Heresy (/ˈhɛrəsi/)
is any belief or theory that is strongly at variance with established
beliefs or customs, in particular the accepted beliefs of a church or
religious organization. A heretic is a proponent of such claims or
beliefs. Heresy is distinct from both apostasy, which is the explicit renunciation of one's religion, principles or cause, and blasphemy, which is an impious utterance or action concerning God or sacred things.
The term is usually used to refer to violations of important religious teachings, but is used also of views strongly opposed to any generally accepted ideas. It is used in particular in reference to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
In certain historical Christian, Islamic and Jewish cultures,
among others, espousing ideas deemed heretical has been and in some
cases still is subjected not merely to punishments such as excommunication, but even the death penalty.
Etymology
The term heresy is from Greekαἵρεσις originally meant "choice" or "thing chosen", but it came to mean the "party or school of a man's choice"
and also referred to that process whereby a young person would examine
various philosophies to determine how to live. The word "heresy" is
usually used within a Christian, Jewish, or Islamic context, and implies
slightly different meanings in each. The founder or leader of a
heretical movement is called a heresiarch, while individuals who espouse heresy or commit heresy are known as heretics. Heresiology is the study of heresy.
According to Titus 3:10 a divisive person should be warned twice
before separating from him. The Greek for the phrase "divisive person"
became a technical term in the early Church for a type of "heretic" who
promoted dissension.
In contrast correct teaching is called sound not only because it builds
up the faith, but because it protects it against the corrupting
influence of false teachers.
The Church Fathers identified Jews and Judaism with heresy. They saw deviations from orthodox Christianity as heresies that were essentially Jewish in spirit. Tertullian
implied that it was the Jews who most inspired heresy in Christianity:
"From the Jew the heretic has accepted guidance in this discussion [that
Jesus was not the Christ.]" Peter of Antioch referred to Christians that refused to venerate religious images as having "Jewish minds".
The use of the word "heresy" was given wide currency by Irenaeus in his 2nd century tract Contra Haereses (Against Heresies)
to describe and discredit his opponents during the early centuries of
the Christian community. He described the community's beliefs and
doctrines as orthodox (from ὀρθός, orthos "straight" + δόξα, doxa "belief") and the Gnostics' teachings as heretical. He also pointed out the concept of apostolic succession to support his arguments.
Constantine the Great, who along with Licinius had decreed toleration of Christianity in the Roman Empire by what is commonly called the "Edict of Milan", and was the first Roman Emperor baptized, set precedents for later policy. By Roman law the Emperor was Pontifex Maximus, the high priest of the College of Pontiffs (Collegium Pontificum) of all recognized religions in ancient Rome. To put an end to the doctrinal debate initiated by Arius, Constantine called the first of what would afterwards be called the ecumenical councils and then enforced orthodoxy by Imperial authority.
The first known usage of the term in a legal context was in AD 380 by the Edict of Thessalonica of Theodosius I, which made Christianity the state church of the Roman Empire.
Prior to the issuance of this edict, the Church had no state-sponsored
support for any particular legal mechanism to counter what it perceived
as "heresy". By this edict the state's authority and that of the Church
became somewhat overlapping. One of the outcomes of this blurring of
Church and state was the sharing of state powers of legal enforcement
with church authorities. This reinforcement of the Church's authority
gave church leaders the power to, in effect, pronounce the death sentence upon those whom the church considered heretical.
Within six years of the official criminalization of heresy by the Emperor, the first Christian heretic to be executed, Priscillian, was condemned in 386 by Roman secular officials for sorcery, and put to death with four or five followers. However, his accusers were excommunicated both by Ambrose of Milan and Pope Siricius, who opposed Priscillian's heresy, but "believed capital punishment to be inappropriate at best and usually unequivocally evil". The edict of Theodosius II (435) provided severe punishments for those who had or spread writings of Nestorius. Those who possessed writings of Arius were sentenced to death.
For some years after the Reformation,
Protestant churches were also known to execute those they considered
heretics, including Catholics. The last known heretic executed by
sentence of the Catholic Church was Spanish schoolmaster Cayetano Ripoll in 1826. The number of people executed as heretics under the authority of the various "ecclesiastical authorities" is not known.
In the Catholic Church, obstinate and willful manifest heresy is considered to spiritually cut one off from the Church, even before excommunication is incurred. The Codex Justinianus (1:5:12) defines "everyone who is not devoted to the Catholic Church and to our Orthodox holy Faith" a heretic.
The Church had always dealt harshly with strands of Christianity that
it considered heretical, but before the 11th century these tended to
centre on individual preachers or small localised sects, like Arianism, Pelagianism, Donatism, Marcionism and Montanism. The diffusion of the almost Manichaean sect of Paulicians westwards gave birth to the famous 11th and 12th century heresies of Western Europe. The first one was that of Bogomils in modern-day Bosnia, a sort of sanctuary between Eastern and Western Christianity. By the 11th century, more organised groups such as the Patarini, the Dulcinians, the Waldensians and the Cathars were beginning to appear in the towns and cities of northern Italy, southern France and Flanders.
In France the Cathars grew to represent a popular mass movement and the belief was spreading to other areas. The Cathar Crusade was initiated by the Catholic Church to eliminate the Cathar heresy in Languedoc. Heresy was a major justification for the Inquisition (Inquisitio Haereticae Pravitatis, Inquiry on Heretical Perversity) and for the European wars of religion associated with the Protestant Reformation.
Pope St. Gregory stigmatized Judaism and the Jewish people in many of his writings. He described Jews as enemies of Christ: "The more the Holy Spirit
fills the world, the more perverse hatred dominates the souls of the
Jews." He labeled all heresy as "Jewish", claiming that Judaism would
"pollute [Catholics and] deceive them with sacrilegious seduction." The identification of Jews and heretics in particular occurred several times in Roman-Christian law.
Between 1420 and 1431 the Hussite heretics defeated five anti-Hussite Crusades ordered by the Pope.
In his work "On the Jews and Their Lies" (1543), German Reformation leader Martin Luther claims that Jewish history was "assailed by much heresy", and that Christ the logos swept away the Jewish heresy and goes on to do so, "as it still does daily before our eyes." He stigmatizes Jewish prayer as being "blasphemous" and a lie, and vilifies Jews in general as being spiritually "blind" and "surely possessed by all devils." Luther calls the members of the Catholic Church "papists" and heretics, and has a special spiritual problem with Jewish circumcision.
In England,
the 16th-century European Reformation resulted in a number of
executions on charges of heresy. During the thirty-eight years of Henry VIII's
reign, about sixty heretics, mainly Protestants, were executed and a
rather greater number of Catholics lost their lives on grounds of
political offences such as treason, notably Sir Thomas More and Cardinal John Fisher, for refusing to accept the king's supremacy over the Church in England. Under Edward VI, the heresy laws were repealed in 1547 only to be reintroduced in 1554 by Mary I;
even so two radicals were executed in Edward's reign (one for denying
the reality of the incarnation, the other for denying Christ's
divinity).
Under Mary, around two hundred and ninety people were burned at the
stake between 1555 and 1558 after the restoration of papal jurisdiction. When Elizabeth I came to the throne, the concept of heresy was retained in theory but severely restricted by the 1559 Act of Supremacy
and the one hundred and eighty or so Catholics who were executed in the
forty-five years of her reign were put to death because they were
considered members of "...a subversive fifth column." The last execution of a "heretic" in England occurred under James VI and I in 1612. Although the charge was technically one of "blasphemy" there was one later execution in Scotland (still at that date an entirely independent kingdom) when in 1697 Thomas Aikenhead was accused, among other things, of denying the doctrine of the Trinity.
Another example of the persecution of heretics under Protestant rule was the execution of the Boston martyrs in 1659, 1660, and 1661. These executions resulted from the actions of the AnglicanPuritans, who at that time wielded political as well as ecclesiastic control in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
At the time, the colony leaders were apparently hoping to achieve their
vision of a "purer absolute theocracy" within their colony .
As such, they perceived the teachings and practices of the rival Quaker
sect as heretical, even to the point where laws were passed and
executions were performed with the aim of ridding their colony of such
perceived "heresies". It should be noticed that the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox communions generally regard the Puritans themselves as having been heterodox or heretical.
Modern era
The era of mass persecution and execution of heretics under the
banner of Christianity came to an end in 1826 with the last execution of
a "heretic", Cayetano Ripoll, by the Spanish Inquisition.
Although less common than in earlier periods, in modern times,
formal charges of heresy within Christian churches still occur. Issues
in the Protestant churches have included modern biblical criticism and
the nature of God. In the Catholic Church, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith criticizes writings for "ambiguities and errors" without using the word "heresy".
