Capital Punishment

Capital punishment has been used throughout most recorded history. It is a pro­vision in the Code of Hammurabi which was written more than 3500 years ago; the Bible recommends the death penalty for more than twenty-five offenses, rang­ing from murder to fornication. It was also used by the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Although there are periods in English history when the death penalty was not used, for example, during the reign of William the Conqueror in the eleventh cen­tury, it remained an important component in the criminal law. By 1800, there were more than 200 crimes that could be punished by death, and more than 1,000 offenders were sentenced to death each year. The American colonists carried on this tra­dition and used the death penalty for a wide variety of crimes, starting with the execution of Captain George Kendall in 1608.

Encouraged by the writings of Enlightenment philosophers, England repealed most capital statutes during the nineteenth century, a move that was copied in a few American states, such as Michigan in 1847, and a few European and South American nations, such as Venezuela (1853) and Portugal (1867). When complete abolition could not be achieved, reformers concentrated on limiting the scope and mitigating the harshness of the death penalty. Pennsylvania adopted a law in 1794 to distinguish first- and second-degree murder and limited the death penalty to murders committed with premeditation or in the course of carrying out another felony (first-degree murder). In 1846, Louisiana abolished the mandatory death penalty and authorized the option of sentencing a capital offender to life impris­onment rather than to death, a reform universally adopted in the U.S. during the following century. After the 1830s, public executions ceased to be commonplace, but did not stop entirely until after 1936.

Today, the most severe sentence used in our nation is capital punishment, or execution. More than 14,500 confirmed executions have been carried out in America under civil authority. Most of these executions were for murder and rape. However, federal, state, and military laws have conferred the death penalty for other crimes, including robbery, kidnapping, treason (offenses against the federal government), espionage, and desertion from military service.

In recent years, the Supreme Court has limited the death penalty to first-degree murder, and only then when aggravating circumstances, such as murder for prof­it or murder using extreme cruelty, are present. The federal government still has provisions for granting the death penalty for espionage by a member of the armed forces, treason, and killing while committing certain federal crimes, such as drag trafficking. Some states continue to sentence criminals to death for crimes such as aircraft piracy, random kidnapping, and the aggravated rape of a child, but n remains to be seen whether the courts will allow criminals to be executed for any crime less than aggravated first-degree murder.