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You & the Law II
Q. What is Capital Punishment? How does it work?
A. Capital punishment is legal infliction of the death penalty in modern law; corporal punishment in its most severe form. Lynching, in contrast to capital punishment, is the unauthorized, illegal use of death as a punishment. The usual alternative to the death penalty is long-term or life imprisonment.
The earliest historical records contain evidence of capital punishment. It was mentioned in the Code of Hammurabi (1750 BC). The Bible prescribed death as the penalty for more than 30 different crimes, ranging from murder (see Exodus 21:12) to fornication (see Deuteronomy 22:13).
The death penalty has been inflicted in many ways now regarded as barbaric and forbidden by law almost everywhere: Crucifixion, boiling in oil, drawing and quartering, impalement, beheading, burning alive, crushing, tearing asunder, stoning and drowning are examples. In the U.S., the death penalty is currently authorized in one of five ways: hanging (the traditional method of execution throughout the English-speaking world), electrocution (introduced by New York State in 1890), the gas chamber (adopted in Nevada in 1923), firing squad (used only in Utah), or lethal injection (introduced in 1977 by Oklahoma). In most nations that still retain the death penalty for some crimes, hanging or the firing squad are the preferred methods of execution. In some countries that adhere strictly to the traditional practices of Islam, beheading or stoning are still occasionally employed as punishment.
The fundamental questions raised by the death penalty are whether it is an effective deterrent to violent crime, and whether it is more effective than the alternative of long-term imprisonment. Those who argue against the death penalty as a deterrent to crime cite the following: (1) Adjacent states, in which one has a death penalty and the other does not, show no significant long-term differences in the murder rate; (2) states that use the death penalty seem to have a higher number of homicides than states that do not use it; (3) states that abolish and then reintroduce the death penalty do not seem to show any significant change in the murder rate; (4) no change in the rates of homicides in a given city or state seems to occur following a local execution. In the early 1970s, some published reports purported to show that each execution in the U.S. deterred eight or more homicides, but subsequent research has discredited this finding. The current prevailing view among criminologists is that no conclusive evidence exists to show that the death penalty is a more effective deterrent to violent crime than long-term imprisonment.
The classic moral arguments in favor of the death penalty have been biblical and retributive. Whosoever sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed. (Genesis 9:6) has usually been interpreted as a divine warrant for putting the murderer to death. ïLet the punishment fit the crime is its secular counterpart; both maxims imply that the murderer deserves to die.
In other countries, the death penalty is inflicted for a range of crimes against people, property, public order and the state. Few African and no Middle Eastern (Arab) or Asian nations have abolished it. About a dozen European countries have carried out executions since the 1970s. By the late 1980s, some Western nations had no capital punishment, while others had abolished it except for military or national security offenses.
All contents © Copyright 2008 by William Grover Arnett, P.S.C.
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