Capital Crimes

Capital Offenses: From Colonial America to the Present

Although the laws of colonial America were greatly influenced by the legal traditions of Great Britain, colonial charters and statutes did not simply mirror the laws of England. The English heritage of capital punishment was significantly harsher than the practices adopted in the colonies. For example, an estimated 72,000 convicts were hanged in Britain under the regime of Henry VIII (1509–1547). By the time of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603), roughly a dozen common law crimes, including murder, treason, larceny, robbery, burglary, rape, and arson, and thirty additional statutory crimes were punished by death. The number of capital crimes continued to grow during the seventeenth century under the Tudors and Stuarts. Early in the eighteenth century, fifty new capital crimes were added by statute, many of which aimed to protect the game and sanctuaries of the royal forests from poachers. Capital crimes swelled by an additional sixty under George III (1770–1820), largely motivated by changing commercial practices and the desire to protect merchants' property and trade, bringing the number of offenses punishable by death in England to over 220 by the end of his reign.

The American colonies all made use of the death penalty but never as extensively as capital punishment was used in England. The colonies were much more sparsely populated than England, and could ill afford to diminish the available labor force by relying so heavily on the death penalty. Jails existed in some early settlements, but the colonies lacked prisons for long-term incarceration and thus relied primarily on fines, mutilation, and death to punish offenders. Although policies varied, most colonies recognized approximately twelve capital crimes. For example, the 1641 “Capitall Laws” of Massachusetts, which were strongly influenced by the commitment of the Puritans to the Old Testament, proscribed idolatry, witchcraft, blasphemy, murder, manslaughter, poisoning, bestiality, sodomy, adultery, “man-stealing” (i.e., kidnapping), bearing false witness in capital cases, and conspiracy and rebellion. By contrast, the Quaker tradition resulted in a much more restrictive roster of capital crimes. In Pennsylvania, under William Penn's Great Act of 1682, only treason and murder were punished by death. Even Pennsylvania's laws grew more severe, however, and by the time of the American Revolution, all of the colonies except Rhode Island recognized at least ten capital crimes.

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