Text 3 From the History of Punishment

 

For the most history punishment has been both painful and public in order to act as deterrent, to others. Physical punishments and public humiliations were social events and carried out in most accessible parts of towns, often од market days when the greater part of the population was present. Justice had to be seen to be done.

One of the most bizarre methods of execution was inflicted in ancient Rome on people found guilty of murdering their fathers.

Their punishment was to be put in a sack with a rooster, a viper, and a clog, then drowned along with the three animals.

In ancient Greece the custom of allowing a condemned man to end his own life by poison was extended only to full citizens. The philosopher Socrates died in this way. Condemned slaves were beaten to death instead. Stoning was the ancient method of punishment for adultery among other crimes.

In Turkey if a butcher was found guilty of selling bad meat, he was tied to a post with a piece of stinking meat fixed under his nose, or a baker having sold short weight bread could be nailed to his door by his ear.

One of the most common punishments for petty offences was the pillory, which stood in the main square of towns. The offender was locked by hands and head into the device and made to stand sometimes for days, while crowds jeered and pelted the offender with rotten vegetables or worse.

In medieval Europe some methods of execution were deliberately drawn out to inflict maxim um suffering. Felons were tied to a heavy wheel and rolled around the streets until they were crushed to death. Others were strangled, very slowly. One of the most terrible punishments was hanging and quartering. The victim was hanged, beheaded and the body cut into four pieces. It remained a legal method of punishment in Britain until 1814. Beheading was normally reserved for those of high rank. In England a block and axe was the common method but this was different from France and Germany where the victim kneeled and the head was taken off with a swing of the sword.

Joseph Ignace Guillotin was a doctor and member of the French Legislative Assembly, who suggested the use of the guillotine for executions in 1789. A physician and humanitarian, Guillotine was disturbed by vulgarity of public executions and petitioned for a single method of capital punishment to be used for all crimes demanding the death sentence. The guillotine consists of a heavy blade with a diagonal edge, which falls between two upright posts to cut off the victim's head cleanly and quickly. Similar machines had been used in various other countries including Scotland and Italy. The main idea was to make execution as quick and painless as possible. The first person executed by guillotine was the highwayman Pelletier in 1792, but the machine came into its own in 1793, during the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution, when aristocrats were guillotined by the hundred. The device was nicknamed “Madame Guillotine” after its sponsor.

 

Text 14 Early Juries

A jury is a body of lay men and women randomly selected to determine facts and to provide a decision in a legal proceeding. Such a body traditionally consists of 12 people and is called a petit jury or trial jury.

At first the jury was made up of local people who could be expected to know the defendant. A jury was convened only to “say the truth” on the basis of its knowledge of local affairs.

In the 14^th century the role of the jury finally became that of judgment of evidence. By the 15^th century trial by jury became the dominant mode of resolving a legal issue. It was not until centuries later that the jury assumed its modern role of deciding facts on the sole basis of what is heard in court.

Before juries, in medieval Europe, trials were usually decided by ordeals. Ordeal is a judgment of the truth of some claim or accusation by various means based on the belief that the outcome will reflect the judgment of supernatural powers and that these powers will ensure the triumph of right.

The main types of ordeal are ordeals by divination, physical test, and battle. A Burmese ordeal by divination involves two parties being furnished with candies of equal size and lit simultaneously; the owner of the candle that outlasts the other is adjudged to have won his cause. Another form of ordeal by divination is the appeal to the corpse for the discovery of its murderer.

The ordeal by physical test, particularly by fire or water, was the most common. In Hindu codes a wife may be required to pass through fire to prove her fidelity to a jealous husband; traces of burning would be regarded as proof of guilt.

The practice of dunking suspected witches was based on the notion that water, as the medium of baptism, would “accept”, or receive the innocent and “reject” the guilty. Court officials would tie the woman's feet and hands together and then drop her into some deep water. If she went straight to the bottom and drowned, it was a sure sign that she wasn’t a witch. On the other hand, if she didn’t sink and just bobbed around for a while, the law said she was to be condemned as a witch.

In ordeal by combat, or ritual combat, the victor is said to win not by his own strength but because supernatural powers have intervened on the side of the right, as in the duel in the European Middle Ages in which the “judgment of God” was thought to determine the winner. If still alive after the combat, the loser might be hanged or burned for a criminal offence or have a hand cut off and property confiscated in civil actions.

In 1215, however, the Catholic Church decided that trial by ordeal was superstition, and priests were forbidden to take part. As a result, a new method of trial was needed, and the jury system emerged.

 

Таблица 5.