Apparently "theft of goods worth more than 12 pence, which was only about one-twentieth of the weekly wage for a skilled worker at the time" could lead to the death sentence.
Other crimes that could be punished with death included:
- Being in the company of Gypsies for one month
- Strong evidence of malice in a child aged 7–14 years of age
- Blacking the face or using a disguise whilst committing a crime
The latter comes from the Black Act, which introduced 50 such offences:
"Pleading the belly" was an option for women who were detectably pregnant, and if they were found pregnant, the woman's death sentence could be postponed until they had delivered their child, changed to penal transportation, or even pardoned altogether:
A jury of matrons would be responsible - sometimes corruptly - although a woman would only receive one reprieve; any further pregnancy would be ignored and the death penalty carried out regardless:
And the death penalty was only formally abolished by the Human Rights Act 1998 (for the remaining offences of high treason or arson in a naval dockyard).
I believe that polls on the subject of reintroducing it for serious crimes regularly return over 50% support.
Edit: oh and you can still get disproportionate sentences for trivial crimes in California under the "three strikes" law. There are people serving life sentences for minor shoplifting.
> I believe that polls on the subject of reintroducing
> it for serious crimes regularly return over 50% support.
To some degree understandable. I used to be against the death penalty for humanitarian reason, but after Anders Behring Breivik gunned down 69 people, mostly children, and got only 21 years in prison [0], I think it would have been better if we just had hanged him. At least then the families of his victim could get to move on, knowing that they will not meet him on the street sometime in the future.
0: 21 years is the maximum prison sentence in Norway, but the prison term can then be repeatedly extended by five years as long as he is considered a threat to society. However that someone is being a threat to society can be hard to prove, so it is totally possible that he will be getting out some day.
I have some curiosity about how you went from 21 years of jail time to the death penalty without even thinking about something else like a life sentence.
Cases like these - you could try to argue what's best with all kinds of arguments, ideas, principles and aim. Death? Life? 21 years + you need to make a shrink happy?
So the interesting question is: why does his current sentence bother you?
So why bother with minor shoplifting if, bar the death penalty, you can commit some really lucrative crime and receive the same penalty? Fair? Hardly! It's a law best described politely as 'short-sighted' in that someone hasn't bothered to work out its implications.
Perhaps. But is the outcome really in anyone's best interests? Is it cost-effective? This isn't exactly a value-adding business, so you're paying for some unlucky idiot's incarceration instead of healthcare, policing, infrastructure...
It sounds insane to me.
Also, are you sure you know every law on the book? I suspect quite a few people break more laws than they think, they're just never enforced. Until some DA wants to set an example, and throws the book at you - at which point this is more about personal gain (for the DA) than benefit to society, let alone fairness.
Let's put it this way - unless all laws are uniformly and blindly enforced, they're never going to be entirely fair. With so many laws on the book, and with each instance at the whim of very few people (law enforcement) with virtually no checks and balances, you can be absolutely sure it's not fair. If furthermore even the judiciary is explicitly forbidden from using common sense...
...it's about as fair as cancer. Sure, you can be really stupid (or get really screwed), but nothing you do can entirely protect you - and even those taking risks don't always pay a (significant) price. Some people are unfortunately born with genetic or cultural risk-factors that you really can't call fair.
It's not the end of the world, and it's not societies worst problem, but let's not kid ourselves that the justice system really deserves that name.
Unfortunately not all parts of the world are on the same civilized level yet. There are many countries in which the law is based on so called divine rules and there it is seen as something positive/progressive that the woman can give birth to her child before she is being stoned for her "crime" (e.g. adultery (true meaning: have been raped)).
Way to go humanity.
Although I'm against the death penalty and I think it's used too much here in the US, I don't think it's used 'all of the time' and I'm pretty sure it's never for something trivial. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
An alarmingly large number of police have acquired the delusion that it is permissible for them to exercise the state's power to punish suspected criminals, without affording them the courtesy of due process.
I don't think this behavior is increasing by all that much. I think the increasing ubiquity of cameras capable of recording decent quality video and the increasing ease in distributing that video is making the existing behavior more noticeable.
The fact that police killings are not capital punishment executions is largely a semantic distinction. Some people feel it is important, while others are less apt to recognize it.
As such, whether the death penalty is used "all the time" or not, and whether it is used for "something trivial" depends largely on how you count the bodies. People have been killed by police for misdemeanor offenses, or even no reasonable suspicion whatsoever.
I don't erase that semantic distinction entirely, but it is rather counterproductive to abolish the post-conviction capital punishment without also rigorously investigating and prosecuting all police-involved deaths. If cops believe that a suspect deserves the death penalty, and the state does not employ it, that person may never get the benefit of a single hearing before a judge.
Around 1,000 people were killed by police in the US last year[1].
I assume that in the vast majority of those cases the use of lethal force was justified to protect the officer(s) or bystanders. Then there are the mistakes.
