Capital punishment

• 1. Introduction

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  Capital punishment carries a name rooted in the Latin word for "head," a clue to one of its oldest forms: beheading. Today, the practice spans hanging, lethal injection, shooting, and stoning, but the word itself still echoes an era when the blade was the state's preferred instrument of finality. As of 2021-55 countries retain it, yet over half the world's population lives under governments that still use the death penalty. That arithmetic raises a set of questions that have never been fully resolved: Who deserves to die by state order? When did societies first begin to question that power? And why, as most countries have moved toward abolition, does the practice persist with such deep public support in places as different as Taiwan, China, and the United States?

• 2. Ancient Roots

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  The Code of Hammurabi stands as the earliest and most famous example of a written legal system that prescribed different punishments based on the class of victim and perpetrator. Long before that, tribal communities dealt with wrongdoing through blood money, corporal punishment, shunning, banishment, or execution. When arbitration between families or clans failed, blood feuds filled the gap. As one formulation of the logic put it, "acts of retaliation underscore the ability of the social collective to defend itself and demonstrate to enemies that injury to property, rights, or the person will not go unpunished."

  Athenian law was first written down by Draco around 621 BC, and it applied the death penalty to a wide range of crimes. Solon later repealed Draco's code but kept capital punishment for intentional homicide, and only then with the victim's family's permission. The word "draconian" descends directly from that early lawmaker's severity. Plato understood execution as a form of purification, arguing that crimes were a kind of defilement and that homicide was a disease of the soul. Aristotle took a more practical stance: a judge must weigh the crime and determine whether rehabilitation was possible, reserving the death penalty for those for whom it was not. That philosophical framework shaped Western criminal law through the 17th century.

  In ancient Rome, the Twelve Tables prescribed death for libel, arson, and theft. Crucifixion began as a punishment reserved for enslaved people who rebelled, later extended to bandits and traitors. The condemned could take up to a few days to die, and their bodies were left on the crosses to decompose. During a famous Senate debate in December 63 BC, Cicero argued for executing Catiline's allies without trial; among the minority who opposed him was Julius Caesar.

• 3. Tang China and Abolition's First Tests

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  In the year 747, Emperor Xuanzong of Tang abolished the death penalty, ordering officials to substitute exile to the remote Lingnan region or severe scourging with the thick rod for capital offences. Under his reign, executions were rare: 24 took place in the year 730 and 58 in the year 736. The two most common methods in that dynasty were strangulation, prescribed for 144 offences, and decapitation, prescribed for 89. Most Tang Chinese preferred strangulation to decapitation because of a traditional belief that the body is a gift from one's parents and should be returned to the grave intact.

  The abolition lasted only 12 years. In 759, the An Lushan Rebellion forced its restoration. That cycle, abolition followed by reversal in response to crisis, would repeat across history and across continents. In Japan, the death penalty was banned during the reign of Emperor Shōmu in 724, but the ban lasted only a few years. Emperor Saga abolished it again in 818 under Shinto influence, and that abolition endured until 1156.

  These short-lived experiments reveal something important about the early reform impulse: it was real, and it had royal sponsors, but it could not survive political emergency. The question of when a state is desperate enough to need the power of execution has never been fully answered.

• 4. Reform and the Enlightenment

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  Cesare Beccaria's treatise On Crimes and Punishments, published in 1764, was the first detailed analysis of capital punishment to demand its abolition. Beccaria aimed to demonstrate not only the injustice of the death penalty but its futility from the perspective of social welfare. His book moved a ruler: Grand Duke Leopold II of Habsburg abolished the death penalty in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, which he described as the first abolition in modern times. On the 30th of November 1786, Leopold promulgated a reform of the penal code, abolished the death penalty, and ordered the destruction of all instruments of capital execution in his land. The last execution in Tuscany had actually taken place in 1769, before the formal decree. In 2000, Tuscany's regional authorities made the 30th of November an annual holiday, now celebrated by 300 cities worldwide as Cities for Life Day.

  Jeremy Bentham, the founder of modern utilitarianism, also called for abolition in England. Charles Dickens and Karl Marx separately noted that violent criminality increased at the times and places of executions, an observation that eventually led governments to move executions inside prison walls. In England in the 18th century, Parliament had expanded capital offences to more than 200, including cutting down a cherry tree in an orchard. By 1820 the list still ran to 160 offences, covering shoplifting and petty theft. Juries frequently refused to convict under what was called the Bloody Code, and judges in petty theft cases sometimes arbitrarily set the value of stolen goods below the capital threshold to avoid a death sentence.

  The 12th-century Jewish legal scholar Moses Maimonides had anticipated the core danger centuries earlier. He wrote that it is "better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent man to death," arguing that convicting on anything less than absolute certainty would push standards down until verdicts followed "the judge's caprice."

