The Death Penalty

All around the world the death penalty has been used as the final step in rehabilitation. Most crimes were murder and purging. But for people in Roman-Greek times the penalties were the same. He who killed a father or mother, grandfather or grandmother, was punished, more majorum (according to the custom of the fathers) by being whipped till he bled, sewn up in a sack with a dog, cock, viper, and ape, and thrown into the sea, if the sea was at hand, and if not, by a constitution of Hadrian, he was exposed to wild beasts, or, in the time of Paulus, to be burnt. (Fr Vincent Benoit OP). . Some equate the American death penalty with the Nazi holocaust. Opponents see no moral distinction between the slaughter of 12 million totally innocent men, women and children and the just execution of society's worst human rights violators. (Sharp2) For years, criminologists analyzed murder rates to see if they fluctuated with the likelihood of convicted murderers being executed, but the results were inconclusive. Then in 1973 Isaac Ehrlich employed a new kind of analysis which produced results showing that for every inmate who was executed, 7 lives were spared because others were deterred from
committing murder. Similar results have been produced by disciples of Ehrlich in follow-up studies. (Sharp3)
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