saic Law endorsed the notion of retaliation; they believed in the rule of “an eye for an eye.” Similarly, the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, and Greeks all executed citizens for a variety of crimes. The most famous people who were executed were Socrates (Saunders 462) and Jesus. Only in England, during the reigns of King Canute (1016-1035; Hoyt 151) and William the Conqueror (1066-1087; Miller 259) was the death penalty not used, although the results of interrogation and torture were often fatal. Later, Britain reinstated the death penalty and brought it to its American colonies. Although the death penalty was widely accepted throughout the early United States, not everyone approved of it. In the late-eighteenth century, opposition to the death penalty gathered enough strength to lead to important restrictions on the use of the death penalty in several northern states, while in the United States, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Rhode Island abandoned the practice altogether. In 1794, Pennsylvania adopted a law to distinguish the degrees of murder and only use the death penalty for premeditated first-degree murder. Another reform took place in 1846 in Louisiana. This state abolished the mandatory death penalty and authorized the option of sentencing a capital offender to life imprisonment rather than to death. After the 1830s, public executions ceased to be demonstrated but did not completely stop until after 1936. Throughout history, governments have been extremely inventive in devising ways to execute people. Executions inflicted in the past are now regarded today as ghastly, barbaric, and unthinkable and are forbidden by law almost everywhere. Common historical methods of execution included: stoning, crucifixion, burning, breaking on the wheel, drawing and quartering, beheading and decapitation, shooting, and hanging. These types of punishments today are banned by the eighth amendment to the constitution (The Constitution, Amendment 8). In the United States, the death penalty is currently implemented in one of five ways: firing squad, hanging, gas chamber, electrocution, and lethal injection. These methods of execution compared to those of the past are not meant for torture, but meant for punishment for the crime. For the past decades, capital punishment has been one of the most hotly contested political issues in America. This debate is a complicated one. Capital punishment is a legal, practical, philosophical, social, political, and moral question. The notion of deterrence has been at the very center of the practical debate over the question of capital punishment. Most of us assume that we execute murderers primarily because we believe it will discourage others from becoming murderers. Retentionists have long asserted the deterrent power of capital punishment as an obvious fact. The fear of death deters people from committing crimes. Still, abolitionists believe that deterrence is little more than an assumption and a naive assumption at that. Abolitionists claim that capital punishment does not deter murderers from killing or killing again. They base most of their argument against deterrence on statistics. States that use capital punishment extensively show a higher murder rate than those that have abolished the death penalty. Also, states that have abolished the death penalty and then reinstated it show no significant change in

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