In what percentage of these cases would you guess that suspect was killed because the officer decided to play judge, jury and executioner? 1%? Even a shockingly high 10%, that would not be an order of magnitude more than the number of capital punishment executions per year.
It's a matter of perspective. In how many of those cases might the police have had other options? According to http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/apr/15/... an (unfortunately politicized) article I just found, it looks as though US law enforcement is several orders of magnitude more bloodthirsty that the UK's. Now situations differ, but the US isn't some lawless third-world country. If the the will was there to limit these killings, there's no way that difference would be THAT large.
By these numbers, it looks as though the vast majority of the US police killings are preventable - which doesn't mean that the agents at the scene at the time were Judge Dredd, it just means that they, their department, and society as whole put them on the spot. I'm sure some people like the power trip, but with disparities in death rates like these, that doesn't sound like plausible major factor to me.
I'd need much more information to decide whether I think US law enforcement is more bloodthirsty. The fact is our cops are much more heavily armed. They have to be because our criminals are too.
Assume all you like. The written police reports all say "officer safety" and "feared for their lives", but it has become more common these past few years, with the rise of camera-equipped mobile phones and retail establishment surveillance cameras, for a video to surface after the report has been filed that completely contradicts the police perspective.
For instance, the report says "suspect reached for my gun" while the video shows "suspect attempting to flee". The report says "aggressive posture", "belligerent", or "combative stance", and the video shows "police employee suddenly attacks someone for no apparent reason".
This is exactly why Wisconsin took away the ability for police to investigate their own public mistakes and clear themselves of all wrongdoing.
So we cannot assume anything. We know that it is at least theoretically possible to employ people as professional police with a lower annual body count by examining other countries (and also that it is possible to kill more per year). Without an open process to examine and investigate the police-involved deaths, we cannot say with certainty that any percentage of them, from 0% to 100%, is due to intentional malicious acts.
It is certain that a positive percentage of all police reports involving use of force are falsified and later contradicted by bystander video recordings. And that is exactly why Colorado is implementing a "right to record" law, with a $15k penalty every time police interfere with people recording them doing their jobs.
And I dispute your later assumption that police are more heavily armed because they need to be to counteract criminals that are more heavily armed. They are more heavily armed because they can use civil forfeiture seizure proceeds to buy decommissioned or surplus military equipment. These "toys" are then used to conduct no-knock raids on people not known to be armed with anything at all.
If you stop assuming things about the police that tend to paint them in a more positive light, and look at only the facts that you can prove, the naked numbers are frightening.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that all killings by police in 2014 were completely random and 100% malicious. Then my chances of being killed by police in the US during that year were about double my chances of getting hit by lightning in the US that year. It wouldn't even place on the list of things I'm frightened about.
Maybe we can agree on this: more transparency is needed. Resistance to transparency is very suspicious.
My point about US/UK police was not about police militarization. That is a different issue. Regular cops out on patrol every day in the US carry guns. Their counterparts in the UK do not. I believe US cops should carry guns because it's so easy for everyone else in the US to get guns, including the criminals they will encounter. A consequence of everyone (cops & crooks) having guns is that there will be more exchanges between them that involve lethal force. Another consequence of cops having guns is that they will use them whenever they believe at the time that lethal force is justified. Sometimes they will be mistaken.
It's not really relevant to someone who is murdered whether it is a judge or a cop who sentences them to death. The result is the same: someone is murdered and those doing the killing face no consequences whatsoever.
No, no they don't. There are currently very few crimes that don't involve killing someone that can receive capital punishment in the US, and their constitutionality has never been tested because no one has been sentenced to death for them.
I was actually going to point that out too. I did a research paper on theft in this time period when I was in college and was shocked when I saw that people were sentenced to for theft. I mean I know it was a different time, but it really wasn't all that long ago. I was relieved when I looked into it more and found that most weren't really executed.
This was apparently pretty typical for English law hundreds of years ago. As I understand it, wealthy people had a lot of influence over the government and were able to lobby for extreme punishments to protect their fortunes. Many of the death sentences were not even carried out by the executioners, because they were so common.
> As I understand it, wealthy people had a lot of influence over the government and were able to lobby for extreme punishments to protect their fortunes.
"A federal jury Thursday found a 32-year-old Minnesota woman guilty of illegally downloading music from the Internet and fined her $80,000 each -- a total of $1.9 million -- for 24 songs."
(After long battles in courts, the penalty was ultimately settled at $222,000).
Going to the source[0], there is no reference to the punishment listed. In fact, other punishments listed on the same page seem mundane in comparison, e.g.
> ... the Jury found him Guilty to the Value of 38s.
Is it possible this is just a transcription error?
According to my tour of The Galleries of Justice, in Nottingham UK, the cut-off point between transportation and execution was the price of a loaf of bread.
