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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.
On Crimes and Punishments (Italian: Dei delitti e delle pene [dei deˈlitti e ddelle ˈpeːne]) is a treatise written by Cesare Beccaria in 1764. The treatise condemned torture and the death penalty and was a founding work in the field of penology .
Senator (and future Chief Justice) Oliver Ellsworth was the drafter of the Crimes Act. The Crimes Act of 1790 (or the Federal Criminal Code of 1790), [1] formally titled An Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes Against the United States, defined some of the first federal crimes in the United States and expanded on the criminal procedure provisions of the Judiciary Act of 1789. [2]
Most of the punishments were public, where heavy use of shame and shaming was included. Through the method of shaming, the criminal justice system meant more to teach a lesson than simply punish the offender. The "criminal" was almost always male. However, punishment for such crimes as witchcraft, infanticide, and adultery fell heavily on the ...
In Utrecht, some forty men were tried, [3]: 229 of whom 18 were convicted and strangled. Death by strangling was the most common punishment for homosexual acts in the Dutch Republic, [ 3 ] : 131 but other punishments during the 1730–31 purge included hanging and drowning in a barrel of water. [ 2 ]
It is important to note that these kinds of punishments (branding by iron, mutilation, etc.) also existed in metropolitan France's penological practice at the time. [ 20 ] 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 ...
Throughout the 1700s, even as England's "Bloody Code" took shape, incarceration at hard labor was held out as an acceptable punishment for criminals of various kinds—e.g., those who received a suspended death sentence via the benefit of clergy or a pardon, those who were not transported to the colonies, or those convicted of petty larceny. [14]
The code prescribed capital punishment for any colonist who endangered the life of the colony by theft or other crimes. [4] Two severe punishments under Dale's Code were: an oatmeal-thief was chained to a tree and left to starve; a pregnant Anne Laydon (nee Burras) was whipped for "sewing shirts too short" and miscarried. [5]