Perhaps due to the many modern negative connotations associated with the term heretic, such as the Spanish inquisition,
the term is used less often today. The subject of Christian heresy
opens up broader questions as to who has a monopoly on spiritual truth,
as explored by Jorge Luis Borges in the short story "The Theologians" within the compilation Labyrinths.
On 11 July 2007, PopeBenedict XVI stated
that all non-Catholic churches are "ecclesial communities." The members
of these churches accuses Vatican of effectively calling them heretics.
Ottoman Sultan Selim the Grim, regarded the ShiaQizilbash as heretics, reportedly proclaimed that "the killing of one Shiite had as much otherworldly reward as killing 70 Christians." Shia, in general, have often been accused by Sunnis of being heretics.
Starting in medieval times, Muslims began to refer to heretics and those who antagonized Islam as zindiqs, the charge being punishable by death.
In some modern day nations and regions, heresy remains an offense punishable by death. One example is the 1989 fatwa issued by the government of Iran, offering a substantial bounty for anyone who succeeds in the assassination of author Salman Rushdie, whose writings were declared as heretical.
Judaism
Orthodox Judaism considers views on the part of Jews who depart from traditional Jewish principles of faith heretical. In addition, the more right-wing groups within Orthodox Judaism hold that all Jews who reject the simple meaning of Maimonides's 13 principles of Jewish faith are heretics. As such, most of Orthodox Judaism considers Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism heretical movements, and regards most of Conservative Judaism as heretical. The liberal wing of Modern Orthodoxy
is more tolerant of Conservative Judaism, particularly its right wing,
as there is some theological and practical overlap between these groups.
Although Zoroastrianism has had an historical tolerance for other religions, it also held sects like Zurvanism and Mazdakism
heretical to its main dogma and has violently persecuted them, such as
burying Mazdakians with their feet upright as "human gardens". In later
periods Zoroastrians cooperated with Muslims to kill other Zoroastrians
deemed as heretical.
Non-religious usage
The term "heresy" is used not only with regard to religion but also in the context of political theory.
In other contexts the term does not necessarily have pejorative
overtones and may even be complimentary when used, in areas where
innovation is welcome, of ideas that are in fundamental disagreement
with the status quo in any practice and branch of knowledge.
Scientist/author Isaac Asimov considered heresy as an abstraction,
Asimov's views
are in Forward: The Role of the Heretic. mentioning religious,
political, socioeconomic and scientific heresies. He divided scientific
heretics into endoheretics (those from within the scientific community) and exoheretics (those from without). Characteristics were ascribed to both and examples
of both kinds were offered. Asimov concluded that science orthodoxy
defends itself well against endoheretics (by control of science
education, grants and publication as examples), but is nearly powerless
against exoheretics. He acknowledged by examples that heresy has
repeatedly become orthodoxy.
The revisionist paleontologistRobert T. Bakker, who published his findings as The Dinosaur Heresies, treated the mainstream view of dinosaurs as dogma.
"I have enormous respect for dinosaur paleontologists past and present.
But on average, for the last fifty years, the field hasn't tested
dinosaur orthodoxy severely enough." page 27 "Most taxonomists,
however, have viewed such new terminology as dangerously destabilizing
to the traditional and well-known scheme..." page 462. This book
apparently influenced Jurassic Park.
The illustrations by the author show dinosaurs in very active poses, in
contrast to the traditional perception of lethargy. He is an example of
a recent scientific endoheretic.
The term heresy is also used as an ideological pigeonhole for contemporary writers because, by definition, heresy depends on contrasts with an established orthodoxy. For example, the tongue-in-cheek contemporary usage of heresy, such as to categorize a "Wall Street heresy" a "Democratic heresy" or a "Republican heresy," are metaphors that invariably retain a subtext that links orthodoxies in geology or biology
or any other field to religion. These expanded metaphoric senses allude
to both the difference between the person's views and the mainstream
and the boldness of such a person in propounding these views.
Selected quotations
Thomas Aquinas:
"Wherefore if forgers of money and other evil-doers are forthwith
condemned to death by the secular authority, much more reason is there
for heretics, as soon as they are convicted of heresy, to be not only
excommunicated but even put to death." (Summa Theologica, c. 1270)
Isaac Asimov:
"Science is in a far greater danger from the absence of challenge than
from the coming of any number of even absurd challenges."
Gerald Brenan: "Religions are kept alive by heresies, which are really sudden explosions of faith. Dead religions do not produce them." (Thoughts in a Dry Season, 1978)
Geoffrey Chaucer:
"Thu hast translated the Romance of the Rose, That is a heresy against
my law, And maketh wise folk from me withdraw." (The Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, c. 1386)
G. K. Chesterton: "Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion." (Heretics, 12th Edition, 1919)
G. K. Chesterton:
"But to have avoided [all heresies] has been one whirling adventure;
and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages,
the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but
erect." (Orthodoxy, 1908)
Helen Keller: "The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next." (Optimism, 1903)
Lao Tzu: "Those who are intelligent are not ideologues. Those who are ideologues are not intelligent." (Tao Te Ching, Verse 81, 6th century BCE)
James G. March on the relations among madness, heresy, and genius:
"... we sometimes find that such heresies have been the foundation for
bold and necessary change, but heresy is usually just new ideas that are
foolish or dangerous and appropriately rejected or ignored. So while it
may be true that great geniuses are usually heretics, heretics are
rarely great geniuses."
Montesquieu: "No kingdom has ever had as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ." (Persian Letters, 1721)
Friedrich Nietzsche: "Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has hitherto always first been accounted a bad man:
but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and
this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed; - history
treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!" (Daybreak, § 20)
The Inquisition was a group of institutions within the government system of the Catholic Church whose aim was to combat public heresy committed by baptized Christians. It started in 12th-century France to combat religious dissent, in particular the Cathars and the Waldensians. Other groups investigated later included the Spiritual Franciscans, the Hussites (followers of Jan Hus) and the Beguines. Beginning in the 1250s, inquisitors were generally chosen from members of the Dominican Order, replacing the earlier practice of using local clergy as judges. The term Medieval Inquisition covers these courts up to mid-15th century.
During the Late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, the concept and scope of the Inquisition significantly expanded in response to the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. It expanded to other European countries, resulting in the Spanish Inquisition and Portuguese Inquisition. The Spanish and Portuguese operated inquisitorial courts throughout their empires in Africa, Asia, and the Americas (resulting in the Peruvian Inquisition and Mexican Inquisition). The Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions focused particularly on the issue of Jewish anusim
and Muslim converts to Catholicism, partly because these minority
groups were more numerous in Spain and Portugal than in many other parts
of Europe, and partly because they were often considered suspect due to
the assumption that they had secretly reverted to their previous
religions.
The term Inquisition comes from Medieval Latin "inquisitio",
which referred to any court process that was based on Roman law, which
had gradually come back into usage in the late medieval period. Today, the English term "Inquisition" can apply to any one of several institutions that worked against heretics (or other offenders against canon law) within the judicial system of the Roman Catholic Church. Although the term Inquisition is usually applied to ecclesiastical courts of the Catholic Church, it has several different usages:
the institution of the Catholic Church for combating heresy,
a number of historical expurgation movements against heresy (orchestrated by the Catholic Church or a Catholic state), or
the trial of an individual accused of heresy.
"[T]he Inquisition, as a church-court, had no jurisdiction over Moors and Jews as such." Generally, the Inquisition was concerned only with the heretical behaviour of Catholic adherents or converts.
"The overwhelming majority of sentences seem to have consisted of
penances like wearing a cross sewn on one's clothes, going on
pilgrimage, etc."
When a suspect was convicted of unrepentant heresy, the inquisitorial
tribunal was required by law to hand the person over to the secular
authorities for final sentencing, at which point a magistrate would
determine the penalty, which was usually burning at the stake although
the penalty varied based on local law. The laws were inclusive of proscriptions against certain religious crimes (heresy, etc.), and the punishments included death by burning,
although usually the penalty was banishment or imprisonment for life,
which was generally commuted after a few years. Thus the inquisitors
generally knew what would be the fate of anyone so remanded, and cannot
be considered to have divorced the means of determining guilt from its
effects.
The 1578 edition of the Directorium Inquisitorum (a standard Inquisitorial manual) spelled out the purpose of inquisitorial penalties: ...
quoniam punitio non refertur primo & per se in correctionem &
bonum eius qui punitur, sed in bonum publicum ut alij terreantur, & a
malis committendis avocentur (translation: "... for punishment does not take place primarily and per se
for the correction and good of the person punished, but for the public
good in order that others may become terrified and weaned away from the
evils they would commit").
