Somewhere in the foggy marches that stretch between a ceremonial Tyburn hanging and the many guises of lethal collective violence in the workaday world dwells the editorial discretion of Executed Today, keeping a lonely vigil at a forgotten customs-post.

What, after all, is an execution?

This site has dallied before, and will dally again, with those border cases — summary executions and borderline executions.

Joined thematically as near-executions, these next three days are of themselves as different from one another as three different killings can be … suggesting the topical breadth spanned by the ultimate sanction.

• Nov. 19: Marshall Ratliff lynched for the Santa Claus bank robbery
• Nov. 20: Aper, by the Emperor Diocletian
• Nov. 21: Partisans by the Sonderbataillon Dirlewanger

On this day..

• 2010: Li Haito, reliquarian
• 1840: Zachariah Freeman
• Feast Day of St. Barlaam
• 1659: William Lamport, the real Zorro?
• 1784: Richard Barrick, Massachusetts highwayman
• 1895: Jesus Vialpando and Feliciano Chavez, desperados
• 1720: Edward Hunt, the first counterfeiter executed in colonial Pennsylvania
• 1929: Myles Fukunaga
• c. 865: Ragnar Lodbrok, Viking raider
• Themed Set: Vikings
• 1945: Three German war criminals
• 2002: Craig Neil Ogan, drug war informant
• 1928: Marshall Ratliff lynched for the Santa Claus Bank Robbery
• 1915: Joe Hill