In 'The Commonwealth Of Thieves' Tom Keneally notes some people were committing offences with the express intention of being sentenced to transportation to the penal colonies in Australia. Apologies for the secondary source.
I also wonder what's up with those two names in the 'burnt in hand' section that are anonymized (V--- E--- and G--- C---). Public people not wanting others to know about it? Escapees? People with no public records?
I love this kind of historical information. It's difficult (to me) to empathise with past historical events when we (I) have no knowledge of those people and how they lived.
Reading about their daily struggles gives events from that time a whole new image.
The cynic in me questions the authenticity of the accounts, given that the chaplain responsible for collecting them was part of the penal apparatus and derived significant income from selling the accounts to the execution-watching public as instructive morality tales.
Even accounting for the religiosity of the condemned, they seem remarkably keen to confess to long histories of criminal behaviour and repent of their sins rather than question the system that had condemned them.
I grew up around Hoddesdon - the same town in England that Mary Knight grew up in, before she was executed for stealing 9shillings, On the same gallows as the candle thief
Modern candles are not even remotely comparable, neither in composition, nor method of manufacture, nor in their former value as a primary source of light. Candles used to use valuable raw materials, were fairly laboriously made by hand, and weren't just a decoration for a romantic dinner, after which one could simply flip on a light switch.
Back then, candles would have been made from either beeswax (churches and rich people) or tallow (everyone else). Spermaceti and brassica-oil candles were not yet in common use. The median family spent 65 shillings per year on candles. The total value stolen was 49.5 shillings. So a valid comparison would be 75% of the median family's annual lighting budget today. I estimate the annual cost for lighting at 1000 kWh grid power (US$120, GB£80), plus some replacement compact fluorescent bulbs (US$30, GB£20), for a crime equivalent of US$113 or GB£75.
Another valid comparison would be the amount it would cost for an equivalent amount of lighting now. In modern terms, the items stolen amounted to about 800 hours of a one-candela light source. Maybe one green 20mW LED and 6 AA alkaline (LR6) batteries, or a white LED and 6 D alkaline (LR20) batteries. This is equivalent to the light of leaving one 25W compact fluorescent bulb on for 6 hours.
Imagine if every time you left the light on in your bedroom when you left for school, your Dad killed you, and then danced on your grave, singing 'alleluia.
As in one of the other comments, you'll see that it is worth about $6000 if you look at GDP per capita; which would be more than a month of someone's effort at the current US median income.
The point is, the penalties weren't effective -- if effectiveness of a criminal justice system is evaluated in terms of crime prevention.
We're talking about an age where there were no police organizations as we currently understand the term: a lot of arrests were made by freelance "thief takers" such as the infamous Jonathan Wilde, who himself eventually went to the gallows (because he wasn't merely a thief-taker, he was also the biggest fence for stolen goods in London!):
(Shorter version: think of him as a kind of 18th century anti-Batman.)
Because arrest rates were virtually non-existent except when an angry shopkeeper grabbed a burglar in the act, or a mob went for a known miscreant, punishments were draconian. But because punishments were draconian, they were often commuted -- by the end of the 18th century about half of death sentences ended up being turned into transportation and involuntary servitude (basically, exile and slavery). Crime rates remained terrifyingly high by modern standards until the 1830s, when Sir Robert Peel as Home Secretary abolished and rationalized a lot of laws (he axed the death penalty for most offenses but replaced it with imprisonment) and instituted the first modern police forces:
Anyway, the takeaway from all this is, the British state in the 18th century performed a large-scale experiment that proved pretty much definitively that draconian punishments do not deter crime. What reduces criminal activity is certainty of apprehension, even if the punishment is relatively mild or rehabilitative. (Nobody thinks "I'd better not steal that pizza, I can probably get away with it but if they catch me I might end up facing life in jail". But knowing "if I steal that pizza, I will be caught" is an effective deterrent.)
More severe penalties are more effective than less severe penalties. The other dimension of certainty of detection gives better opportunities for improvement and using it was a great step for civilization - but it does not negate the my thesis.
Your argument is like proposing that people in 18th century invented airplanes because using steamers did not really improve the time of travel :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Code
Apparently "theft of goods worth more than 12 pence, which was only about one-twentieth of the weekly wage for a skilled worker at the time" could lead to the death sentence.
Other crimes that could be punished with death included:
- Being in the company of Gypsies for one month
- Strong evidence of malice in a child aged 7–14 years of age
- Blacking the face or using a disguise whilst committing a crime
The latter comes from the Black Act, which introduced 50 such offences:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Act
"Pleading the belly" was an option for women who were detectably pregnant, and if they were found pregnant, the woman's death sentence could be postponed until they had delivered their child, changed to penal transportation, or even pardoned altogether:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleading_the_belly
A jury of matrons would be responsible - sometimes corruptly - although a woman would only receive one reprieve; any further pregnancy would be ignored and the death penalty carried out regardless:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_of_matrons