Origin
Before
1100, the Catholic Church suppressed what they believed to be heresy,
usually through a system of ecclesiastical proscription or imprisonment,
but without using torture,
and seldom resorting to executions. Such punishments were opposed by a number of clergymen and theologians, although some countries punished heresy with the death penalty.
In the 12th century, to counter the spread of Catharism,
prosecution of heretics became more frequent. The Church charged
councils composed of bishops and archbishops with establishing
inquisitions (the Episcopal Inquisition). The first Inquisition was temporarily established in Languedoc (south of France) in 1184. The murder of Pope Innocent's papal legate Pierre de Castelnau in 1208 sparked the Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229). The Inquisition was permanently established in 1229, run largely by the Dominicans in Rome and later at Carcassonne in Languedoc.
Medieval Inquisition
Historians use the term "Medieval Inquisition" to describe the
various inquisitions that started around 1184, including the Episcopal
Inquisition (1184–1230s) and later the Papal Inquisition (1230s). These
inquisitions responded to large popular movements throughout Europe
considered apostate or heretical to Christianity, in particular the Cathars in southern France and the Waldensians
in both southern France and northern Italy. Other Inquisitions followed
after these first inquisition movements. The legal basis for some
inquisitorial activity came from Pope Innocent IV's papal bullAd extirpanda of 1252, which explicitly authorized (and defined the appropriate circumstances for) the use of torture by the Inquisition for eliciting confessions from heretics. However, Nicholas Eymerich,
the inquisitor who wrote the "Directorium Inquisitorum", stated:
'Quaestiones sunt fallaces et ineficaces' ("interrogations via torture
are misleading and futile"). By 1256 inquisitors were given absolution if they used instruments of torture.
In the 13th century, Pope Gregory IX (reigned 1227–1241) assigned the duty of carrying out inquisitions to the Dominican Order and Franciscan Order. By the end of the Middle Ages, England and Castile were the only large western nations without a papal inquisition.
Most inquisitors were friars who taught theology and/or law in the universities. They used inquisitorial procedures, a common legal practice adapted from the earlier Ancient Roman court procedures.
They judged heresy along with bishops and groups of "assessors" (clergy
serving in a role that was roughly analogous to a jury or legal
advisers), using the local authorities to establish a tribunal and to
prosecute heretics. After 1200, a Grand Inquisitor headed each Inquisition. Grand Inquisitions persisted until the mid 19th century.
Early Modern European history
With the sharpening of debate and of conflict between the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, Protestant societies came to see/use the Inquisition as a terrifying "Other", while staunch Catholics regarded the Holy Office as a necessary bulwark against the spread of reprehensible heresies.
Witch-trials
Emblem of the Spanish Inquisition (1571)
While belief in witchcraft, and persecutions directed at or excused by it, were widespread in pre-Christian Europe, and reflected in Germanic law,
the influence of the Church in the early medieval era resulted in the
revocation of these laws in many places, bringing an end to traditional
pagan witch hunts.
Throughout the medieval era mainstream Christian teaching had denied
the existence of witches and witchcraft, condemning it as pagan
superstition. However, Christian influence on popular beliefs in witches and maleficium (harm committed by magic) failed to entirely eradicate folk belief in witches.
The fierce denunciation and persecution of supposed sorceresses
that characterized the cruel witchhunts of a later age were not
generally found in the first thirteen hundred years of the Christian
era.
The medieval Church distinguished between "white" and "black" magic.
Local folk practice often mixed chants, incantations, and prayers to the
appropriate patron saint to ward off storms, to protect cattle, or
ensure a good harvest. Bonfires on Midsummer's Eve were intended to
deflect natural catastrophes or the influence of fairies, ghosts, and
witches. Plants, often harvested under particular conditions, were
deemed effective in healing.
Black magic was that which was used for a malevolent purpose.
This was generally dealt with through confession, repentance, and
charitable work assigned as penance.
Early Irish canons treated sorcery as a crime to be visited with
excommunication until adequate penance had been performed. In 1258 Pope Alexander IV
ruled that inquisitors should limit their involvement to those cases in
which there was some clear presumption of heretical belief.
The prosecution of witchcraft
generally became more prominent throughout the late medieval and
Renaissance era, perhaps driven partly by the upheavals of the era – the
Black Death, Hundred Years' War, and a gradual cooling of the climate
that modern scientists call the Little Ice Age (between about the 15th and 19th centuries). Witches were sometimes blamed.
Since the years of most intense witch-hunting largely coincide with the
age of the Reformation, some historians point to the influence of the
Reformation on the European witch-hunt.
Dominican priest Heinrich Kramer was assistant to the Archbishop of Salzburg. In 1484 Kramer requested that Pope Innocent VIII clarify his authority to prosecute witchcraft in Germany,
where he had been refused assistance by the local ecclesiastical
authorities. They maintained that Kramer could not legally function in
their areas.
The bull Summis desiderantes affectibus
sought to remedy this jurisdictional dispute by specifically
identifying the dioceses of Mainz, Köln, Trier, Salzburg, and Bremen. Some scholars view the bull as "clearly political".
The bull failed to ensure that Kramer obtained the support he had
hoped for, in fact he was subsequently expelled from the city of
Innsbruck by the local bishop, George Golzer, who ordered Kramer to stop
making false accusations. Golzer described Kramer as senile in letters
written shortly after the incident. This rebuke led Kramer to write a
justification of his views on witchcraft in his book Malleus Maleficarum,
written in 1486. In the book, Kramer stated his view that witchcraft
was to blame for bad weather. The book is also noted for its animus
against women.
Despite Kramer's claim that the book gained acceptance from the clergy
at the university of Cologne, it was in fact condemned by the clergy at
Cologne for advocating views that violated Catholic doctrine and
standard inquisitorial procedure. In 1538 the Spanish Inquisition
cautioned its members not to believe everything the Malleus said.
Spanish Inquisition
Pedro Berruguete, Saint Dominic Guzmán presiding over an Auto da fe (c. 1495). Many artistic representations depict torture and burning at the stake during the auto-da-fé (Portuguese for "Act of Faith").
Portugal and Spain in the late Middle Ages consisted largely of
multicultural territories of Muslim and Jewish influence, reconquered
from Islamic control,
and the new Christian authorities could not assume that all their
subjects would suddenly become and remain orthodox Roman Catholics. So
the Inquisition in Iberia, in the lands of the Reconquista counties and kingdoms like León, Castile and Aragon, had a special socio-political basis as well as more fundamental religious motives.
In some parts of Spain towards the end of the 14th century, there was a wave of violent anti-Judaism, encouraged by the preaching of Ferrand Martinez, Archdeacon of Ecija. In the pogroms of June 1391 in Seville, hundreds of Jews were killed, and the synagogue was completely destroyed. The number of people killed was also high in other cities, such as Córdoba, Valencia and Barcelona.
One of the consequences of these pogroms
was the mass conversion of thousands of surviving Jews. Forced baptism
was contrary to the law of the Catholic Church, and theoretically
anybody who had been forcibly baptized could legally return to Judaism.
However, this was very narrowly interpreted. Legal definitions of the
time theoretically acknowledged that a forced baptism was not a valid
sacrament, but confined this to cases where it was literally
administered by physical force. A person who had consented to baptism
under threat of death or serious injury was still regarded as a
voluntary convert, and accordingly forbidden to revert to Judaism. After the public violence, many of the converted "felt it safer to remain in their new religion." Thus, after 1391, a new social group appeared and were referred to as conversos or New Christians.
King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile established the Spanish Inquisition
in 1478. In contrast to the previous inquisitions, it operated
completely under royal Christian authority, though staffed by clergy and
orders, and independently of the Holy See. It operated in Spain and in all Spanish colonies and territories, which included the Canary Islands, the Spanish Netherlands, the Kingdom of Naples, and all Spanish possessions in North, Central, and South America. It primarily targeted forced converts from Islam (Moriscos, Conversos and secret Moors) and from Judaism (Conversos, Crypto-Jews and Marranos) — both groups still resided in Spain after the end of the Islamic control of Spain — who came under suspicion of either continuing to adhere to their old religion or of having fallen back into it.
In 1492 all Jews who had not converted were expelled from Spain;
those who converted became nominal Catholics and thus subject to the
Inquisition.
Inquisition in the Spanish overseas empire
In the Americas, King Philip II set up three tribunals (each formally titled Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición) in 1569, one in Mexico, Cartagena de Indias (in modern-day Colombia) and Peru. The Mexican office administered Mexico (central and southeastern Mexico), Nueva Galicia (northern and western Mexico), the Audiencias of Guatemala (Guatemala, Chiapas, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica), and the Spanish East Indies. The Peruvian Inquisition, based in Lima, administered all the Spanish territories in South America and Panama.
