Senior Paper

5-14-07 3B1

Is the areas I’m really focusing on and just information I plan on using.2

Claim—United States crime rates would drop substantially if we reverted from the use of lethal injection as capital punishment to the form used in medieval times.3

Imagine you steal a television from a local electronics store. The police arrest you and find you have some prior and are going to go to prison. The judge who tries your case sends you to five years in prison. In past times such a crime could have gotten you far worse: the rack, a whipping, the thumb crusher, and even worse forms of torture. Now imagine a person you know kills another and is sent to death row. He/she spends five years sitting in a cell, writing appeals to judges and then is executed by method of lethal injection. In past times the person’s sentence would have been much more severe and dealt with promptly. Whether it was the pear in the mouth, the chair, or any other methods, you can guarantee it would be drawn out, painful, and lead to either death or infection leading to death no matter what. Which would you like more? Lethal injection or medieval torture? I hope you chose lethal injection. However, even if you watch the news you hardly ever hear of criminals even being sentenced to death. Now imagine watching the news and seeing criminals executed by means of the pear of anguish, the racks, the stocks, or other methods used in medieval times, would you be likely to ever commit that kind of crime? I know I wouldn’t. Even with stealing, if you got whipped or placed in the stocks for a week you would not steal. However the punishment of jail time, fines, and community service we receive and see now does nothing to cause us not to steal. I believe the crime rates in the United States would drop substantially if we reverted from the means of capital punishment we use today to the forms of medieval torture once used.4

From a young age we teach our children to fear pain and punishment. With the threat of spankings and sitting in the corner what are we really teaching our children? (5

In our world today we have different methods of capital punishment: from the Hammurabi codes practiced in many of the Saudi Arabian countries where if you steal your hand is cut off, if again you are caught stealing the other hand is cut off, and on the third time you are beheaded to Columbia where a person caught drunk driving is shot on the side of the road. There is no trial, no questions; the family is notified of where the car is located so they may retrieve it before they are fined for it being left on the side of the road. Based on public reports available, Amnesty International estimated that at least 1,770 people were executed in China during the year (2005) Iran executed at least 94 people, and Saudi Arabia at least 86. There were 60 executions in the USA (Amnesty International). Here in America criminals over the last 70 years have waited on death row, looking toward their execution by the gas chambers, which are now deemed dangerous because the sealing in the chamber is not safe for witnesses and the operators. Even hanging is still an option but not used because of botched executions and accidental decapitations. Even the firing squad is no longer used because it was cruel to the guards who did not know if they dealt the lethal shot. We now use the electric chair in some states though many have ruled it cruel after botched executions, lethal injection is now the method primarily used in the United States with some giving the option for the person to choose. Lethal injection, practiced in 37, states is the most widely used method. However, though claimed as humane, it too has its flaws. Many who have the pleasure of this method are past drug users with veins that seem impossible to find and these veins are many times so tight that as the chemical cocktail is administered they expand past their point and explode causing many times chemical burns, sever pain, and cause them to have to move the IV and try again. So we’re now more worried about the crimals well being rather then the crime they committed tied with there punishment. Our government created the 8th amendment to protect criminals from being cruely punished.6

Amendment 8 - Cruel and Unusual Punishment. Ratified 12/15/1791. Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. (8th Amendment).7

In Wilkerson v. Utah, the Supreme Court commented that drawing and quartering, public dissecting, burning alive and disemboweling would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. So we use the methods deemed right though they still cause pain, and can go wrong. How is a drop snapping your neck, a chemical cocktail though an IV, or the process of being gassed getting the point across not to commit crimes?8

500-1450 AD was a different world obviously compared to our world of today. From the age of marriage, population and even methods of capital punishment things have changed. In Medieval times you looked to the forms of punishment or medieval torture as its best termed. The thumb crusher used to get confession crushed fingers as turned from left to right. The rack uses a pulley system and chains securing both the feet and hands to the wooden form as the crank is turned confessions are also drawn from the victim. Said to be the worst of all as it is continued you hear the first the snapping of cartilage then the breaking of bones till finally limbs are separated from the body. The Judas Cradle is a pyramid shaped seat the person is set on with arms and legs bound. They can be spun around the pyramid and is painful just alone but waits could be added to speed up confession or just increase torture. The pear is a metal object in the shape of a pear that is inserted into an orifice and spread apart. Rat torture is more of death by rat. The person is tied to the rack or just a table or platform and a rat is covered by a small tin bowl on the person’s stomach or chest. The tin is heated and the rat tries to dig away from the heat. The breast ripper is self explanatory and used namely on women charged with inducing a miscarriage or adultery. The most common was the stocks which Hollywood has given us the idea of just bent over with arms and neck held it could be far worse. Arms, legs, and neck all held and exposed to the elements and people. You could be stoned, tortured by people and the elements for as long as charged from just a day to as long as you could live. Any reason could give you any number of tortures. Whether just looking for a confession, adultery, inducing a miscarriage, witchery, blasphemy, homosexuality, rape, and murder; It didn’t matter the crime it was the punishment people feared because they could be tortured, humiliated then released to be mocked for the rest of their lives or used to lead to death as quickly or slowly as desired by the person in charge of the torture. This meant that people were charged once and only once and if they were one of those release and were charged again that record was kept. 9

"Although there were no national statistics centuries ago, some historians discovered that the archives of some English counties were intact back to the 13th century. So in the 1970's they began diligently counting indictments and comparing them with estimated population levels to get a rough idea of medieval and early modern crime rates. Historians in Continental Europe... came up with findings that yielded the same surprising results: that murder was much more common in the Middle Ages than it is now and that it dropped precipitately in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries." (Violence by Berit Kjos)10

Though crime rates have dropped from 500 to 2005 but you must consider in that time witchcraft, adultery, blasphemy, and inducing miscarriages were all charged and are not today. During 2005, at least 2,148 people were executed in 22 countries( Amnesty International). I can’t recall a recent court decision of a women being sentenced to death row for casting a spell on a bigot ex boyfriend or for a married women sleeping with another married man. Can you? It is because we aren’t charging for such actions that the crime rates have dropped not because people are committing fewer crimes we simply aren’t charging as many types of crimes. Though crime rates have technically dropped from that time frame of time to today’s we can’t completely claim that it has. People of the medieval frame were tried once; where people in our time are tried again and again for the same crime receiving the same punishment over and over again. We are doing nothing but saying we’re predictable and will allow them to continue with nothing but a slap on the writs. At least by a more sever type of punishment we would be doing more then just housing criminals in our prisons giving them shelter, food, outdoor recreation, and television. Now true we must wonder what if new evidence is brought forward proving innocence? Since 1973, 123 prisoners have been released in the USA after evidence emerged of their innocence of the crimes for which they were sentenced to death (Amnesty International). That’s 34 years that’s about 4 people each year cleared of a crime but 4 innocent people among the estimated in our prison systems. On death row inmates fill there time with writing appeals to changed their fates, reading, watching television, writing books and whatever else they can do to fill their time. The suicide rate of death row inmates was found by Lester and Tartaro to be 113 per 100,000 for the period 1976–1999. This is about ten times the rate of suicide in the United States as a whole and about six times the rate of suicide in the general U.S. prison population (Wikipedia). If we are giving these criminals the opportunity to end their own life’s how are we showing the rest of the country and even the world not to commit crimes? 11