Death for stealing candles
oldbaileyonline.org
oldbaileyonline.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Code
Apparently "theft of goods worth more than 12 pence, which was only about one-twentieth of the weekly wage for a skilled worker at the time" could lead to the death sentence.
Other crimes that could be punished with death included:
- Being in the company of Gypsies for one month
- Strong evidence of malice in a child aged 7–14 years of age
- Blacking the face or using a disguise whilst committing a crime
The latter comes from the Black Act, which introduced 50 such offences:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Act
"Pleading the belly" was an option for women who were detectably pregnant, and if they were found pregnant, the woman's death sentence could be postponed until they had delivered their child, changed to penal transportation, or even pardoned altogether:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleading_the_belly
A jury of matrons would be responsible - sometimes corruptly - although a woman would only receive one reprieve; any further pregnancy would be ignored and the death penalty carried out regardless:
Thanks for the reminder.
I believe that polls on the subject of reintroducing it for serious crimes regularly return over 50% support.
Edit: oh and you can still get disproportionate sentences for trivial crimes in California under the "three strikes" law. There are people serving life sentences for minor shoplifting.
To quote William Gibson
> "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."
To some degree understandable. I used to be against the death penalty for humanitarian reason, but after Anders Behring Breivik gunned down 69 people, mostly children, and got only 21 years in prison [0], I think it would have been better if we just had hanged him. At least then the families of his victim could get to move on, knowing that they will not meet him on the street sometime in the future.
0: 21 years is the maximum prison sentence in Norway, but the prison term can then be repeatedly extended by five years as long as he is considered a threat to society. However that someone is being a threat to society can be hard to prove, so it is totally possible that he will be getting out some day.
Isn't that the whole point of a maximum prison sentence, though?
So the interesting question is: why does his current sentence bother you?
I'm honestly curious on your perspective.
So don't repeatedly shoplift and you won't have any problem. Seems fair to me.
It sounds insane to me.
Also, are you sure you know every law on the book? I suspect quite a few people break more laws than they think, they're just never enforced. Until some DA wants to set an example, and throws the book at you - at which point this is more about personal gain (for the DA) than benefit to society, let alone fairness.
Let's put it this way - unless all laws are uniformly and blindly enforced, they're never going to be entirely fair. With so many laws on the book, and with each instance at the whim of very few people (law enforcement) with virtually no checks and balances, you can be absolutely sure it's not fair. If furthermore even the judiciary is explicitly forbidden from using common sense...
...it's about as fair as cancer. Sure, you can be really stupid (or get really screwed), but nothing you do can entirely protect you - and even those taking risks don't always pay a (significant) price. Some people are unfortunately born with genetic or cultural risk-factors that you really can't call fair.
It's not the end of the world, and it's not societies worst problem, but let's not kid ourselves that the justice system really deserves that name.
I don't think this behavior is increasing by all that much. I think the increasing ubiquity of cameras capable of recording decent quality video and the increasing ease in distributing that video is making the existing behavior more noticeable.
The fact that police killings are not capital punishment executions is largely a semantic distinction. Some people feel it is important, while others are less apt to recognize it.
As such, whether the death penalty is used "all the time" or not, and whether it is used for "something trivial" depends largely on how you count the bodies. People have been killed by police for misdemeanor offenses, or even no reasonable suspicion whatsoever.
I don't erase that semantic distinction entirely, but it is rather counterproductive to abolish the post-conviction capital punishment without also rigorously investigating and prosecuting all police-involved deaths. If cops believe that a suspect deserves the death penalty, and the state does not employ it, that person may never get the benefit of a single hearing before a judge.
In what percentage of these cases would you guess that suspect was killed because the officer decided to play judge, jury and executioner? 1%? Even a shockingly high 10%, that would not be an order of magnitude more than the number of capital punishment executions per year.
[1] http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/09/more-than-1000-people-have...
By these numbers, it looks as though the vast majority of the US police killings are preventable - which doesn't mean that the agents at the scene at the time were Judge Dredd, it just means that they, their department, and society as whole put them on the spot. I'm sure some people like the power trip, but with disparities in death rates like these, that doesn't sound like plausible major factor to me.
I'd need much more information to decide whether I think US law enforcement is more bloodthirsty. The fact is our cops are much more heavily armed. They have to be because our criminals are too.
For instance, the report says "suspect reached for my gun" while the video shows "suspect attempting to flee". The report says "aggressive posture", "belligerent", or "combative stance", and the video shows "police employee suddenly attacks someone for no apparent reason".
This is exactly why Wisconsin took away the ability for police to investigate their own public mistakes and clear themselves of all wrongdoing.
So we cannot assume anything. We know that it is at least theoretically possible to employ people as professional police with a lower annual body count by examining other countries (and also that it is possible to kill more per year). Without an open process to examine and investigate the police-involved deaths, we cannot say with certainty that any percentage of them, from 0% to 100%, is due to intentional malicious acts.
