1925 …   Wikipedia

  • lynching — noun a) Execution of a person by mob action without due process of law, especially hanging The police with difficulty prevented the swaying mass from lynching him on the spot. mdash; Jerry Stokes by b) Any act of violence inflicted by a mob upon… …   Wiktionary

  • Lynching — Lynch Lynch, v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Lynched}; p. pr. & vb. n. {Lynching}.] [See Note under {Lynch law}.] To inflict punishment upon, especially death, without the forms of law, as when a mob captures and hangs a suspected person. See {Lynch law}.… …   The Collaborative International Dictionary of English

  • lynching — линчевание …   Большой англо-русский и русско-английский словарь

  • lynching — n линчевание …   Англо-русский словарь по социологии

  • lynching — Общая лексика: линчевание …   Универсальный англо-русский словарь

  • lynching — линчевание …   Англо-русский юридический словарь

  • Lynching in the United States — is the practice in the 19th and 20th centuries of the humiliation and killing of people by mobs acting outside the law. These murders, most of them unpunished, often took the form of hanging and burning. Mobs sometimes tortured the… …   Wikipedia