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1. In this case the word “capital” means the person’s head, in the past people were executed by taking off their head from their body. The history of capital punishment is rather long, one of the first laws concerning it was met in the eighteenth century B.C. in the Code of King of Hammaurabi of Babylon. There were about 25 crimes, for which the death penalty was used. In the Fourteenth Century B.C.’s Hittite Code you could also meet the death penalty; in the Draconian Code of Athens, by that law death was made the only punishment for all crimes; he ways of fulfillment were different: crucifixion, drowning, burning alive, and impalement. Hanging became a usual method of execution in Britain in the Tenth Century A.D. This rule was broken during the Sixteenth Century, under the reign of Henry VIII, at those times about 72,000 people were executed. Nowadays such things as marrying a Jew or not confessing to a crime would probably not considered to be worth a person’s life, but these were considered to be a rather hard offenses and were punished. The situation was getting even worse when by the 1700s the number of crimes, for that death penalty was applied, was getting bigger and at last grew to 222 crimes, that were to be punished through death, including stealing, cutting down a tree. The result was that the judges didn’t like to consider most of the people guilty for such kind of offenses as the death penalty was a too serious type of punishment. It is logical that the Britain laws concerning death penalty were to be changed and reformed. The reforms of 1823-1837 resulted in elimination of death penalty for about 100 of the 222 crimes, which were earlier punished by death. The use of death penalty in America was under the influence of Britain. The Europeans coming to the new world were bringing the practice of capital punishment with them. The reason for executing Kendall, in the Jamestown colony of Virginia in 1608 was the suspect that he was a spy for Spain. In 1612, Virginia Governor Sir Thomas Dale produced the Divine, Moral and Martial Laws. This set of laws was too severe for some even small wrong deeds like stealing fruits, killing poultry, and trading with natives. The laws concerning the death penalty were different in different colonies. For example The Massachusetts Bay Colony the first execution happened in 1630. The New York Colony was living by the Duke’s Laws of 1665. Here the cases for death punishment were such as beating one’s mother or father, or not agreeing with the “true God,” they were punished by death.
During the colonial times, even more attention was paid to death punishment and such famous people as Montesquieu, Voltaire and Bentham, and English Quakers John Bellers and John Howard were writing about it. In the essay of Cesare Beccaria’s 1767, “On Crimes and Punishment” that was well-known and read all over the world, the author was talking about absence of justification for the state’s taking of a life. The essay was one of the start points of abolit本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。