In part two of our three-part mini-series on crime and punishment, we'll explore the "ultimate" punishment: the death penalty.
We'll explore its grim history, the moral questions it raises, and how views on the death penalty have changed over time.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our three-part series on crime and punishment.
[00:00:27] In case you missed it, in part one we talked about the history of crime and punishment in Britain, and learned about the various ways through British history that Britain dealt with criminals, or people who were suspected to have committed crimes.
[00:00:43] In part three we are going to talk about the evolving role of prisons, and in today’s episode, part two, we’ll talk about the grisly but important subject of capital punishment, otherwise known as the death penalty.
[00:00:56] As a little warning before we start, this episode is about the death penalty, it will contain some descriptions of capital punishment, although we will try to keep it as family-friendly as a discussion about the death penalty can be.
[00:01:11] So, with that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get started and talk about capital punishment.
[00:01:19] The word “capital” is a strange one in English.
[00:01:23] It can mean the main city in a country, the place that is the administrative and governmental centre.
[00:01:31] It can mean money or assets owned by an individual or a company.
[00:01:36] It can mean a large letter, the kind of letter you start a sentence with or use at the start of someone’s name or the name of a town, city or country.
[00:01:47] In old fashioned English, when used as an adjective it even meant “very good”, so you might say “that’s a capital idea”, meaning “that’s a very good idea”.
[00:02:00] But put “capital” in front of punishment and it certainly does not mean “excellent”, at least from the point of view of the person on the receiving end of it.
[00:02:11] In this sense, capital means the most extreme, the highest level of punishment.
[00:02:18] Capital punishment means the death penalty, the state-sanctioned killing of a person for a crime.
[00:02:27] The classical scholars among you might know why this kind of punishment is called “capital”; it is because it comes from the Latin word for head, caput, and many capital punishments involve doing something to someone’s head, typically chopping it off.
[00:02:46] Now, the grim reality of capital punishment is that if you were to draw a large line starting at the beginning of human history and going all the way up to the modern day, only a tiny slither at the very end would be “the bit without capital punishment”, or at least without much capital punishment.
[00:03:08] If you remember from the last episode, 18th century Britain went through a period where there was something called The Bloody Code, which listed 200 different crimes for which execution was a recommended punishment.
[00:03:24] But of course, capital punishment is far from unique to Britain.
[00:03:31] For as long as humans have documented history, there are records of societies killing their citizens as punishment.
[00:03:40] To be precise, the 1700 BC Code of Hammurabi, which was written almost 4,000 years ago in Babylon, lays out 25 different crimes for which people could be put to death.
[00:03:56] Some, you might think “ok, fair enough, that really is a bad crime”, for example stealing the son of another citizen or sneaking into a house and committing rape.
[00:04:07] Others you might think are a little harsh.
[00:04:11] For example, the code specified that, and I’m quoting directly, “if a builder builds a house and a wall falls down and kills the person inside, the builder shall be put to death”.
[00:04:24] Or “if a meeting of criminals takes place in a tavern and the tavern owner doesn’t immediately report it to the authorities, the tavern owner shall be put to death”.
[00:04:36] I can’t imagine that this would have encouraged many people to become builders or tavern owners, if one honest mistake at work could cost them their life.
[00:04:47] Now, while The Code of Hammurabi might be the first recorded instance of a legal code setting out capital punishment, there is evidence that it was used all over the world, it is not as if the idea came from the Middle East and people elsewhere hadn’t thought of it.
[00:05:04] After all, for all its criticisms, one can see why it was considered an effective legal tool.
[00:05:12] It permanently removed people who committed undesirable acts from society, theoretically meaning that there would be fewer people in that society to commit crimes.
[00:05:23] Not only that, but it would act as a deterrent, a reason to encourage people not to commit crimes in the first place. We’ll come to whether that’s true in a bit, but that was the theory at least.
[00:05:36] And with time, as the method of execution became more and more creative and executions were carried out increasingly publicly, deterrent was an ever important reason.
[00:05:51] Nobody wanted to die if they could avoid it, but the prospect of being killed in some gruesome and extremely painful way was an extra reason not to commit a crime and potentially face the same fate.
[00:06:05] So, most societies justified capital punishment through a mixture of removing criminals from society and deterring people from committing criminal acts in the future.
[00:06:17] And there was the extra element of when capital punishment was considered divine punishment, it was the will of God for someone to die.
[00:06:27] From Ancient Israel right through to Medieval Europe, and still in some countries today, people were and still are sentenced to death for crimes deemed contrary to the will of God.
[00:06:40] In countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan this is still the case for blasphemy, and going back to Medieval England, for example, hundreds of women found themselves sentenced to death for crimes associated with witchcraft, which was seen as a religious crime.
