Capital Punishment

Since at least the beginning of written history societies have put people to death, both as a redress to social harms and as a means to control deviant and criminal behaviors. Widespread opposition to capital punishment, however, is a more recent phenomenon, first emerging during the European Enlightenment, as new political philosophies began to take root in the body politic and changing social attitudes toward death and dying emerged. This entry explores the general shift in the cultural orientation toward capital punishment in Europe and the United States, recent changes in its use globally, and contemporary issues regarding the death penalty in the United States.

Capital Punishment in Western Europe and the United States

In 1764, the Italian criminologist Cesare Beccaria voiced the first widely read opposition in Europe to capital punishment. His arguments against capital punishment were part of a shift toward emphasizing individual rights within emerging political and social philosophies. Such philosophies were related, at least in part, to the emergence of new views of life and death in the late 17th and 18th centuries, views increasingly informed by rationalism and science and decreasingly by religion and the traditions of the ancien régime that had dominated much of European society and culture for hundreds of years.

Attitudes toward death had been slowly changing since the end of the Middle Ages, including attitudes toward capital punishment. For centuries prior, social life had been governed by rigid forms of tradition, and death was itself common and communal. People died often and early, and the movement from life to death was still a public event and still governed by an adherence to ritual and an assumption of communal salvation. In the case of capital punishment, prior to the Enlightenment, there was little opposition to the idea that some people deserved to be put to death. Executions were generally grisly, public affairs, often accompanied by torture and prolonged suffering, designed to deter other would-be offenders. Bodies of the condemned were frequently left to rot, burned, or scattered; denying one a proper Christian burial ensured damnation in the next world as well.

By the 12th century, images of individual judgment began to replace those of communal salvation. Where this represented a shift in emphasis toward what the French social historian Philippe Ariès called “one's own death,” rituals of condemnation and execution nevertheless changed little throughout the Middle Ages, except in one important sense: where capital punishment was increasingly viewed as a means of suffering by which one could repent and be saved. This is evident, for example, in the well-known Malleus maleficarum(Hammer Against Witches), written in 1486, which detailed numerous ways in which those accused and found guilty of witchcraft were able to save themselves through confession, repentance, and punishment. In practice, however, tens or even [Page 143]hundreds of thousands were put to death throughout the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Reformation, and aside from crimes of heresy or witchcraft, people were put to death for political crimes, crimes against the king, and common crimes. Some parts of Renaissance Europe (e.g., Venice) restricted the use of capital punishment, and thinkers such as Thomas Moore and Erasmus debated its merits, but by and large there was little opposition to, and many opportunities that favored, its use, including wars between states, various inquisitions, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and peasant revolts.

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