“The punishment of death is pernicious to society, from the example of barbarity it affords. Is it not absurd that the laws which detest and punish homicide should, in order to prevent murder, publicly commit murder themselves?” - Cesare Beccaria (18th century Italian thinker)

“There is no crueller tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice” - Montesquieu (18th century French politician and philosopher)

The very first known codification of the death penalty can be found in the Sumerian Code of king Ur-Nammu (Mesopotamia, ca. 2100 BC) which stipulated that the crimes of murder, rape, robbery, and adultery must be punished by death. Three centuries later, the famous Code of king Hammurabi (Babylon) codified the death sentence for twenty-five different crimes. In the 7th century BC, the Draconian laws of Athens instituted the death penalty as the only sentence for all crimes, from the stealing of an apple from an orchard to murder with premeditation or treason. In those times, those found guilty of a (capital) crime were executed by crucifixion, drowning, burning at the stake, or impalement.

In the last two thousand years, the history of the death penalty in Western Europe has witnessed many ups and downs. There have been short periods of abolition, for example during the reign of William the Conqueror in 11th century England, and at the end of the 18th century in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and in Austria. Other periods were characterized by very high numbers of executions, most notably 15th century England under the reign of Henry VIII, and later during the 18th century when 222 crimes, including cutting down a tree or stealing a rabbit, were punishable with death.

Also, France saw a frenzied period of executions at the end of the 18th century during and just after the French Revolution (an estimated 40.00 were executed between 1789 and 1799), particularly during the “Reign of Terror,” when the “Law of Suspects” was passed that made it possible to arrest and execute anyone whose conduct was deemed “suspect.” In a nine-month period in 1793-1794, 16.000 were sent to the guillotine and as least as many died in prison. In some cities, the numbers of death sentences were so high that people were executed en masse with canon fire, because executions with the guillotine, one at a time, took too much time.

Throughout the middle Ages, offenses such as murder, sacrilege, theft, and (high) treason were liable to a death sentence, but during some periods heresy and a number of divergent opinions were considered capital offenses as well.

In the 19th century, most Western European countries applied the death penalty only to murder with premeditation and (high) treason, and at the end of that century Portugal and the Netherlands in Europe , Venezuela , Costa Rica, Brazil , and Ecuador in Latin America were the first countries to abolish capital punishment (except for treason and collaboration in wartime).

After WWII, and after the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the push for the abolishment of the death penalty grew strongly inWestern Europe. In most countries, the last executions have been for treason, collaboration with the enemy, and war crimes in the years following the end of WWII, and several countries formally banned capital punishment soon after. Although some nations like theUK,Ireland,Greece,Belgium,Spain, France, and Luxemburg still maintained the death penalty in their penal code for years or decades longer, executions became very rare occurrences.Francewas the last country inWestern Europeto formally abolish the death penalty in 1977.

“An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life. Morality is never upheld by legalized murder” - Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The death penalty was introduced in the New World by the first European colonists. Sir Thomas Dale, founder of the Jamestown colony and first Governor of Virginia, instituted the Divine, Moral, and Martial Laws, under which a host of crimes, including such mild offenses as stealing grapes, killing a chicken, or trading with the Indians, were punished with public hanging.

By the second part of the 18th century, public hangings in notorious cases attracted crowds of up to 30.000 people. But under the influence of various European thinkers and philosophers, the end of the 18th century saw a profound religious and philosophical revival; ideas about the dignity of human life, or the need for social reform and the necessity to end the vicious cycle of murder and revenge began to find ground in the United States. In particular, the ideas of Italian thinker Cesare Beccaria gave a strong impulse to the abolitionist movement, and eminent statesmen such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin embraced his views.

There was a noticeable trend in society away from corporal punishment such as whipping, and the notion of extenuating circumstances such as age, insanity, and self-defence became more widely accepted. The state of Pennsylvania introduced the first formal reform of the law in 1790, taking sodomy, robbery, and burglary off its list of capital crimes, and four years later it formally codified the notion of degrees of murder severity, and only first degree murder (premeditated murder) remained punishable by death. This was both the result of a compromise with the Quaker community, which was opposed to the death penalty, and of the growing awareness of the times.

The Bill of Rights (the first ten Amendments to the United States Constitution) was introduced by James Madison in 1789 and became effective in 1791. The eighth amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment (“_ no excessive bail shall be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted”)._ Those four words would come to play an important role at different moments in the history of capital punishment in the United States (see below, and also “ Recent developments”).

