death penalty

88:4.7Magic gained such a strong hold upon the sav­age be­cause he could not grasp the con­cept of nat­u­ral death. The later idea of orig­i­nal sin helped much to weaken the grip of magic on the race in that it ac­counted for nat­u­ral death. It was at one time not at all un­com­mon for ten in­no­cent per­sons to be put to death be­cause of sup­posed re­spon­si­bil­ity for one nat­u­ral death. This is one rea­son why an­cient peo­ples did not in­crease faster, and it is still true of some African tribes. The ac­cused in­di­vid­ual usu­ally con­fessed guilt, even when fac­ing death.

70:10.14Pun­ish­ment by burn­ing alive was once a com­mon prac­tice. It was rec­og­nized by many an­cient rulers, in­clud­ing Ham­murabi and Moses, the lat­ter di­rect­ing that many crimes, par­tic­u­larly those of a grave sex na­ture, should be pun­ished by burn­ing at the stake. If “the daugh­ter of a priest” or other lead­ing cit­i­zen turned to pub­lic pros­ti­tu­tion, it was the He­brew cus­tom to “burn her with fire.”

70:10.15Trea­son—the “sell­ing out” or be­trayal of one’s tribal as­so­ciates—was the first cap­i­tal crime. Cat­tle steal­ing was uni­ver­sally pun­ished by sum­mary death, and even re­cently horse steal­ing has been sim­i­larly pun­ished. But as time passed, it was learned that the sever­ity of the pun­ish­ment was not so valu­able a de­ter­rent to crime as was its cer­tainty and swift­ness.

92:5.113. The post-Mel­chiz­e­dek era. Though Amen­emope and Ikh­na­ton both taught in this pe­riod, the out­stand­ing re­li­gious ge­nius of the post-Mel­chiz­e­dek era was the leader of a group of Lev­an­tine Bed­ou­ins and the founder of the He­brew re­li­gion—Moses. Moses taught mono­the­ism. Said he: “Hear, O Is­rael, the Lord our God is one God.” “The Lord he is God. There is none be­side him.” He per­sis­tently sought to up­root the rem­nants of the ghost cult among his peo­ple, even pre­scrib­ing the death penalty for its prac­ti­tion­ers. The mono­the­ism of Moses was adul­ter­ated by his suc­ces­sors, but in later times they did re­turn to many of his teach­ings. The great­ness of Moses lies in his wis­dom and sagac­ity. Other men have had greater con­cepts of God, but no one man was ever so suc­cess­ful in in­duc­ing large num­bers of peo­ple to adopt such ad­vanced be­liefs.

162:3.3It was the plan of Je­sus’ en­e­mies, if he up­held the law of Moses re­quir­ing that the self-con­fessed trans­gres­sor be stoned, to in­volve him in dif­fi­culty with the Ro­man rulers, who had de­nied the Jews the right to in­flict the death penalty with­out the ap­proval of a Ro­man tri­bu­nal. If he for­bade ston­ing the woman, they would ac­cuse him be­fore the San­hedrin of set­ting him­self up above Moses and the Jew­ish law. If he re­mained silent, they would ac­cuse him of cow­ardice. But the Mas­ter so man­aged the sit­u­a­tion that the whole plot fell to pieces of its own sor­did weight.

133:4.12To the con­demned crim­i­nal he said at the last hour: “My brother, you have fallen on evil times. You lost your way; you be­came en­tan­gled in the meshes of crime. From talk­ing to you, I well know you did not plan to do the thing which is about to cost you your tem­po­ral life. But you did do this evil, and your fel­lows have ad­judged you guilty; they have de­ter­mined that you shall die. You or I may not deny the state this right of self-de­fense in the man­ner of its own choos­ing. There seems to be no way of hu­manly es­cap­ing the penalty of your wrong­do­ing. Your fel­lows must judge you by what you did, but there is a Judge to whom you may ap­peal for for­give­ness, and who will judge you by your real mo­tives and bet­ter in­ten­tions. You need not fear to meet the judg­ment of God if your re­pen­tance is gen­uine and your faith sin­cere. The fact that your er­ror car­ries with it the death penalty im­posed by man does not prej­u­dice the chance of your soul to ob­tain jus­tice and en­joy mercy be­fore the heav­enly courts.”

72:10.1The meth­ods of this peo­ple in deal­ing with crime, in­san­ity, and de­gen­er­acy, while in some ways pleas­ing, will, no doubt, in oth­ers prove shock­ing to most Uran­tians. Or­di­nary crim­i­nals and the de­fec­tives are placed, by sexes, in dif­fer­ent ag­ri­cul­tural colonies and are more than self-sup­port­ing. The more se­ri­ous ha­bit­ual crim­i­nals and the in­cur­ably in­sane are sen­tenced to death in the lethal gas cham­bers by the courts. Nu­mer­ous crimes aside from mur­der, in­clud­ing be­trayal of gov­ern­men­tal trust, also carry the death penalty, and the vis­i­ta­tion of jus­tice is sure and swift.