Criminological study on historical overview of capital punishment/death penalty

Abstract

Throughout the eighteenth century, Great Britain experienced a dramatic swell in capital offenses. This swell was the result not of an increase in crime, or even of an increase in violent crime; it was the result, rather, of Parliament’s continued enlargement of the long list of offenses punishable by death. In the "illogical chaos" of British law, petty crimes such as pick pocketing were capital offenses while attempted murder remained outside the capital code (Trevelyan 348). Still, by 1770, the seeds of the capital code’s demise had been planted. It was in that year that Sir William Meredith suggested that Parliament consider "more proportionate punishments". His proposal, predictably, fell flat, but it began the long string of events that would lead to the eventual abolition of the ‘bloody code’ of English law nearly two hundred years later. However in Sri Lanka recently there is an argument regarding the implementation of capital punishment and through this paper it has discussed what kind of deterrence approaches were used as the punishment for crime control in history. For this purpose this paper developed through literature base analysis in background on death penalty and has explained how does it evolution as the contemporary society.