Stephen J. Field Quotes
A convict is not to be scourged until the flesh fall from his body and he die under the lash, though he may have committed a hundred offenses, for each of which, separately, a whipping of twenty stripes might be inflicted.
Stephen J. Field, 1816-1899, U. S. Supreme Court Justice, O'Neil v. Vermont, 1891
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Named after penal reformer Johne Howard, 1726-1790. Howard Associations have since been organized in many countries.
The capital punishment debate was raging in Europe. Belgium and parts of Switzerland had just abolished the death penalty.
William the Conqueror. This is one of the first if not the first nationwide abolition of capital punishment in history. Ironically, the two alternatives that the abolition law allowed would both be illegal and repugnant to us today even though we allow capital punishment.
Einstein had changed his mind. He like almost everyone else at the time favored the death penalty, but in 1927 came to the new conclusion for the same reasons that many American politicians stated 70 years later. He had no compunctions against capital punishment for murderers who were dangers to society, but the potential error of the justice system led him to oppose state sanctioned execution. At the time the number of errors in capital cases that had been demonstrated were few. But as a scientist, Einstein knew that all human endeavors were prone to error. He was a strong law and order supporter however—see {588606}.
Livermore's argument fell on deaf ears, and the amendment was passed over the objection of a few arch-conservatives.
Although this is generally followed as a legal principle in America, states like Texas have executed felons who most other jurisdictions would see as Coke’s “mad man.”
This quotation while difficult for us to fathom today, illustrates a very conservative 18th century view of punishment and law enforcement. The South African high court was very distressed that torture was to be ended. To them, and many others throughout the so called “civilized” European cultures of the time, capital punishment was not a very good deterrent—even for slaves. The execution was usually accompanied by horrible torture and cruelty before death. Slavery was such a horrible life, and the White colonists knew it, that death could be welcome (many slaves had committed suicide). So the suffering at the execution was to serve as a further deterrent. In reality it did not, any more than capital punishment did in the 20th century, but by the logic of the culture and the times, torture was needed as well as capital punishment.
This is the basis for the practice of Saudi Arabia and a few other nations which are so decried by most nations and religions or the world. Modern Muslims and Muslim nations do not follow this Koranic prescription any more than Christians and Jews follow the Mosaic Law of the Bible regarding punishment that we would today regard as cruel and which has become very unusual.
Most people reading this think at first that if comes out of the Middle Ages, but it is quite contemporary expressing a point of view that holds that the state is but the instrument of and subservient to God as defined by Protestant Fundamentalism.
The Scimitar editors assumed that the author was a man. It was Ida B. Wells. The lynch mob found no one and only ransacked the Free Speech offices, threatening to lynch the editors if they ever returned.
This is the earliest surviving attempt of the Romans to formulate a legal code.
Stephen Johnson Field was an American jurist. He was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court from May 20, 1863, to December 1, 1897, the second longest tenure of any justice. Prior to this appointment, he was the fifth Chief Justice of California.
