Palace guardsman José Gómez Moreno started his diary with anecdotes relating to the strange occurrences which seemed to happen so frequently in late eighteenth-century Mexico City. Freak accidents, fires, murders, kidnappings, and assaults were not uncommon. While he certainly showed a fascination for the oddities of the day – from balloons to the viceroy’s wig – the halberdier paid special attention to the 246 executions that he witnessed over the course of twenty-two years, an average of just over eleven per year. Some years saw more hangings, garrotings, and burnings than others. Annual executions peaked in 1790, with a total of thirty-two in the first full year of Viceroy Revillagigedo’s reign.

The practice of criminal justice in western and central Europe was more violent between 1400 and 1600 than before or afterwards, but sensational propaganda produced during this period exaggerates the prevalence of torture and execution. Many criminals evaded justice altogether and most defendants who were caught and brought to trial were subject to quick and relatively merciful justice. Fines, short prison sentences and banishment were far more commonplace than brutally painful execution rituals. As early as the seventeenth century, the practice of both torture and execution declined, the result of changes in Christianity, the growing confidence of secular states, and concerns that inflicting pain was inherently abusive. Enlightenment authors such as Voltaire and Beccaria, who insisted on judicial reform in the late eighteenth century, grossly distorted the actual practice of criminal justice in their own era in ways that have allowed historians to assume that criminal justice in the pre-modern period was more violent than it actually was.