Portuguese Inquisition
A copper engraving from 1685: "Die Inquisition in Portugall"
The Portuguese Inquisition formally started in Portugal in 1536 at the request of King João III. Manuel I had asked Pope Leo X for the installation of the Inquisition in 1515, but only after his death in 1521 did Pope Paul III acquiesce. At its head stood a Grande Inquisidor, or General Inquisitor, named by the Pope but selected by the Crown, and always from within the royal family. The Portuguese Inquisition principally targeted the Sephardic Jews, whom the state forced to convert to Christianity. Spain had expelled its Sephardic population in 1492; many of these Spanish Jews left Spain for Portugal but eventually were targeted there as well.
The Portuguese Inquisition held its first auto-da-fé in 1540. The Portuguese inquisitors mostly targeted the JewishNew Christians (i.e. conversos or marranos). The Portuguese Inquisition expanded its scope of operations from Portugal to its colonial possessions, including Brazil, Cape Verde, and Goa.
In the colonies, it continued as a religious court, investigating and
trying cases of breaches of the tenets of orthodox Roman Catholicism
until 1821. King João III (reigned 1521–57) extended the activity of the courts to cover censorship, divination, witchcraft, and bigamy.
Originally oriented for a religious action, the Inquisition exerted an
influence over almost every aspect of Portuguese society: political,
cultural, and social.
The Goa Inquisition, an inquisition largely aimed at Catholic converts from Hinduism or Islam
who were thought to have returned to their original ways, started in
1560. In addition, the Inquisition prosecuted non-converts who broke
prohibitions against the observance of Hindu or Muslim rites or interfered with Portuguese attempts to convert non-Christians to Catholicism. Aleixo Dias Falcão and Francisco Marques set it up in the palace of the Sabaio Adil Khan.
According to Henry Charles Lea, between 1540 and 1794, tribunals in Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra, and Évora resulted in the burning of 1,175 persons, the burning of another 633 in effigy, and the penancing of 29,590. But documentation of 15 out of 689 autos-da-fé has disappeared, so these numbers may slightly understate the activity.
Roman Inquisition
With the Protestant Reformation, Catholic authorities became much more ready to suspect heresy in any new ideas,
including those of Renaissance humanism,
previously strongly supported by many at the top of the Church
hierarchy. The extirpation of heretics became a much broader and more
complex enterprise, complicated by the politics of territorial
Protestant powers, especially in northern Europe. The Catholic Church
could no longer exercise direct influence in the politics and
justice-systems of lands that officially adopted Protestantism. Thus war
(the French Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years' War), massacre (the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre) and the missional and propaganda work (by the Sacra congregatio de propaganda fide) of the Counter-Reformation came to play larger roles in these circumstances, and the Roman law type of a "judicial" approach to heresy represented by the Inquisition became less important overall.
In 1542 Pope Paul III established the Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition as a permanent congregation staffed with cardinals
and other officials. It had the tasks of maintaining and defending the
integrity of the faith and of examining and proscribing errors and false
doctrines; it thus became the supervisory body of local Inquisitions. Arguably the most famous case tried by the Roman Inquisition was that of Galileo Galilei in 1633.
The penances and sentences for those who confessed or were found
guilty were pronounced together in a public ceremony at the end of all
the processes. This was the sermo generalis or auto-da-fé. Penances
(not matters for the civil authorities) might consist of a pilgrimage, a
public scourging, a fine, or the wearing of a cross. The wearing of two
tongues of red or other brightly colored cloth, sewn onto an outer
garment in an "X" pattern, marked those who were under investigation.
The penalties in serious cases were confiscation of property by the
Inquisition or imprisonment. This led to the possibility of false
charges to enable confiscation being made against those over a certain
income, particularly rich marranos. Following the French invasion of 1798, the new authorities sent 3,000 chests containing over 100,000 Inquisition documents to France from Rome.
Ending of the Inquisition in the 19th and 20th centuries
The wars of independence of the former Spanish colonies in the Americas concluded with the abolition of the Inquisition in every quarter of Hispanic America between 1813 and 1825.
By decree of Napoleon's government in 1797, the Inquisition in Venice was abolished in 1806
In Portugal, in the wake of the Liberal Revolution of 1820, the "General Extraordinary and Constituent Courts of the Portuguese Nation" abolished the Portuguese inquisition in 1821.
The last execution of the Inquisition was in Spain in 1826. This was the execution by garroting of the school teacher Cayetano Ripoll for purportedly teaching Deism in his school. In Spain the practices of the Inquisition were finally outlawed in 1834.
In Italy, after the restoration of the Pope as the ruler of the Papal States in 1814, the activity of the Papal States Inquisition continued on until the mid-19th century, notably in the well-publicised Mortara Affair
(1858–1870). In 1908 the name of the Congregation became "The Sacred
Congregation of the Holy Office", which in 1965 further changed to "Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith", as retained to the present day.
Statistics
Beginning
in the 19th century, historians have gradually compiled statistics
drawn from the surviving court records, from which estimates have been
calculated by adjusting the recorded number of convictions by the
average rate of document loss for each time period. Gustav Henningsen
and Jaime Contreras studied the records of the Spanish Inquisition,
which list 44,674 cases of which 826 resulted in executions in person and 778 in effigy (i.e. a straw dummy was burned in place of the person). William Monter estimated there were 1000 executions between 1530–1630 and 250 between 1630–1730. Jean-Pierre Dedieu studied the records of Toledo's tribunal, which put 12,000 people on trial. For the period prior to 1530, Henry Kamen estimated there were about 2,000 executions in all of Spain's tribunals. Italian Renaissance history professor and Inquisition expert Carlo Ginzburg
had his doubts about using statistics to reach a judgment about the
period. "In many cases, we don’t have the evidence, the evidence has
been lost," said Ginzburg.
Appearance in popular media
Series 2 Episode 2 of Monty Python's Flying Circus is entitled "The Spanish Inquisition", and features Michael Palin, Terry Jones, and Terry Gilliam
as an inept—not to mention anachronistic—team of Inquisitors attempting
to menace 20th-Century Britons, who seem unfazed by their inane torture
implements (such as "the rack", which was taken out of a dishwasher,
or even the dreaded "Comfy Chair") and woefully unpolished theatrics
(Palin's character discovers to his horror that having more "chief
weapons" rather than fewer seems to take some of the punch out of his
diabolical monologue). Their signature gimmick is bursting into the room
whenever someone says they "didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition", and
declaring that "nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition", a line which has itself inspired numerous homages and parodies since.
The 1982 novel Baltasar and Blimunda by José Saramago,
portrays how the Portuguese Inquisition impacts the fortunes of the
title characters as well as several others from history, including the
priest and aviation pioneer Bartolomeu de Gusmão.
Inquisitio is a French television series set in the Middle Ages.
In the novel Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco,
there is some discussion about various sects of Christianity and
inquisition, a small discussion about the ethics and purpose of
inquisition, and a scene of Inquisition. In the movie by the same name,
The Inquisition plays a prominent role including torture and a burning
at the stake.
In the novel La Catedral del Mar by Ildefonso Falcones, there are scenes of inquisition investigations in small towns and a great scene in Barcelona.
Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is a government-sanctioned practice whereby a person is killed by the state as a punishment for a crime. The sentence that someone be punished in such a manner is referred to as a death sentence, whereas the act of carrying out the sentence is known as an execution. Crimes that are punishable by death are known as capital crimes or capital offences, and they commonly include offences such as murder, treason, espionage, war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Etymologically, the term capital (lit. "of the head", derived via the Latincapitalis from caput, "head") in this context alluded to execution by beheading.
Fifty-six countries retain capital punishment, 103 countries have completely abolished it de jure
for all crimes, six have abolished it for ordinary crimes (while
maintaining it for special circumstances such as war crimes), and 30 are
abolitionist in practice.
Execution of criminals has been used by nearly all societies since the beginning of civilizations on Earth.
Until the nineteenth century without developed prison systems, there
was frequently no workable alternative to insure deterrence and
incapacitation of criminals. The executions themselves often involved torture with cruel methods such as the breaking wheel.
The use of formal execution extends to the beginning of recorded
history. Most historical records and various primitive tribal practices
indicate that the death penalty was a part of their justice system.
Communal punishment for wrongdoing generally included compensation by
the wrongdoer, corporal punishment, shunning, banishment and execution. Usually, compensation and shunning were enough as a form of justice. The response to crime committed by neighbouring tribes or communities included a formal apology, compensation or blood feuds.
