Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 11.pdf/32

 The Death Penalty in Olden Times.

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THE DEATH PENALTY IN OLDEN TIMES. Bv Florence Spooner. THE punishment of burning has been inflicted by several communities. Ex amples of it occur in the early ages of the French monarchy. It was enacted at Rome, by the code of the twelve tables, against in cendiaries, but nowhere was it adopted with so many variations as among the Babylon ians and the Hebrews. At Babylon a burning, fiery furnace was sometimes pre pared for the purpose, as in the instance of the young Jews who refused to worship the image of Nebuchadnezzar. Sometimes the criminal was roasted in the fire, as Ahab, son of Kolaiah. In Judea, boiling caldrons and funeral piles were used but these were deemed insufficient torture and previous to killing murderers, melted lead was poured into their mouths which were forced open by partial strangulation. In France, the convict was bound with iron chains to a stake, wearing a shirt dipped in sulphur. This was the most rigorous of ordinary punishments, and yet, though inflicted in cases of witcheraft, sacri lege, blasphemy and heresy, it was not ex tended to the more heinous crime of parri cide. As to the punishment of breaking on the wheel, it is of little moment to ascer tain whether this punishment was first inflict ed under Commodus, in the second century of Christianity, or at a far later period by Louis le Gros, upon the assassins of the Earl of Hander, or lastly by Emperor Abert, in his war with the Swiss at the beginning of the fourteenth century, on Rudolph of Warth, who made an attempt upon his own life. It was confessedly not admitted into the French code before the reign of Francis I, and it would be satisfactory to be able to impute to the Chancellor of Poyet an idea so worthy of his malignity, but the edict is dated Feb. 4, 1534. The edict was marked not less by its disproportion of punishment than by its general spirit of atrocity.

Hanging had been the penalty of murder, and so it remained. The wheel was not extended to this crime, but confined to cases of highway robbery and burglary. This shocking disparity was corrected under the reign of Henry II. Two modes of effec ting this correction offered themselves; either to be satisfied with hanging the high wayman ( a punishment, even so far too heavy for the offense ) or to break the murderer upon the wheel. The first would have been the milder mode : the latter was adopted. The highwaymen no longer ap peared a greater criminal than the murderer but he was still equally punished, and hence, the writers of their times on criminal law place on the same line, both as to punishment and heinousness, highway robbery and parri cide. The wheel was avowedly so barbarous an instrument that the judges almost invari ably by an applied permission directed the criminal to be strangled before he was placed upon it. In the punishment of beheading a civil distinction was made at Rome be tween the citizen and the slave, but in France, where no slavery exists, can it be proper by a marked difference in the operation of the law to insult a large majority of the nation, reviving principles of villenageand feudality. In defense of this diversity of punishment, it has been said : you are deceived by ap pearances, the equality of suffering consists more in the ignominy than in the actual pang, and the criminal of higher extraction by undergoing the same infliction would endure a heavier punishment than his infe rior. In China all this was reversed, the great man was strangled, the humbler offender was beheaded. The Jews looked upon behead ing as the most ignominious of punish ments. To the Greeks it was unknown. The punishment of hanging was known in the first ages of the French monarchy. It