A HISTORY OF THE DEATH PENALTY
Mankind has always understood that electricity carries danger. Long before we knew what it was, we knew to avoid it. Lightning bolts come from the sky and shatter trees or bring down chimneys and the steeples of churches. The power is immense. If the lightning hits loose, wet sand it often leaves a physical mark behind. The bolt heats the sand to over 3,000 degrees, melting the silica in the sand to create glass tubes called fulgurites or thunderbolts.
These hollow tubes can be several inches across and can penetrate several feet into the ground. The largest one known to be found was over sixteen feet long, in Florida, though there are reports of fulgurites twice this length. The thunderbolts are formed in about a second. The ancient world knew all about them and knew the power of the lightning that caused them. They attributed the power to the weapons of the gods.
Now we know that electricity is the force behind the bolt of lightning and the thunderous crack that accompanies it. We have harnessed that power. It is not surprising that the idea arose to use electricity to kill people. But there is a problem; it doesn’t always kill. There are many stories of people being struck by lightning and walking away and of people being badly injured but making a full recovery. YouTube is full of dramatic footage of lightning strikes. In one a bolt spears the field during a game of soccer in South Africa and several players hit the ground as if they have been shot. But within a minute all are moving, although two had to be taken away by stretcher.
Because electricity doesn’t always kill, the electric chair has become one of the most controversial forms of execution in the modern world. A botched execution can be a slow and painful process. Today we like our executions to be clinical and efficient but that wasn’t always the case. Sometimes the point was to make the convict suffer. The history of capital punishment is littered with methods that make Old Sparky seem humane.
Most ancient and primitive societies practiced some form of the death penalty. The biblical injunction of “an eye for an eye” was almost universal and if you killed someone, you paid the ultimate price. Imprisonment, as we know it, was not common. If the crime was not serious, you paid compensation. For more serious incidents, you risked physical punishment such as being stoned in the stock, losing a hand or an eye, or having your tongue cut out. But for murder, rape, and treason, among other crimes, you would be put to death, both as a punishment and as a deterrent to others.
Methods were imaginative and gruesome. Criminals were boiled to death, flayed until all their skin peeled off, slowly sliced or disemboweled, or crushed by huge weights. In India, the weight was often supplied by an elephant slowly bringing its foot down on the criminal’s head until it smashed apart like a coconut.
The Code of Hammurabi was one of the earliest recorded legal systems. It came from Babylon around 1772 BC and contains the earliest mention of “an eye for an eye.” Law 196 states: “If a man destroys the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye. If one breaks a man’s bone, they shall break his bone.” However, you could avoid these punishments by paying a fine.
But if you stole property or took the slave of another out of the city limits, you would be put to death. The execution method depended on the crime. If a mother and son were caught committing incest, both were burned to death. But if a scheming lover murdered his rival, he would be impaled, his body balanced on a sharp spike which would penetrate him to cause a slow and agonizing death.
The Torah, the law that governed ancient Israel, was laid out in the first five books of the Old Testament and set down the death penalty for murder, kidnapping, practicing magic, violating the Sabbath, blasphemy, and sexual crimes. Executions were rare, however.
The ancient Greeks set out their legal system about twenty-six hundred years ago, with the death penalty as punishment for a wide variety of crimes. The Romans also had a highly evolved legal system and made good use of capital punishment. One of their favorite methods was crucifixion, where the condemned were tied to a tree or a cross with their hands outstretched. As their body fell forward against the restraints, their own weight would gradually suffocate them, causing them to expire after a lengthy period.
In medieval Europe, the death penalty became one of the most common forms of punishment, particularly when applied to the lower or peasant classes. It was cheaper than detaining someone. Generally dungeons were only used to house rich captives who might be ransomed. Those convicted of crimes were put to death. The modern concept of imprisonment was unheard of. During the reign of England’s Henry VIII, seventy-two thousand people are estimated to have been executed, including two of his own wives.
Some of the medieval methods of execution were torturous. Being hanged and then drawn and quartered was one of the more barbaric. The prisoner would be hung until nearly dead and then cut down and revived. Once consciousness had returned, a sharp knife was applied to the gut and the entrails pulled out and presented to the victim. His penis was also hacked off. Finally, the executioner would chop the prisoner’s head off with an axe, bringing his suffering to a close. The body was then hacked into four quarters and put on public display as a deterrent.
Women were spared this—instead they were tied to a pole and a fire built around them. They were then burned to death. This was a common punishment for those accused of witchcraft. Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries up to three hundred thousand women across Europe were subjected to this savage execution.
Times were harsher and most people accepted the rightness of capital punishment. But even then there were voices crying out against the practice. In the twelfth century, a Jewish scholar, Moses Maimonides, wrote: “It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent man to death.”
It was a minority view.