Capital Punishment was Once Perfect
Let me first say that I am not opposed to the death penalty because I feel sorry for a murderer. As I have written many times, in my heart I want murderers to be skinned alive, salted, basted with oil, and then slowly roasted over a roaring fire. However, we should not mete out Justice with our hearts (that is the way of the barbarian) but with our minds.
My mind tells me that in our hurry for revenge against the guilty we should not execute the innocent.
More than 3700 years ago, the Babylonian King Hammurabi ordered a compendium of 282 laws to be inscribed on stone tablets. The consequences for violating those laws were nothing less than retributive justice and would today, among civilized peoples, be considered brutal and barbaric. Thirty of those commandments required the offending party to be put to death.
How was guilt determined? It was perfect: the evidence of guilt coincided with the punishment:
Ancient History Encyclopedia, Hammurabi
Hammurabi’s law code thus set the standard for future codes in dealing strictly with the evidence of the crime and setting a specific punishment for that crime. What decided one’s guilt or innocence, however, was the much older method of the Ordeal, in which an accused person was sentenced to perform a certain task (usually being thrown into a river or having to swim a certain distance across a river) and, if they succeeded, they were innocent and, if not, they were guilty. Hammurabi’s code stipulates that: “If a man’s wife has been pointed out because of another man, even though she has not been caught with him, for her husband’s sake she must plunge into the divine river.” The woman who did so and survived the ordeal would be recognized as innocent, but then her accuser would be found guilty of false witness and punished by death. The ordeal was resorted to regularly in what were considered the most serious crimes, adultery and sorcery, because it was thought these two infractions were most likely to undermine social stability.
In those uncivilized times it was believed that the Gods would rescue the innocent and thus one's execution was simultaneously the evidence of and punishment for the crime. How perfect is that?
It should be noted that it was a rare thing indeed that someone survived based on the principle advocated by the adherents of the death penalty that it is better to execute 9 innocent people than let one guilty person go free.
That method of gathering evidence against an accused would not work well today since there are many water-sports enthusiasts who have learned to breathe quite long underwater (over 22 minutes) and might survive even though guilty of the crime, see my article The Record For Holding One`s Breath While Naked.
Oh, well, it's almost a perfect system.
Related:
During the witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries, dunking a young woman was used to determine guilt or innocence although in contrast to ancient times it was more likely that the dunkee would be found innocent. In the photo above we see a young woman being dunked.