A blood feud
or vendetta occurs when arbitration between families or tribes fails or
an arbitration system is non-existent. This form of justice was common
before the emergence of an arbitration system based on state or
organized religion. It may result from crime, land disputes or a code of
honour. "Acts of retaliation underscore the ability of the social
collective to defend itself and demonstrate to enemies (as well as
potential allies) that injury to property, rights, or the person will
not go unpunished." However, in practice, it is often difficult to distinguish between a war of vendetta and one of conquest.
Elaborations of tribal arbitration of feuds
included peace settlements often done in a religious context and
compensation system. Compensation was based on the principle of substitution
which might include material (for example, cattle, slave) compensation,
exchange of brides or grooms, or payment of the blood debt. Settlement
rules could allow for animal blood to replace human blood, or transfers
of property or blood money
or in some case an offer of a person for execution. The person offered
for execution did not have to be an original perpetrator of the crime
because the system was based on tribes, not individuals. Blood feuds
could be regulated at meetings, such as the Norsementhings. Systems deriving from blood feuds may survive alongside more advanced
legal systems or be given recognition by courts (for example, trial by combat). One of the more modern refinements of the blood feud is the duel.
In certain parts of the world, nations in the form of ancient
republics, monarchies or tribal oligarchies emerged. These nations were
often united by common linguistic, religious or family ties. Moreover,
expansion of these nations often occurred by conquest of neighbouring
tribes or nations. Consequently, various classes of royalty, nobility,
various commoners and slave emerged. Accordingly, the systems of tribal
arbitration were submerged into a more unified system of justice which
formalized the relation between the different "classes" rather than
"tribes". The earliest and most famous example is Code of Hammurabi which set the different punishment and compensation, according to the different class/group of victims and perpetrators. The Torah (Jewish Law), also known as the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Christian Old Testament), lays down the death penalty for murder, kidnapping, magic, violation of the Sabbath, blasphemy, and a wide range of sexual crimes, although evidence suggests that actual executions were rare.
A further example comes from Ancient Greece, where the Athenian legal system was first written down by Draco in about 621 BC: the death penalty was applied for a particularly wide range of crimes, though Solon later repealed Draco's code and published new laws, retaining only Draco's homicide statutes. The word draconian derives from Draco's laws. The Romans also used death penalty for a wide range of offences.
Tang dynasty
Although many are executed in the People's Republic of China each year in the present day, there was a time in the Tang dynasty (618–907) when the death penalty was abolished. This was in the year 747, enacted by Emperor Xuanzong of Tang
(r. 712–756). When abolishing the death penalty Xuanzong ordered his
officials to refer to the nearest regulation by analogy when sentencing
those found guilty of crimes for which the prescribed punishment was
execution. Thus depending on the severity of the crime a punishment of
severe scourging with the thick rod or of exile to the remote Lingnan
region might take the place of capital punishment. However, the death
penalty was restored only 12 years later in 759 in response to the An Lushan Rebellion. At this time in the Tang dynasty only the emperor had the authority to sentence criminals to execution. Under Xuanzong capital punishment was relatively infrequent, with only 24 executions in the year 730 and 58 executions in the year 736.
Ling Chi – execution by slow slicing – was a form of torture and execution used in China from roughly AD 900 (Tang era) until it was banned in 1905
The two most common forms of execution in the Tang dynasty were
strangulation and decapitation, which were the prescribed methods of
execution for 144 and 89 offences respectively. Strangulation was the
prescribed sentence for lodging an accusation against one's parents or
grandparents with a magistrate, scheming to kidnap a person and sell
them into slavery and opening a coffin while desecrating a tomb.
Decapitation was the method of execution prescribed for more serious
crimes such as treason and sedition. Despite the great discomfort
involved, most of the Tang Chinese preferred strangulation to
decapitation, as a result of the traditional Tang Chinese belief that
the body is a gift from the parents and that it is, therefore,
disrespectful to one's ancestors to die without returning one's body to
the grave intact.
Some further forms of capital punishment were practised in the
Tang dynasty, of which the first two that follow at least were
extralegal. The first of these was scourging to death with the thick rod
which was common throughout the Tang dynasty especially in cases of
gross corruption. The second was truncation, in which the convicted
person was cut in two at the waist with a fodder knife and then left to
bleed to death. A further form of execution called Ling Chi (slow slicing), or death by/of a thousand cuts, was used from the close of the Tang dynasty (around 900) to its abolition in 1905.
When a minister of the fifth grade or above received a death
sentence the emperor might grant him a special dispensation allowing him
to commit suicide in lieu of execution. Even when this privilege was
not granted, the law required that the condemned minister be provided
with food and ale by his keepers and transported to the execution ground
in a cart rather than having to walk there.
Nearly all executions under the Tang dynasty took place in public
as a warning to the population. The heads of the executed were
displayed on poles or spears. When local authorities decapitated a
convicted criminal, the head was boxed and sent to the capital as proof
of identity and that the execution had taken place.
Middle Ages
The burning of Jakob Rohrbach, a leader of the peasants during the German Peasants' War.
The breaking wheel was used during the Middle Ages and was still in use into the 19th century.
In medieval and early modern Europe, before the development of modern prison systems, the death penalty was also used as a generalized form of punishment. During the reign of Henry VIII of England, as many as 72,000 people are estimated to have been executed.
In early modern Europe, a massive moral panic regarding witchcraft
swept across Europe and later the European colonies in North America.
During this period, there were widespread claims that malevolent Satanicwitches were operating as an organized threat to Christendom. As a result, tens of thousands of women were prosecuted for witchcraft and executed through the witch trials of the early modern period (between the 15th and 18th centuries).
The death penalty also targeted sexual offences such as sodomy. In England, the Buggery Act 1533 stipulated hanging as punishment for "buggery". James Pratt and John Smith were the last two Englishmen to be executed for sodomy in 1835.
Despite the wide use of the death penalty, calls for reform were not unknown. The 12th century Jewish legal scholar, Moses Maimonides,
wrote, "It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty
persons than to put a single innocent man to death." He argued that
executing an accused criminal on anything less than absolute certainty
would lead to a slippery slope of decreasing burdens of proof,
until we would be convicting merely "according to the judge's caprice". Maimonides's concern was maintaining popular respect for law, and he
saw errors of commission as much more threatening than errors of
omission.
Antiporta of Dei delitti e delle pene (On Crimes and Punishments), 1766 ed.
In the last several centuries, with the emergence of modern nation states, justice came to be increasingly associated with the concept of natural and legal rights. The period saw an increase in standing police forces and permanent penitential institutions. Rational choice theory, a utilitarian approach to criminology which justifies punishment as a form of deterrence as opposed to retribution, can be traced back to Cesare Beccaria, whose influential treatise On Crimes and Punishments (1764) was the first detailed analysis of capital punishment to demand the abolition of the death penalty. Jeremy Bentham, regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism, also called for the abolition of the death penalty. Beccaria, and later Charles Dickens and Karl Marx
noted the incidence of increased violent criminality at the times and
places of executions. Official recognition of this phenomenon led to
executions being carried out inside prisons, away from public view.
In England in the 18th century, when there was no police force,
there was a large increase in the number of capital offences to more
than 200. These were mainly property offences, for example cutting down a
cherry tree in an orchard. In 1820, there were 160, including crimes such as shoplifting, petty theft or stealing cattle. The severity of the so-called Bloody Code
was often tempered by juries who refused to convict, or judges, in the
case of petty theft, who arbitrarily set the value stolen at below the
statutory level for a capital crime.
20th century
Mexican execution by firing squad, 1916
In Nazi Germany there were three types of capital punishment; hanging, decapitation and death by shooting. Also, modern military organisations employed capital punishment as a means of maintaining military discipline. In the past, cowardice, absence without leave, desertion, insubordination, looting, shirking under enemy fire and disobeying orders were often crimes punishable by death. One method of execution, since firearms came into common use, has also been firing squad, although some countries use execution with a single shot to the head or neck.
50 Poles tried and sentenced to death by a Standgericht in retaliation for the assassination of 1 German policeman in Nazi-occupied Poland, 1944
Various authoritarian states—for example those with fascist or
Communist governments—employed the death penalty as a potent means of political oppression. According to Robert Conquest, the leading expert on Joseph Stalin's purges, more than one million Soviet citizens were executed during the Great Terror of 1937–38, almost all by a bullet to the back of the head. Mao Zedong publicly stated that "800,000" people had been executed in China during the Cultural Revolution
(1966-1976). Partly as a response to such excesses, civil rights
organizations started to place increasing emphasis on the concept of human rights and an abolition of the death penalty.
