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Punishments were a matter of public or royal law, where the disciplinary power over slaves could be considered more severe than that for domestic servants yet less severe than that for soldiers. Masters could only chain and whip slaves "when they believe that their slaves deserved it" and cannot, at will, torture their slaves, or put them to death.
Giles Corey and John Darren Caymo were killed this way. Disembowelment: Often employed as a supplementary part of the execution, e.g., with drawing in hanging, drawing, and quartering. Dismemberment: Used as punishment for high treason in the Ancien régime; also used by several others countries at various points in history. Drowning
Enslaved people were punished by whipping, shackling, hanging, beating, burning, mutilation, branding, rape, and imprisonment. Punishment was often meted out in response to disobedience or perceived infractions, but sometimes abuse was performed to re-assert the dominance of the enslaver (or overseer) over the enslaved person. [14]
Punishment and killing of slaves: Slave codes regulated how slaves could be punished, usually going so far as to apply no penalty for accidentally killing a slave while punishing them. [9] Later laws began to apply restrictions on this, but slave-owners were still rarely punished for killing their slaves. [ 10 ]
Judges were not professionally trained [citation needed] so many of their decisions were unsatisfactory being the product of incompetence, capriciousness, corruption, and political manipulation. The use of torture to extract confessions and a wide range of cruel punishments such as whipping, mutilation, and public executions was commonplace.
His essay entitled, "The Method of Procuring Slaves on the Coast of Africa; with an account of their sufferings on the voyage, and cruel treatment in the West Indies", describes the iron bit as having "a flat iron which goes into the mouth, and so effectually keeps down the tongue, that nothing can be swallowed, not even the saliva, a passage ...
The punishment was only ever applied to men; for reasons of public decency, women convicted of high treason were instead burned at the stake. It became a statutory punishment in the Kingdom of England for high treason in 1352 under King Edward III (1327–1377), although similar rituals are recorded during the reign of King Henry III (1216–1272).
It has been argued that the Act sought to preserve the well-being and encourage the breeding of existing slave populations to preserve the labour basis upon which the Caribbean's plantation economies were based. It does not appear that the provisions which prohibited cruel and unusual punishments were widely enforced.