Fewer US Executions (and a brief history of capital punishment)

The number of executions carried out by U.S. prisons has dropped to a 14-year-low, with only 37 criminals put to death in 2008.  The decrease is attributed to juries handing out fewer death sentences and a de facto Supreme Court moratorium on capital punishment that existed during the first four months of 2008. Unsurprisingly, my home state of Texas still leads the nation in its enforcement of the death penalty, indicating, perhaps, that the Lone Star State is sympathetic to the practice's historical antecedents:

In 1760 BC, King Hammurabi of Babylon codified the death penalty as punishment for 25 different crimes.  (Murder wasn't one of them.)  The first recorded death sentence took place in 16th Century BC Egypt when a member of the nobility was ordered to commit suicide.  (Commoners in those days were hacked to death with axes.)  In Ancient Greece circa 600 BC, Draconian Code prescribed the death penalty for every criminal offence committed.  (In an ironic twist, the code's author was accidentally killed by Athenians who, showing their support for citizen Draco's no-nonsense approach to crime fighting, threw so many cloaks on him that he suffocated.) 

Some Biblical scholars contend that God not only enacted the world's first death penalty ("from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die."), he was also the first judge to commute his own sentence.  (Instead of executing Adam and Eve, Yahweh substituted the lesser penalty of banishment.)  Under Mosaic Law, the Israelites stoned their evildoers.  Bad guys in Persia were boiled in oil or eaten alive by insects.  Ancient Romans executed criminals in a variety of ways including but not limited to crucifixion, impalement, drowning, and live burial.  (The punishment for parricide was particularly vivid: the offender was stuffed inside a sack along with a dog, a rooster, a viper and an baboon. The sack was then submersed in water.)  During the Middle Ages, noblemen who committed capital crimes were beheaded while lowly peasants suffered the more, ahem, ignoble death of hanging.  Strangulation was not uncommon.  (continued, after the jump...)

Arguably, the most humane technique for dispatching criminals was practiced in France from the 18th century until as recently as 1977.  Execution by guillotine, an admittedly bloody affair, is probably less painful than our current favored method of death by lethal injection.  And it's certainly less painful than killing someone in an electric chair.  (George Westinghouse famously said about that: "They would have done better with an axe."). 

But cutting off a person's head is so messy.  We naturally prefer the idea of sending convicted felons into dreamless oblivion.  And if it happens that some of these hardened criminals suffer a bit before drifting off to their well-deserved deaths, well, they have only themselves to blame, right?  They might experience pain, but at least our executioners don't have to spend hours mopping up blood. Guillotines are so incredibly crude and barbaric.  Really, one gets chills. 

Proponents of the death penalty offer many compelling reasons why execution is an acceptable form of punishment for heinous criminal acts, and I wouldn't presume to debate the matter with them.  After all, they have history on their side.  NY State Senator James Donovan, a supporter of capital punishment, once put forth this curious argument:

"Where would Christianity be if Jesus got eight to fifteen years with time off for good behavior?"

Where indeed?

Comments

[P Smith]

If the christians are so much in favour of the "death penalty" (read: state-sponsored murder), then why aren't they bringing people back to life that were wrongly convicted and executed (racist trials, inadequate defense, police and prosecutorial misconduct, falsified evidence and testimony, etc.)?

When there is no possibility of innocent people being executed (e.g. scientists find a way to remotely view the past through a time machine), then a "death penalty" will be justified. Until then, it's murder, bloodlust and petty revenge, and NOT justice.

As for the final question in the piece: "'Where would Christianity be if Jesus got eight to fifteen years with time off for good behavior?'" The answer is _nowhere_; christianity would still be as fictional. (For those who don't like that remark, your right to be religious is no greater than mine not to be. If you have a right to speak in favour of it, then I have an equal right to refute it.)