Describe the History of Capital Punishment

The Code of Hammurabi (39 KB) , a legal document from ancient Babylonia (in modern-day Iraq), contained the first known death penalty laws. Under the code, written in the 1700s B.C., twenty-five crimes were punishable by death. These crimes included adultery (cheating on a wife or husband) and helping slaves escape. Murder was not one of the twenty-five crimes."

JoAnn Bren Guernsey Death Penalty: Fair Solution or Moral Failure?, 2009

1608

First Recorded Execution in the British American Colonies Was for Treason

"In fourteenth-century England, one could be executed for a crime as minor as disturbing the peace. And three centuries later, when the first colonists came to the land now known as the United States, they brought the British penal system across the ocean with them. A colonist in Virginia could be executed for crimes as trivial as stealing grapes, killing chickens, or trading with the Indians.

But the first documented execution in the new colonies was for a far more serious offense. In the Jamestown colony of Virginia in 1608, Captain George Kendall was hanged for the capital offense of treason. Among other serious capital crimes in colonial times were murder, rape, heresy - and witchcraft."

Pennsylvania founder William Penn convened his first General Assembly at Chester, PA, on Dec. 4, 1682. Following a debate on Pennsylvania's Frame of Government, the conference produced The Great Law or Body of Laws, which consisted of 61 chapters dictating the governance of Pennsylvania. It included the original Quaker criminal code which limited crimes punishable by death to premeditated murder and treason. Penn replaced the death penalty and bodily punishments with imprisonment in a House of Correction. This Quaker code was a radical departure from the practices of other societies around the world.

Negley King Teeters, PhD The Cradle of the Penitentiary: The Walnut Jail at Philadelphia, 1773-1885, 1955

1764

Italian Jurist Presents a Critique of the Death Penalty That Influences Abolitionists

Portrait of Cesare Beccaria.

Source: www.giovannidallorto.com

(accessed Jan. 9, 2010)"The first prominent European to call for an end to the death penalty, Beccaria is considered the founder of the modern abolition movement... In 1764, Beccaria published his famous Essays on Crimes and Punishments. It was the first major study of the criminal justice system as it operated in eighteenth-century Europe, as well as the first call for the abolition of capital punishment. It remains the most influential attack on the death penalty ever published...

It was Beccaria, though,