It is certain that a positive percentage of all police reports involving use of force are falsified and later contradicted by bystander video recordings. And that is exactly why Colorado is implementing a "right to record" law, with a $15k penalty every time police interfere with people recording them doing their jobs.
And I dispute your later assumption that police are more heavily armed because they need to be to counteract criminals that are more heavily armed. They are more heavily armed because they can use civil forfeiture seizure proceeds to buy decommissioned or surplus military equipment. These "toys" are then used to conduct no-knock raids on people not known to be armed with anything at all.
If you stop assuming things about the police that tend to paint them in a more positive light, and look at only the facts that you can prove, the naked numbers are frightening.
Maybe we can agree on this: more transparency is needed. Resistance to transparency is very suspicious.
My point about US/UK police was not about police militarization. That is a different issue. Regular cops out on patrol every day in the US carry guns. Their counterparts in the UK do not. I believe US cops should carry guns because it's so easy for everyone else in the US to get guns, including the criminals they will encounter. A consequence of everyone (cops & crooks) having guns is that there will be more exchanges between them that involve lethal force. Another consequence of cops having guns is that they will use them whenever they believe at the time that lethal force is justified. Sometimes they will be mistaken.
Western society has come a long way indeed.
Oh, wait...
"A federal jury Thursday found a 32-year-old Minnesota woman guilty of illegally downloading music from the Internet and fined her $80,000 each -- a total of $1.9 million -- for 24 songs."
(After long battles in courts, the penalty was ultimately settled at $222,000).
wealthy people had a lot of influence over the government
and were able to lobby for extreme punishments to protect their fortunes
> ... the Jury found him Guilty to the Value of 38s.
Is it possible this is just a transcription error?
Edit: maybe not, see [1]
[0] http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/images.jsp?doc=171601130002
[1] http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/images.jsp?doc=171601130006
I also wonder what's up with those two names in the 'burnt in hand' section that are anonymized (V--- E--- and G--- C---). Public people not wanting others to know about it? Escapees? People with no public records?
Reading about their daily struggles gives events from that time a whole new image.
BTW, I found extremely interesting that they gave the condemned an interview which they then wrote down ( http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?div=OA17160127 ).
How many average people from that time have the luxury of their lives being recorded for future people to see? How many of us have that today?
Even accounting for the religiosity of the condemned, they seem remarkably keen to confess to long histories of criminal behaviour and repent of their sins rather than question the system that had condemned them.
http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?div=OA17160127
That's the weirdest thing ever - it's like finding the middle of butt-nowhere was still the middle of butt-nowhere 200 years ago.
RIP Mary.
This is equivalent to about £300 today. If we instead consider it as a percentage of the GDP per capita it would be eqiuivalent to £6000 today.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bolsius-Ivory-Dinner-Candles-7-5hrs/...
Another valid comparison would be the amount it would cost for an equivalent amount of lighting now. In modern terms, the items stolen amounted to about 800 hours of a one-candela light source. Maybe one green 20mW LED and 6 AA alkaline (LR6) batteries, or a white LED and 6 D alkaline (LR20) batteries. This is equivalent to the light of leaving one 25W compact fluorescent bulb on for 6 hours.
Imagine if every time you left the light on in your bedroom when you left for school, your Dad killed you, and then danced on your grave, singing 'alleluia.
As in one of the other comments, you'll see that it is worth about $6000 if you look at GDP per capita; which would be more than a month of someone's effort at the current US median income.
We're talking about an age where there were no police organizations as we currently understand the term: a lot of arrests were made by freelance "thief takers" such as the infamous Jonathan Wilde, who himself eventually went to the gallows (because he wasn't merely a thief-taker, he was also the biggest fence for stolen goods in London!):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Wild
(Shorter version: think of him as a kind of 18th century anti-Batman.)
Because arrest rates were virtually non-existent except when an angry shopkeeper grabbed a burglar in the act, or a mob went for a known miscreant, punishments were draconian. But because punishments were draconian, they were often commuted -- by the end of the 18th century about half of death sentences ended up being turned into transportation and involuntary servitude (basically, exile and slavery). Crime rates remained terrifyingly high by modern standards until the 1830s, when Sir Robert Peel as Home Secretary abolished and rationalized a lot of laws (he axed the death penalty for most offenses but replaced it with imprisonment) and instituted the first modern police forces:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Peel
Anyway, the takeaway from all this is, the British state in the 18th century performed a large-scale experiment that proved pretty much definitively that draconian punishments do not deter crime. What reduces criminal activity is certainty of apprehension, even if the punishment is relatively mild or rehabilitative. (Nobody thinks "I'd better not steal that pizza, I can probably get away with it but if they catch me I might end up facing life in jail". But knowing "if I steal that pizza, I will be caught" is an effective deterrent.)
Your argument is like proposing that people in 18th century invented airplanes because using steamers did not really improve the time of travel :)
It was fully prov'd, that the Prisoner unbolted the Hatch...
If this be error, and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
Beyond that, "prove", "proof", "proven", etc are all from the latin provare - to try, or test.
I like the example of the double meaning in 'as you like it', shown at 8:11 [2].
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=gP...