what crimes might be deemed so unforgivable as to merit a sentence of crucifixion?
In fantasy no real crime is necessary. But neither in the real world. How many people have been executed by the state (whatever you mean by the word "state") for political or other purposes who never did anything wrong?
Anyway, like some recent talk on 'Plantation Plight' this can get a bit uncomfortable unless we're clear what kind of fantasy we're talking about...
many stories show us victims who are innocents, martyrs, rebels for a just cause, are punished for trumped-up charges, or guilty only of infractions against an unjust or restrictive society (such as resistance against tyranny, slaves trying to escape, or people violating some obscure holy traditions...)
- so of course the sympathy goes to the victim ( though in certain cases using that word is supposedly not allowed
) and the booing and hissing goes against the enforcing society, even if we sometimes see that the executioners themselves are also shown with a human dimension and their own conflicts that lead them to where they end up.
But what if we have a delinquent who is, even in our view, morally guilty, but not necessarily a complete 'monster' that we can easily dissociate all our emotions from -- and a society that has its own line of reasoning that leads to such a punishment...
... it can get ugly...
I couldn't, and wouldn't want to, draw up lists, but we've had discussions on the death penalty, and penal justice generally, before.
One historical trend we've seen in Western nations (and it's not that long ago that most Western nations had the death penalty) is to see the purpose of justice to be increasingly the 'improvement' of the delinquent to 'bring them into the fold' of society again. The death penalty as well as true life-long imprisonment then remain as the last resort for those perpetrators that society despairs of ever rehabilitating. In parallel with that, 'pride' of applying the death penalty has receded, public executions have gone out of fashion, and 'humane' execution methods have been sought, that turned the execution more into a 'removal' of the unacceptable element, than a public ceremony of affirmation of morality. Also, those most extreme options of punishment are subjected to continuous doubt and challenge.
Most antique cultures didn't care about 'humanely' putting to death those who they considered abhorrent or dangerous to society (they may have offered more humane methods or even the option of suicide to the privileged) - and the public spectacle was an integral part of the process - and they didn't harbor any doubts about what they were doing.
Revolutionary regimes also often show some or all aspects of that, regardless of whether they want to create the 'New Man' according to 'rational' ideas, or bring back the 'Justified and ancient' ways according to scriptures. The Islamic State goes all the way there; the terror of the French revolution used a 'humane' instrument but also did so very publicly and proudly.
If perhaps society decides, that the relation between it and its members, is not so much defined by
rights of the individual that society has to guarantuee, but by
obligations that the individual must fulfill to society, and uses public punishments to enforce that cultural shift, extracting as much suffering as possible from the delinquent to show them to all in the process of '
paying back their debt to society' ... pretty much anything could be possible.
Those kind of cultural shifts might happen when the preceding social order is perceived as having failed, reneged on its promises, and is finally weak enough to be replaced by those who want to bring about the entirely new or return to an idealized golden age. Of course that's all just dark fantasy and couldn't ever happen...
Because by doing so, they undermine the social order of society.
