LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Capital Punishment: Death Penalty
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Capital punishment was written into God’s will for the Jewish nation in the Old Testament. The death penalty was a viable form of punishment for at least sixteen separate offenses. Some people have misunderstood one of the Ten Commandments which says, “You shall not kill” (Exodus 20:13). They have assumed that the law forbade taking human life under any circumstances. But God required the death penalty for some sixteen crimes. Therefore, the commandment would have been better translated, “You shall not murder.” In other words, the command was a prohibition against an individual taking the law into his own hands and exercising personal vengeance.
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Although nearly 100 foreign nationals have been sentenced to death since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, none was executed until Carlos Santana of the Dominican Republic in Texas in 1993. Two days later, Ramon Montoya of Mexico was ... executed in Texas. Montoya's execution was met with outrage and street protests in Mexico, which strongly opposes the death penalty.72 Mexico then began to try to intervene at earlier stages of death penalty cases. A fundamental problem became clear: neither Mexico nor the many defendants of Mexican citizenship had been notified at the time of arrest of their rights under the Vienna Convention. Research revealed at least 38 Mexican citizens on death rows across the U.S., and that a similar number of citizens from other countries, had also been sentenced to death without proper consular notification.73
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Capital punishment is often the subject of controversy. Opponents of the death penalty argue that it has led to irreversible miscarriages of justice, that life imprisonment is an effective substitute, and that it violates the criminal's right to life. Supporters believe that the penalty is justified for murderers by the principle of retribution, that life imprisonment is not an equally effective deterrent, and that the death penalty affirms the right to life by punishing those who violate it in the most strict form. While some arguments are about moral judgments, others are disagreements about empirical trends, such as whether the death penalty is a more effective deterrent than life imprisonment.
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Despite the sometimes vigorous opposition and gains made by the abolitionists, the use of capital punishment grew along with the country. Nearly 1400 documented executions took place during the nineteenth century. Early in the twentieth century, the Prohibition Era and Great Depression brought the abolitionmovement to a near stand-still. As a result, the 1930s and 1940s saw the highest levels of executions with between 100 and 200 prisoners executed annually. The 1950s and 1960s began to witness a decline in executions, due partly to increasing appeals in courts following initial convictions and sentencing.From 1930 through 1997, 4,291 executions occurred of which over 3,800 took place between 1930 and 1964. Support for the death penalty declined slightly inthe 1960s, but grew again by the late 1970s.
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In most places that practice capital punishment today, the death penalty is reserved as punishment for premeditated murder, espionage, treason, or as part of military justice. In some countries, sexual crimes, such as adultery and sodomy, carry the death penalty, as do religious crimes such as apostasy, the formal renunciation of one's religion. In many retentionist countries (countries that use the death penalty), drug trafficking is ... a capital offense. In China human trafficking and serious cases of corruption are also punished by the death penalty. In militaries around the world courts-martial have imposed death sentences for offenses such as cowardice, desertion, insubordination, and mutiny.[1]
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Even if capital punishment did not serve as a deterrent, it still would serve at least one other worthwhile purpose: the elimination from society of those elements that persist in destructive behavior. The Bible teaches that some people can be hardened into a sinful, wicked condition. They have become so cold, cruel, and mean that even the threat of death does not phase them. Paul referred to those whose consciences had been “seared with a hot iron” (1 Timothy 4:2). Some people are so hardened that they are described as “past feeling” and completely given over to wickedness (Ephesians 4:19). God invoked the death penalty upon an entire generation because their wickedness was “great in the earth” and “every imagination of the thoughts of [their] heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5).
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Death Penalty