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CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: HISTORY

Capital punishment is a legal infliction of the death penalty; in modern law, corporal punishment in its most severe form. The usual alternative to the death penalty is long-term or life imprisonment.

The earliest historical records contain evidence of capital punishment. is mentioned in the Code of Hammurabi. The Bible prescribed death as penalty for more than 30 different crimes, ranging from murder to mention. The Draconian Code of ancient Greece imposed capital punishment for every offence. In  England, during the reign of William the Conqueror, the death s penalty was not used, although the results of interrogation and torture were often fatal. By the end of the 15^th century, English law recognized six major crimes: treason, murder, larceny, burglary, rape, and arson. By 1800, more 200 capital crimes were recognized; and as a result, 1000 or more persons were sentenced to death each year. In early American colonies the death penalty was commonly authorized for a wide  variety of crimes. Blacks, whether slave or free, were threatened with death for many crimes that were punished less severely when committed whites.

Efforts to abolish the death penalty did not  gather momentum until the end of the18-th century. In Europe, a short treatise, Crimes and Punishments, by the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria, inspired influential thinkers such as the French philosopher Voltaire to oppose torture, flogging, and the death penalty The abolition of capital punishment in England in November 1965 was welcomed by most people with humane and progressive ideas. To them it seemed a departure from feudalism, from the cruel pre-Christian spirit of revenge: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Many of these people think differently now. Since the abolition of capital punishment crime — and especially murder—has been on increase throughout Britain. Today, therefore, public opinion in Britain has changed. People who before, also in Parliament, stated that capital punishment was not a deterrent to murder — for there have always been murders in all countries with or without the law of execution — now feel that killing the assassin is the' lesser of two evils. Capital punishment, they think, may not be the ideal answer, but it is better than nothing, especially when, as in England, a sentence of life imprisonment only lasts eight or nine years.

 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.

DEFENDERS of the death penalty insist that because taking an offender's life is a more severe punishment than any prison term, it must be the better deterrent. SUPPORTERS also argue that no adequate deterrent in life imprisonment is effective for those already serving a life term who commit murder while being in prison, and for revolutionaries, terrorists, traitors, and spies.

In the U .S. those who argue against the death penalty as a deterrent to crime cite the following: (1) Adjacent states, in which one has the death penalty and the other does not, show no significant 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 rate of homicides in a given city or state seems to occur following an expository execution.

In the early 1970s, some published reports showed 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 call for retribution. "Whosoever sheds man's blood, by ran shall his blood be shed" has usually been interpreted as a divine warrant for  putting the murderer to death. "Let the punishment fit the crime" is its secular counterpart; both statements imply that the murderer deserves to die. DEFENDERS of capital punishment have also claimed that society  the right to kill in defence of its members, just as the individual may I in self-defence. The analogy to self-defence, however, is somewhat  doubtful, as long as the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent to violent crimes has not been proved.

The chief objection to capital punishment has been that it is always used  unfairly, in at least three major ways. First, women are rarely sentenced  death and executed, even though 20 per cent of all homicides in recent years have been committed by women. Second, a disproportionate number of non-whites are sentenced to death and executed. Third, poor and friendless defendants, those with inexperienced or court-appointed attorney, are most likely to be sentenced to death and executed.

DEFENDERS of the death penalty, however, have insisted that, because none of the laws of capital punishment causes sexist, racist, or class bias in its use, these kinds of discrimination are not a sufficient reason for abolishing the death penalty. OPPONENTS have replied that the death penalty can be the result of a mistake in practice and that it is impossible to administer fairly.