• 5. The Abolition Wave

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  The Kingdom of Tahiti was the first legislative assembly in the world to abolish the death penalty, doing so in 1824 and substituting banishment. Michigan became the first government in the United States and the first in the entire Anglosphere to ban the death penalty, in 1846. Venezuela abolished it in 1863; San Marino followed in 1865, though the last execution there had taken place in 1468. Portugal abolished the penalty in 1867 after legislative proposals in 1852 and 1863. The last execution in Brazil was in 1876; Emperor Pedro II commuted all subsequent death sentences until the penalty was abolished for civil and military offences in peacetime in 1891.

  In the United Kingdom, the death penalty was abolished for murder in a five-year experiment beginning in 1965, made permanent in 1969; the last execution had taken place in 1964. Complete abolition for all offences followed in 1998. Canada abolished it in 1976 except for some military offences, with full abolition in 1998. France abolished it in 1981. Australia ended the penalty in 1973, though Western Australia retained it until 1984.

  In the United States, the Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972 based on the Furman v. Georgia case, then permitted it again under certain conditions in 1976 via Gregg v. Georgia. Further limits came with Atkins v. Virginia in 2002, which banned the penalty for people with an intellectual disability, and Roper v. Simmons in 2005, which banned it for offenders who were under 18 at the time of their crime. As of the time this documentary draws its data, 23 of 50 states and Washington, D.C. had banned capital punishment. Pakistan lifted a six-year moratorium in December 2014 after Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan terrorists killed 132 students and 9 staff members at the Army Public School and Degree College Peshawar and has since executed over 400 convicts.

• 6. Juvenile Offenders

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  One of the youngest people ever executed was the infant son of Perotine Massey, on or around the 18th of July 1556. His mother was one of the Guernsey Martyrs, burned for heresy; his father had already fled the island. The infant, less than one day old, was ordered burned by Bailiff Hellier Gosselin on the advice of priests who argued the child had inherited moral stain from his mother. Since 1642 in Colonial America and the United States, an estimated 365 juvenile offenders have been executed.

  The United States Supreme Court abolished capital punishment for offenders under 16 in Thompson v. Oklahoma in 1988, then extended the ban to all juveniles in Roper v. Simmons in 2005. In Prussia, children under 14 were exempted from the death penalty in 1794; the exemption was extended to those under 16 in 1851. The North German Confederation excluded all juveniles in 1871, a policy continued by the German Empire in 1872. Nazi Germany reversed course in 1939, reinstating the death penalty for those aged 16 to 17, then broadening it to cover children from 12 to 17 in 1943. West Germany abolished capital punishment for juveniles in 1949; East Germany did so in 1952.

  Iran was the world's largest executioner of juvenile offenders and faced broad international condemnation for it. During Hassan Rouhani's presidency from 2013 to 2021, at least 3,602 death sentences were carried out, including 34 involving juvenile offenders. In October 2008, a girl named Aisha Ibrahim Dhuhulow was buried up to her neck at a football stadium in Somalia and stoned to death before more than 1,000 people. Japan has not executed a juvenile offender since August 1997, when Norio Nagayama was hanged for shooting four people dead in the late 1960s. His case established the Nagayama standards, which weigh factors such as the number of victims, the brutality of the crime, and its social impact, and those standards continue to shape death-penalty decisions in Japanese courts.

• 7. The Debate Continues

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  Albert Camus wrote in his 1956 book Reflections on the Guillotine: "An execution is not simply death. It is just as different from the privation of life as a concentration camp is from prison." His point was that the state, unlike any private murderer, informs the condemned of their fate and then holds them in that knowledge for months. Amnesty International calls the death penalty "the ultimate irreversible denial of Human Rights," citing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948.

  John Stuart Mill offered the counterargument in a speech before Parliament in 1868: "to deter by suffering from inflicting suffering is not only possible, but the very purpose of penal justice." New York Law School professor Robert Blecker has defended a version of this position, arguing that punishment must be painful in proportion to the crime. A different line of support comes from the view that the death penalty prevents recidivism absolutely.

  The wrongful execution argument cuts across both camps. Some researchers have claimed that as many as 39 executions were carried out in the face of compelling evidence of innocence or serious doubt about guilt in the United States from 1992 through 2004. DNA evidence prevented the pending execution of more than 15 death row inmates during that same period. A study of executions carried out in the United States between 1977 and 2001 found that at least 34 of 749 executions, or 4.5%, involved unanticipated problems or delays that caused unnecessary agony for the prisoner. A separate study published in The Lancet in 2005 found that in 43% of lethal injection cases, the blood level of hypnotics was insufficient to guarantee unconsciousness. Public opinion reflects the unresolved tension: in Norway, only 25% support the death penalty, while in Taiwan an 88% majority opposed abolition in a 2016 survey by the National Development Council.