Contemporary era
Among countries around the world, all European (except Belarus) and many Oceanic states (including Australia, New Zealand and East Timor), and Canada have abolished capital punishment. In Latin America, most states have completely abolished the use of capital punishment, while some countries such as Brazil and Guatemala allow for capital punishment only in exceptional situations, such as treason committed during wartime. The United States (the federal government and 31 of the states), some Caribbean countries and the majority of countries in Asia (for example, Japan and India) retain capital punishment. In Africa, less than half of countries retain it, for example Botswana and Zambia. South Africa abolished the death penalty in 1995.
Abolition was often adopted due to political change, as when
countries shifted from authoritarianism to democracy, or when it became
an entry condition for the European Union. The United States is a
notable exception: some states have had bans on capital punishment for
decades, the earliest being Michigan
where it was abolished in 1846, while other states still actively use
it today. The death penalty in the United States remains a contentious
issue which is hotly debated.
In retentionist countries, the debate is sometimes revived when a
miscarriage of justice has occurred though this tends to cause
legislative efforts to improve the judicial process rather than to
abolish the death penalty. In abolitionist countries, the debate is
sometimes revived by particularly brutal murders though few countries
have brought it back after abolishing it. However, a spike in serious,
violent crimes, such as murders or terrorist attacks, has prompted some
countries to effectively end the moratorium on the death penalty. One
notable example is Pakistan which in December 2014 lifted a six-year moratorium on executions after the Peshawar school massacre during which 132 students and 9 members of staff of the Army Public School and Degree College Peshawar were killed by Taliban terrorists. Since then, Pakistan has executed over 400 convicts.
In 2017 two major countries, Turkey and the Philippines, saw their executives making moves to reinstate the death penalty. As of March 2017, passage of the law in the Philippines awaits the Senate's approval.
Modern-day public opinion
The public opinion on the death penalty varies considerably by
country and by the crime in question. Countries where a majority of
people are against execution include Norway where only 25 percent are in
favour. Most French, Finns and Italians also oppose the death penalty. A 2016 Gallup poll shows that 60% of Americans support the death penalty, down from 64% in 2010 65% in 2006 and 68% in 2001. A 2010 poll found that 61% of Americans would choose a penalty other than the death sentence for murder.
Use of capital punishment is growing in India in the 2010s due to anger over several recent brutal cases of rape.
While support for the death penalty for murder is still high in China,
executions have dropped precipitously, with 3,000 executed in 2012
versus 12,000 in 2002. A poll in South Africa found that 76 percent of millennium generation South Africans support re-introduction of the death penalty, which is abolished in South Africa. A 2017 poll found younger Mexicans are more likely to support capital punishment than older ones.
57% of Brazilians support the death penalty. The age group that shows
the greatest support for execution of those condemned is the 25 to
34-year-old category, in which 61% say they are in favor.
Trends in most of the world have long been to move to private and less painful executions. France developed the guillotine for this reason in the final years of the 18th century, while Britain banned drawing and quartering in the early 19th century. Hanging by turning the victim off a ladder or by kicking a stool or a bucket, which causes death by suffocation, was replaced by long drop "hanging" where the subject is dropped a longer distance to dislocate the neck and sever the spinal cord. Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar, Shah of Persia (1896-1907) introduced throat-cutting and blowing from a gun
(close-range cannon fire) as quick and relatively painless alternatives
to more torturous methods of executions used at that time. In the United States, electrocution and gas inhalation were introduced as more humane alternatives to hanging, but have been almost entirely superseded by lethal injection. A small number of countries still employ slow hanging methods and stoning.
A study of executions carried out in the United States between
1977 and 2001 indicated that at least 34 of the 749 executions, or 4.5%,
involved "unanticipated problems or delays that caused, at least
arguably, unnecessary agony for the prisoner or that reflect gross
incompetence of the executioner". The rate of these "botched executions"
remained steady over the period of the study. A separate study published in The Lancet in 2005 found that in 43% of cases of lethal injection, the blood level of hypnotics was insufficient to guarantee unconsciousness. However, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2008 (Baze v. Rees) and again in 2015 (Glossip v. Gross) that lethal injection does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment.
Many countries have abolished capital punishment either in law or in practice. Since World War II
there has been a trend toward abolishing capital punishment. Capital
punishment has been completely abolished by 102 countries, a further six
have done so for all offences except under special circumstances and 32
more have abolished it in practice because they have not used it for at
least 10 years and are believed to have a policy or established
practice against carrying out executions.
The death penalty was banned in China between 747 and 759. In Japan, Emperor Saga abolished the death penalty in 818 under the influence of Shinto and it lasted until 1156.
In England, a public statement of opposition was included in The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards, written in 1395. Sir Thomas More's Utopia,
published in 1516, debated the benefits of the death penalty in
dialogue form, coming to no firm conclusion. More was himself executed
for treason in 1535. More recent opposition to the death penalty stemmed
from the book of the Italian Cesare BeccariaDei Delitti e Delle Pene ("On Crimes and Punishments"),
published in 1764. In this book, Beccaria aimed to demonstrate not only
the injustice, but even the futility from the point of view of social welfare, of torture and the death penalty. Influenced by the book, Grand Duke Leopold II of Habsburg, the future Emperor of Austria, abolished the death penalty in the then-independent Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the first permanent abolition in modern times. On 30 November 1786, after having de facto blocked executions (the last was in 1769), Leopold promulgated the reform of the penal code
that abolished the death penalty and ordered the destruction of all the
instruments for capital execution in his land. In 2000, Tuscany's
regional authorities instituted an annual holiday on 30 November to
commemorate the event. The event is commemorated on this day by 300
cities around the world celebrating Cities for Life Day.
The Roman Republic banned capital punishment in 1849. Venezuela followed suit and abolished the death penalty in 1863[55] and San Marino
did so in 1865. The last execution in San Marino had taken place in
1468. In Portugal, after legislative proposals in 1852 and 1863, the
death penalty was abolished in 1867. The last execution of the death
penalty in Brazil was 1876, from there all the condemnations were
commuted by the Emperor Pedro II
until it's abolition for civil offences and military offences in
peacetime in 1891. The penalty for crimes committed in peacetime was
then reinstated and abolished again twice (1938–53 and 1969–78), but on
those occasions it was restricted to acts of terrorism or subversion
considered "internal warfare" and all sentence were commuted and were
not carried out.
In the United Kingdom, it was abolished for murder (leaving only treason, piracy with violence, arson in royal dockyards
and a number of wartime military offences as capital crimes) for a
five-year experiment in 1965 and permanently in 1969, the last execution
having taken place in 1964. It was abolished for all peacetime offences
in 1998.
In the United States, Michigan was the first state to ban the death penalty, on 18 May 1846. The death penalty was declared unconstitutional between 1972 and 1976 based on the Furman v. Georgia case, but the 1976 Gregg v. Georgia
case once again permitted the death penalty under certain
circumstances. Further limitations were placed on the death penalty in Atkins v. Virginia (death penalty unconstitutional for people with an intellectual disability) and Roper v. Simmons
(death penalty unconstitutional if defendant was under age 18 at the
time the crime was committed). In the United States, 18 states and the District of Columbia ban capital punishment.
Abolitionists believe capital punishment is the worst violation of human rights, because the right to life is the most important, and capital punishment violates it without necessity and inflicts to the condemned a psychological torture. Human rights activists oppose the death penalty, calling it "cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment". Amnesty International considers it to be "the ultimate, irreversible denial of Human Rights".
Contemporary use
Capital punishment by country
World map of the use of capital punishment as of 26 March 2018
Legend
Retentionist countries: 56
Abolitionist
in practice countries (have not executed anyone during the last 10
years and are believed to have a policy or established practice of not
carrying out executions): 29
Abolitionist countries except for crimes committed under exceptional circumstances (such as crimes committed in wartime): 7
Abolitionist countries: 106
Most countries, including almost all First World nations, have abolished capital punishment either in law or in practice. Notable exceptions are the United States, China, India, Japan, and most Islamic states. The United States is the only Western country to still use the death penalty.
Since World War II,
there has been a trend toward abolishing the death penalty. 58
countries retain the death penalty in active use, 102 countries have
abolished capital punishment altogether, six have done so for all
offences except under special circumstances, and 32 more have abolished
it in practice because they have not used it for at least 10 years and
are believed to have a policy or established practice against carrying
out executions.
According to Amnesty International, 23 countries are known to have performed executions in 2016. There are countries which do not publish information on the use of capital punishment, most significantly China and North Korea. As per Amnesty International, around 1000 prisoners were executed in 2017.
A
map showing the use of the death penalty in the United States by
individual states. Note that the death penalty is used throughout the
United States for certain federal crimes (cf. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev).
