Trends in the Use of Capital Punishment
1952; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 284; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1177/000271625228400103
ISSN1552-3349
Autores Tópico(s)American Constitutional Law and Politics
ResumoT RENDS in the use of the death penalty cannot be separated from trends in the use of punishment as a whole. The trend in punishment for about the past 275 years is from the corporal, bloody, and severe sanctions developed through the medieval period to the predominantly nonphysical forms of today. The movement has been to abandon the gallows and the stake, the butcher knife, the branding iron, and the whip, and to adopt some form and degree of fines and imprisonment. Perhaps the most important single influence behind this movement is the secularization of thought which became evident with the development of modern science at the opening of the seventeenth cenfury. If one accepts the position that the criminal must be made to suffer for and to expiate his offense, then the forms of punishment which held almost undisputed sway in Occidental and other countries for centuries prior to 1682 will perhaps seem necessary. If, however, one accepts the position that crime is as natural as any other form of cultural behavior, it will seem reasonable to attempt to control it through a program based on an understanding of the sociocultural processes leading to criminality. The inroads of science upon the theological notion of expiation and retribution are so great that the advocates of capital punishment have been on the defensive for about two centuries. The argument on the death penalty has changed from an axiomatic acceptance and justification on the part of those who support it to a search for factual evidence that will demonstrate its efficacy in controlling those few offenses to
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