A few decades later, in 1834, Pennsylvania was the first state to ban all public executions, soon followed by all New England and Mid-Atlantic states (Kentucky was the last state to ban public executions, in 1936, when the last public hanging took place) Michigan was the first state to abolish the death penalty in 1846 for all crimes except treason, quickly followed by Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Iowa, Maine, and Colorado. The last three, however, reinstated it later on.

The abolitionist ideas grew in popularity until the onset of the Civil War (1861-1865). After the Civil War, the public debate began to focus more on the civil rights issues, and the whole question of capital punishment moved to the background, and after a brief period of liberalisation at the beginning of the 20th century, a conjunction of social, intellectual, political, and economic factors led to a frenzy of death sentences and executions between 1920 and 1940, with an average of 167 executions per year in the 1930s.

This tendency reversed itself after WWII, and Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, West Virginia, Vermont, and New York joined Michigan, Minnesota, North-Dakota, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin in abolishing capital punishment. A Gallup Poll in 1966 showed that nationwide support for the death penalty had dropped to 42%. In 1972 the United States Supreme Court declared capital punishment anti-constitutional (“cruel and unusual punishment”), thereby removing the sword of Damocles from above the heads of the 629 death row inmates at the time. But only four years later, that same Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty. All the states that had the death penalty before 1972, introduced it again, and the situation remained unchanged until December, 2007, when New Jersey abolished it.

As of October, 2008, 14 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia do not have the death penalty, 36 states, the Federal Government, and the U.S. Military do. However, it must be noted that New Hampshire, Kansas, and the U.S. Military have not carried any executions since before 1972, and in January, 2003, the state of Illinois issued an executive clemency for all of its 167 death row inmates. Also, the New York Sate Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that the execution procedure in vigour in the state (lethal injection) was in violation of the state’s constitution, and since no efforts have been made to find an alternative procedure, the state of New York does not apply capital punishment since that year. The same situation occurred in Nebraska: the Supreme Court of Nebraska ruled in 2008 that execution by the electric chair violates the state’s constitution, and in the absence of an alternative procedure, Nebraska has no capital punishment anymore.

During the Clinton Administration, two Acts of Congress were passed and ratified by the President: the “_ Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act” of 1994, which made 60 new federal crimes liable to the death penalty (including three that do not involve murder or the loss of human life), and the “ Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act_” (AEDPA) of 1996, which restricts access to new state hearings for claims of actual innocence for those sentenced to death, and imposes shorter filing deadlines for all habeas corpus claims.

Possibly as a result of the AEDPA, the numbers of executions began to rise again until the year 2000. Since then, the trend reversed itself, but the numbers are still higher than before 1994. Only 2008 will probably end with fewer executions, due to the _ de facto_ moratorium that lasted from September 25, 2007 through April 16, 2008 (see below “Recent developments”).

As of August, 2008, about 3265 men and women are on death row in the United States, of which 360 are in Texas.

“The final word of Justice cannot be capital punishment; it would mean that we have lost all faith in human dignity” - Pascal Clément (2007), French Minister of Justice, and former proponent of the death penalty.

Not a year passes by without at least one country abolishing capital punishment. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, Eastern European countries have one by one renounced the death penalty. The Council of Europe demands that new members sign Protocol 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights at the earliest possible date. Protocol 6 prohibits the death penalty except in times of war. Although not all forty-seven member states have ratified Protocol 6 yet, no death sentence has been given or execution been carried out in those countries since they joined the European Council. For example, the death penalty is still codified in Russia, but no execution has taken place there since 1996, and the government has issued an executive clemency for all its death row inmates (716) in June, 1999. The Ukraine, formerly one the world leaders in numbers of executions, signed Protocol 6 in 1999.

The Council of Europe added Protocol 13 to the European Convention on Human Rights in 2002. Protocol 13 rejects the death penalty in all circumstances, even in wartime. Despite the fact that the ratification of Protocol 13 is optional, all but one of the Council’s 46 member states have either signed and ratified it (40) or signed it (5), as of October, 2008.

In the rest of the world, the countries with the most confirmed executions in 2007 were China (470), Iran (317), Saudi Arabia (143), and Pakistan (135). The real numbers are probably (much) higher, especially in China and in Iran, where the state tightly controls all news media, and where it is practically impossible for outside observers to have access to reliable information. Of all the fully developed countries, only Singapore, Japan, and the United States are still administrating the death penalty in 2008.

Twenty-four years ago, in 1984, 64 countries had abolished the death penalty, and by 1996, 100 countries had done so. As of February, 2008, well over half of all countries in the world have written capital punishment off their penal code.