States with a valid death penalty statute
States without the death penalty
The use of the death penalty is becoming increasingly restrained in some retentionist countries including Taiwan and Singapore. Indonesia carried out no executions between November 2008 and March 2013. Singapore, Japan and the United States are the only developed countries that are classified by Amnesty International as 'retentionist' (South Korea is classified as 'abolitionist in practice'). Nearly all retentionist countries are situated in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. The only retentionist country in Europe is Belarus.
The death penalty was overwhelmingly practised in poor and
authoritarian states, which often employed the death penalty as a tool
of political oppression. During the 1980s, the democratisation of Latin
America swelled the ranks of abolitionist countries.
This was soon followed by the fall of Communism in Europe. Many of the countries which restored democracy aspired to enter the EU. The European Union and the Council of Europe both strictly require member states not to practise the death penalty (see Capital punishment in Europe). Public support for the death penalty in the EU varies. The last execution on the present-day territory of the Council of Europe took place in 1997 in Ukraine.
On the other hand, rapid industrialisation in Asia has been increasing
the number of developed retentionist countries. In these countries, the
death penalty enjoys strong public support, and the matter receives
little attention from the government or the media; in China there is a small but growing movement to abolish the death penalty altogether. This trend has been followed by some African and Middle Eastern countries where support for the death penalty is high.
Some countries have resumed practising the death penalty after
having suspended executions for long periods. The United States
suspended executions in 1972 but resumed them in 1976; there was no
execution in India between 1995 and 2004; and Sri Lanka declared an end to its moratorium on the death penalty on 20 November 2004, although it has not yet performed any executions. The Philippines re-introduced the death penalty in 1993 after abolishing it in 1987, but abolished it again in 2006.
The United States and Japan are the only developed countries to
have recently carried out executions. The U.S. federal government, the
U.S. military, and 31 states have a valid death penalty statute, and
over 1,400 executions have been carried in the United States since it
reinstated the death penalty in 1976, including 28 in 2015. Japan has
111 inmates with finalized death sentences as of July 26, 2018, after
executing Shoko Asahara and 6 other senior members of Aum Shinrikyo, the cult group which caused multiple crimes with thousands of victims such as Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995, on July 6, followed by the executions of remaining 6 senior members on July 26.
The most recent country to abolish the death penalty was Burkina Faso in June 2018.
Juvenile offenders
The death penalty for juvenile offenders (criminals aged under 18 years at the time of their crime) has become increasingly rare. Considering the age of majority
is still not 18 in some countries, since 1990 ten countries have
executed offenders who were juveniles at the time of their crimes: The People's Republic of China (PRC), Bangladesh, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United States, and Yemen. The PRC, Pakistan, the United States, Yemen and Iran have since raised the minimum age to 18.
Amnesty International has recorded 61 verified executions since then,
in several countries, of both juveniles and adults who had been
convicted of committing their offences as juveniles. The PRC does not allow for the execution of those under 18, but child executions have reportedly taken place.
Starting in 1642 within British America, an estimated 365 juvenile offenders were executed by the states and federal government of the United States. The United States Supreme Court abolished capital punishment for offenders under the age of 16 in Thompson v. Oklahoma (1988), and for all juveniles in Roper v. Simmons (2005).
Between 2005 and May 2008, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan
and Yemen were reported to have executed child offenders, the most being
from Iran.
The United NationsConvention on the Rights of the Child, which forbids capital punishment for juveniles under article 37(a), has been signed by all countries and ratified, except for Somalia and the United States (notwithstanding the latter's Supreme Court decisions abolishing the practice).
The UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights
maintains that the death penalty for juveniles has become contrary to a jus cogens of customary international law. A majority of countries are also party to the U.N. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
(whose Article 6.5 also states that "Sentence of death shall not be
imposed for crimes committed by persons below eighteen years of
age...").
Iran, despite its ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,
was the world's largest executioner of juvenile offenders, for which it
has received international condemnation; the country's record is the
focus of the Stop Child Executions Campaign.
But on 10 February 2012, Iran's parliament changed the controversial
law of executing juveniles. In the new law, the age of 18 (solar year)
would be for both genders considered and juvenile offenders will be
sentenced on a separate law than of adults.
Based on the Islamic law which now seems to have been revised, girls at
the age of 9 and boys at 15 of lunar year (11 days shorter than a solar
year) were fully responsible for their crimes. Iran accounted for two-thirds of the global total of such executions, and currently has roughly 140 people on death row for crimes committed as juveniles (up from 71 in 2007). The past executions of Mahmoud Asgari, Ayaz Marhoni
and Makwan Moloudzadeh became international symbols of Iran's child
capital punishment and the judicial system that hands down such
sentences.
Saudi Arabia also executes criminals who were minors at the time of the offence. In 2013, Saudi Arabia was the center of an international controversy after it executed Rizana Nafeek, a Sri Lankan domestic worker, who was believed to have been 17 years old at the time of the crime.
Japan has not been executing juvenile criminals after August 1997, when they executed Norio Nagayama, a spree killer
who had been convicted of shooting four people dead in the late 1960s.
Nagayama's case created the so-called Nagayama standards, which take
into account factors such as the number of victims, brutality and social
impact of the crimes. The standards have been used in determining
whether to apply the death sentence in murder cases. Teruhiko Seki,
convicted of murdering four members including a 4-year-old daughter and
raping a 15-year-old daughter of a family in 1992, became the second
inmate to be hanged for a crime committed as a minor in the first such
execution in 20 years after Nagayama on December 19, 2017. Takayuki Otsuki,
who raped and strangled a 23-year-old lady and then strangled to death
her 11-month-old daughter on April 14, 1999, when he was 18, is another
inmate sentenced to death, and his request for retrial has been rejected
by the Supreme Court of Japan.
A public execution is a form of capital punishment which "members of
the general public may voluntarily attend". This definition excludes the
presence of a small number of witnesses randomly selected to assure
executive accountability.
While today the great majority of the world considers public executions
to be distasteful and most countries have outlawed the practice,
throughout much of history executions were performed publicly as a means
for the state to demonstrate "its power before those who fell under its
jurisdiction be they criminals, enemies, or political opponents".
Additionally, it afforded the public a chance to witness "what was
considered a great spectacle".
Social historians note that beginning in the 20th century in the
U.S. and western Europe death in general became increasingly shielded
from public view, occurring more and more behind the closed doors of the
hospital. Executions were likewise moved behind the walls of the penitentiary. The last formal public executions occurred in 1868 in Britain, in 1936 in the U.S. and in 1939 in France.
According to Amnesty International, in 2012 "public executions were known to have been carried out in Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Somalia". There have been reports of public executions carried out by state and non-state actors in Hamas-controlled Gaza, Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Executions which can be classified as public were also carried out in the U.S. states of Florida and Utah as of 1992.
Capital crime
Crimes against humanity
Crimes against humanity such as genocide
are usually punishable by death in countries retaining capital
punishment. Death sentences for such crimes were handed down and carried
out during the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 and the Tokyo Trials in 1948, but the current International Criminal Court does not use capital punishment. The maximum penalty available to the International Criminal Court is life imprisonment.
Murder
Intentional homicide is punishable by death in most countries
retaining capital punishment, but generally provided it involves an aggravating factor required by statute or judicial precedents.
Drug trafficking
A sign at the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport warns arriving travelers that drug trafficking is a capital crime in the Republic of China (photo taken in 2005)
Some countries provide the death penalty for drug trafficking and related offences, mostly in West Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia. Among countries who regularly execute drug offenders are China, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Singapore.
Other offences
Other crimes that are punishable by death in some countries include terrorism, treason, espionage, crimes against the state (most countries with the death penalty), political protests (Saudi Arabia), rape (China, India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Brunei, etc.), economic crimes (China), kidnapping (China), separatism (China), adultery (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar, Brunei, etc.), sodomy (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Brunei, etc.), and religious Hudud offences such as apostasy (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, etc.), blasphemy (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan), Moharebeh (Iran), Witchcraft and Sorcery (Saudi Arabia), and forms of aggravated robbery/hirabah (Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Zambia).
Controversy and debate
Capital punishment is controversial. Death penalty opponents regard the death penalty as inhumane and criticize it for its irreversibility. They argue also that capital punishment lacks deterrent effect, discriminates against minorities and the poor, and that it encourages a "culture of violence". There are many organizations worldwide, such as Amnesty International, and country-specific, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), that have abolition of the death penalty as a fundamental purpose.
Advocates of the death penalty argue that it deters crime, is a good tool for police and prosecutors in plea bargaining, makes sure that convicted criminals do not offend again, and is a just penalty.
