I love this one:
Christopher Moore, for example, convicting of counterfeiting dollars at the Halifax Quarter Sessions in 1770, was sentenced "to stand in the pillory one hour with one of his ears nailed thereto." Moore escaped a worse fate because of uncertainty about whether the ear should be removed first; a statute of 1758 was ambiguous on the point, but one of 1774 made it clear that removal was indeed the prescribed punishment.
(From Philip Girard, Jim Phillips, R. Blake Brown, A History of Canadian Law: Volume One Beginnings to 1866, p 283.)
All three authors are friends, and I actually read a fair amount of this book in draft or when it appeared, but this paragraph had eluded me until now. A puzzle: which is worse, having the ear removed entirely or being attached to it while it spends an hour nailed to the pillory?
Here, from the back files: another Chris Moore doing cool things.
