ராஜபார்வை - RAJAPAARVAI

 Punishment of death

Recently embarked on a brief study on death penalty (as part of periodic self- renewal of knowledge sources). Interesting finds are there for any who surfs the abundant variety of references and internet sources.

In ancient Tamil society, 'death punishment' seems rare. There are references to one Chieftain Nannan  ( Natrinai  292, Kurunthogai 73) who inflicted death punishment on a girl who ate a mango of the royal garden that came floating in a river. In Silappathikaram, the Pandiya King awards death punishment, without any enquiry, on Kovalan on the suspision of theft of the anklet of his wife, the queen. 

But in many societies, death penalty has been in vogue from very early times of recorded history. To mention a few,

i)        The Roman law of the Twelve Tables (5^th Century B.C) contains reference to death penalty. Death sentences were carried out by brutal  means such as ‘beheading, boiling in oil, burying alive, burning, crucifixion, disembowelment, drowning, flaying alive, hanging, impalement, stoning, strangling, being thrown to wild animals, and quartering (being torn apart)’.

ii)   The Draco’s Law Code of Athens, (7^th century B.C.) called ‘draconian law’ has made death penalty as the lone punishment for all crimes (hence the use of the term "draconian" to describe particularly harsh penalties). The myth about Draco’s code is that Code was written not in ink but in blood instead.

iii)     The Hittite Code (14^th Century B.C) incorporates death penalty also but only marginally. The most serious offenses typically were punished through enslavement. Crimes of a sexual nature often were punishable by death.

iv)         The Code of Babylonian King Hammurabi (18^th Century B.C) (Full code available at: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/ancient/hamframe.asp) engraved on stone tablets for all the public to see has, among its 282 rules/codes, prescribed the death penalty for over 20 different offenses.

Perhaps like the Codes of Manu, Hammurabi code provides a peculiar, unequal kind of law based on social status. The code has rules separately for slaves, freed men, and the freeborn people of the city-state of Babylon.

This code has prescribed severe punishments for many of the offences now more lightly dealt with in most countries (E.g.: death by execution for theft, perjury, and such other crimes). The Code has the famous prescription that "If a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye."

A look at some of the crimes bringing liability for the death sentence under the Hammurabi Code offers interesting insights into the system of prevalent law then in Babylon.

In our days of carefree thefts of temple statutes, jewels and properties; construction of substandard public and private buildings by money-thirsty contractors; public indulging in baseless levelling of serious accusations against others; increasing illicit and incest affairs in the society, we have to see how the very harsh Hammurabi Code, has tried to address these social evils.

Death for theft

·       If someone stole anything from the temple or the court, he would be put to death.  

·    The buyer of the sold good or receiver of the stolen item from the thief that person would also be put to death. Escape from death was possible if he could prove that he had no knowledge of the item having been stolen.

·       If a man bought an item from a slave or the son of another man, the purchaser would be considered a thief and could be put to death.

·        If a person’s home was burning and someone went into his house to help put the fire out and if that person was caught stealing from that home, the ‘thief’ would be put to death by fire.

Meddling with Slaves

·        Meddling with another person’s slave could get a person killed.

·        Taking another person’s slave outside the city gates would attract a death sentence.

·        Hiding runaway slaves would also incur a death sentence.

Robbery

·        Any form of robbery was punishable by death.

·       If someone were to break into a home to steal and he was caught, the thief would be taken back to that home, killed there, and buried.

Conspirators

·        Any tavern keeper who allowed conspirators in the tavern, and if those conspirators were not caught, the tavern keeper would face the death penalty.

Adultery & Sexual offences

·        Adultery was a serious crime in ancient Babylon. If a wife and some other man were caught in the act of having an affair, both the wife and paramour could be tied up and thrown into the river. (The husband, if he desired, could pardon his wife and save her from drowning.)

·        If a man forced himself on another man’s wife and he is caught in the act, the man would be put to death. (Luckily, the wife would be held blameless in the situation.)

·        If a wife of a man and the husband of another woman were having an affair and plotted to murder their spouses, both the widows would face impalement.

·        If any father has intimate moments with the wives of their sons and if the son’s father was caught red-handed, the father would be bound and cast into the river.

·   If a son indulges in incest (with his own mother), both he and his mother would be burned to death.

Assault

·    If a pregnant woman was hit and the hit woman was a freeborn woman and if she lost her child due to the injury, the man had to pay a fine. If the woman died as a result of the assault, then besides him, his daughter would also be put to death.

House builder

·    If a house builder did not build a home properly, and if the house collapsed killing the owner, the house builder would be put to death.

·      If the house collapsed and the owner’s son was killed, then the son of the house builder would be put to death.

 

Certainly, the Hammurabi Code is ‘barbaric in nature’ than being legal to our senses. But there is justification to give necessary allowance to the relevant time period, level of civilization and the nature of the society in question.

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