Supporters of the death penalty argued that death penalty is morally
justified when applied in murder especially with aggravating elements
such as for murder of police officers, child murder, torture murder, multiple homicide and mass killing such as terrorism, massacre and genocide. This argument is strongly defended by New York Law School's Professor Robert Blecker, who says that the punishment must be painful in proportion to the crime. Eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant
defended a more extreme position, according to which every murderer
deserves to die on the grounds that loss of life is incomparable to any
jail term.
Some abolitionists argue that retribution is simply revenge and
cannot be condoned. Others while accepting retribution as an element of
criminal justice nonetheless argue that life without parole
is a sufficient substitute. It is also argued that the punishing of a
killing with another death is a relatively unique punishment for a
violent act, because in general violent crimes are not punished by
subjecting the perpetrator to a similar act (e.g. rapists are not
punished by corporal punishment).
Human rights
Abolitionists believe capital punishment is the worst violation of human rights, because the right to life is the most important, and capital punishment violates it without necessity and inflicts to the condemned a psychological torture. Human rights activists oppose the death penalty, calling it "cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment". Amnesty International considers it to be "the ultimate irreversible denial of Human Rights". Albert Camus wrote in a 1956 book called Reflections on the Guillotine, Resistance, Rebellion & Death:
An execution is not simply death.
It is just as different from the privation of life as a concentration
camp is from prison. [...] For there to be an equivalency, the death
penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the
date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from
that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a
monster is not encountered in private life.
In the classic doctrine of natural rights as expounded by for instance Locke and Blackstone, on the other hand, it is an important idea that the right to life can be forfeited. As John Stuart Mill explained in a speech given in Parliament against an amendment to abolish capital punishment for murder in 1868:
And we may imagine somebody asking
how we can teach people not to inflict suffering by ourselves inflicting
it? But to this I should answer – all of us would answer – that to
deter by suffering from inflicting suffering is not only possible, but
the very purpose of penal justice. Does fining a criminal show want of
respect for property, or imprisoning him, for personal freedom? Just as
unreasonable is it to think that to take the life of a man who has taken
that of another is to show want of regard for human life. We show, on
the contrary, most emphatically our regard for it, by the adoption of a
rule that he who violates that right in another forfeits it for himself,
and that while no other crime that he can commit deprives him of his
right to live, this shall.
Wrongful execution
Capital punishment was abolished in the United Kingdom in part because of the case of Timothy Evans,
an innocent man who was hanged in 1950 after being wrongfully convicted
of two murders that had been committed by his neighbour.
It is frequently argued that capital punishment leads to miscarriage of justice through the wrongful execution of innocent persons. Many people have been proclaimed innocent victims of the death penalty.
Some have claimed that as many as 39 executions have been carried
out in the face of compelling evidence of innocence or serious doubt
about guilt in the US from 1992 through 2004. Newly available DNA evidence prevented the pending execution of more than 15 death row inmates during the same period in the US, but DNA evidence is only available in a fraction of capital cases. As of 2017,
159 prisoners on death row have been exonerated by DNA or other
evidence, which is seen as an indication that innocent prisoners have
almost certainly been executed.
It is impossible to assess how many have been wrongly executed, since
courts do not generally investigate the innocence of a dead defendant,
and defense attorneys tend to concentrate their efforts on clients whose
lives can still be saved; however, there is strong evidence of
innocence in many cases.
Improper procedure may also result in unfair executions. For example, Amnesty International argues that in Singapore "the Misuse of Drugs Act
contains a series of presumptions which shift the burden of proof from
the prosecution to the accused. This conflicts with the universally
guaranteed right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty".
This refers to a situation when someone is caught with drugs. In this
situation, in almost any jurisdiction, the prosecution has a prima facie case.
Racial, ethnic and social class bias
Opponents of the death penalty argue that this punishment is being
used more often against perpetrators from racial and ethnic minorities
and from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, than against those criminals
who come from a privileged background; and that the background of the
victim also influences the outcome.
Researchers have shown that white Americans are more likely to support
the death penalty when told that it is mostly applied to African
Americans,
and that more stereotypically black-looking defendants are more likely
to be sentenced to death if the case involves a white victim.
International views
The United Nations introduced a resolution during the General Assembly's 62nd sessions in 2007 calling for a universal ban.
The approval of a draft resolution by the Assembly's third committee,
which deals with human rights issues, voted 99 to 52, with 33
abstentions, in favour of the resolution on 15 November 2007 and was put
to a vote in the Assembly on 18 December.
Again in 2008, a large majority of states from all regions
adopted a second resolution calling for a moratorium on the use of the
death penalty in the UN General Assembly (Third Committee) on 20
November. 105 countries voted in favour of the draft resolution, 48
voted against and 31 abstained.
A range of amendments proposed by a small minority of pro-death
penalty countries were overwhelmingly defeated. It had in 2007 passed a
non-binding resolution (by 104 to 54, with 29 abstentions) by asking its
member states for "a moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing
the death penalty".
A number of regional conventions prohibit the death penalty, most
notably, the Sixth Protocol (abolition in time of peace) and the 13th
Protocol (abolition in all circumstances) to the European Convention on Human Rights. The same is also stated under the Second Protocol in the American Convention on Human Rights,
which, however has not been ratified by all countries in the Americas,
most notably Canada and the United States. Most relevant operative
international treaties do not require its prohibition for cases of
serious crime, most notably, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
This instead has, in common with several other treaties, an optional
protocol prohibiting capital punishment and promoting its wider
abolition.
Several international organizations have made the abolition of
the death penalty (during time of peace) a requirement of membership,
most notably the European Union (EU) and the Council of Europe. The EU and the Council of Europe are willing to accept a moratorium as an interim measure. Thus, while Russia
is a member of the Council of Europe, and the death penalty remains
codified in its law, it has not made use of it since becoming a member
of the Council – Russia has not executed anyone since 1996. With the
exception of Russia (abolitionist in practice), Kazakhstan (abolitionist for ordinary crimes only), and Belarus (retentionist), all European countries are classified as abolitionist.
Latvia abolished de jure the death penalty for war crimes in 2012, becoming the last EU member to do so.
The Protocol no.13
calls for the abolition of the death penalty in all circumstances
(including for war crimes). The majority of European countries have
signed and ratified it. Some European countries have not done this, but
all of them except Belarus and Kazakhstan have now abolished the death
penalty in all circumstances (de jure, and Russia de facto). Poland is the most recent country to ratify the protocol, on 28 August 2013.
Signatories to the Second Optional Protocol to the ICCPR: parties in dark green, signatories in light green, non-members in grey
The Protocol no.6
which prohibits the death penalty during peacetime has been ratified by
all members of the European Council, except Russia (which has signed,
but not ratified).
In Turkey, over 500 people were sentenced to death after the 1980 Turkish coup d'état. About 50 of them were executed, the last one 25 October 1984. Then there was a de facto moratorium on the death penalty in Turkey. As a move towards EU membership, Turkey made some legal changes. The death penalty was removed from peacetime law by the National Assembly in August 2002, and in May 2004 Turkey amended its constitution
in order to remove capital punishment in all circumstances. It ratified
Protocol no. 13 to the European Convention on Human Rights in February
2006. As a result, Europe is a continent free of the death penalty in
practice, all states but Russia, which has entered a moratorium, having
ratified the Sixth Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights,
with the sole exception of Belarus, which is not a member of the Council of Europe. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
has been lobbying for Council of Europe observer states who practise
the death penalty, the U.S. and Japan, to abolish it or lose their
observer status. In addition to banning capital punishment for EU member
states, the EU has also banned detainee transfers in cases where the
receiving party may seek the death penalty.
Sub-Saharan African countries that have recently abolished the death penalty include Burundi, which abolished the death penalty for all crimes in 2009, and Gabon which did the same in 2010. On 5 July 2012, Benin
became part of the Second Optional Protocol to the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which prohibits the use
of the death penalty.
The newly created South Sudan
is among the 111 UN member states that supported the resolution passed
by the United Nations General Assembly that called for the removal of
the death penalty, therefore affirming its opposition to the practice.
South Sudan, however, has not yet abolished the death penalty and stated
that it must first amend its Constitution, and until that happens it
will continue to use the death penalty.
Among non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch
are noted for their opposition to capital punishment. A number of such
NGOs, as well as trade unions, local councils and bar associations
formed a World Coalition Against the Death Penalty in 2002.
Religious views
The world's major faiths have differing views depending on the religion, denomination, sect and/or the individual adherent. As an example, the majority of Christendom opposes the death penalty
and the world's largest Christian denomination - Catholicism - opposes
capital punishment in all cases, whereas both the Baha'i and Islamic
faiths support capital punishment.
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