[00:07:00] Clearly this was bad news if you were one of the poor women who found herself accused of being a witch and ended up burned at the stake, but there is an argument that this kind of brutality was a necessary step towards a realisation, in Europe at least, of the problems with capital punishment.
[00:07:22] Burning someone at the stake or drowning them in a pond is a horrific thing to do, especially if you later realise that they were completely innocent of the crime that they were accused of.
[00:07:35] And moving into the 17th and then 18th centuries, Enlightenment thinkers started to question capital punishment from a moral and practical perspective.
[00:07:46] In much of Europe at least, this hadn’t really been a major concern for people.
[00:07:52] The death penalty was part and parcel of life, it was how societies had always dealt with criminals, and its use or effectiveness had rarely been questioned.
[00:08:05] However, as we touched on in the last episode, Enlightenment thinkers started to ask these questions.
[00:08:12] Could it ever be morally justified to end someone’s life?
[00:08:17] Was capital punishment really an effective deterrent?
[00:08:22] In other words, did it do what it was meant to do?
[00:08:26] As you might remember from the last episode, a lot of this can be traced back to the great Italian Enlightenment philosopher, Cesare Beccaria, and his seminal work, On Crimes and Punishments.
[00:08:40] Given that capital punishment was so prevalent in Europe at the time, and that it was such a final, non-reversible, sentence, Beccaria dedicated a sizable portion of the book to the subject.
[00:08:54] And he was against it, both on moral and practical grounds. He argued that there was no crime great enough to warrant capital punishment.
[00:09:05] It was morally unacceptable because there was no legitimate social contract under which the state could decide to end someone’s life, so the state deciding to execute someone constituted murder.
[00:09:19] It was also practically a bad idea, because, it was not an effective deterrent, it didn’t actually stop people from committing crimes, no matter how public and no matter how awful the method of execution.
[00:09:34] According to Beccaria, the greatest deterrent is the certainty of punishment, the knowledge that if you commit a crime, you will be caught and punished.
[00:09:45] Because the death penalty was the stated punishment for so many different crimes–often crimes that we would now consider minor crimes–sentences were often passed in an arbitrary and inconsistent manner.
[00:10:00] One judge might decide that someone should be executed for theft of a horse, but another more lenient one, or one who was feeling particularly generous that morning, might decide that a small fine would be sufficient.
[00:10:15] Same crime, but an inconsistent application of the law.
[00:10:21] Beccaria argued that what needed to happen was for the law to be applied uniformly.
[00:10:27] It was this certainty of punishment that would be a better deterrent than thinking, “well, I might be hanged but I could well escape with a small fine”.
[00:10:37] What’s more, and we’ll touch on this in greater detail in the next episode, Beccaria argued that a far greater deterrent than the death penalty was life imprisonment.
[00:10:50] Life imprisonment was, by definition, a longer punishment than a swift execution.
[00:10:57] Instead of being killed in front of a bloodthirsty crowd, and perhaps even being glorified in the process, the criminal would be forced to live out the rest of their days in prison, and it was this, not the threat of execution, that would be a bigger deterrent to would-be criminals.
[00:11:19] And lest I forget, another very important but obvious argument that Beccaria made against capital punishment was its irreversible nature. If someone was wrongly convicted, if evidence later came to light that they were innocent of the crime, capital punishment was irreversible, it could not be undone, someone cannot be un-executed.
[00:11:46] Now, Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments was published in 1764.
[00:11:52] Although you might have been listening to his arguments and nodding along, thinking “that all sounds perfectly reasonable to me”, these ideas were revolutionary at the time.
[00:12:03] Why?
[00:12:04] Well, the prevailing view, at least in most of Europe, was almost diametrically opposite to Beccaria.
[00:12:12] People believed that the state did have the moral right to execute people.
[00:12:17] People believed that capital punishment was an effective deterrent.
[00:12:22] People believed that criminals had forfeited their human rights.
[00:12:27] And the justice system was more about retribution–revenge–and absolute state control than reliable justice.
[00:12:37] It didn’t matter, therefore, if the occasional innocent person was executed; the death penalty was all about cleansing society and deterring future criminals.
[00:12:48] Moving towards the modern day, clearly there still is this division between countries and societies that have come to the conclusion that capital punishment is barbaric and unacceptable, and countries in which it is still considered to be an important part of the justice system.
[00:13:07] As of 2024, there are 112 countries that have abolished capital punishment altogether.
[00:13:15] 7 more have removed the death penalty from regular law, but still have a provision for it under special circumstances, for example during war.
[00:13:25] 22 countries haven’t abolished it officially, but haven’t used it for at least 10 years, so are believed to have internal guidance not to use it.
[00:13:36] So, that’s 141 countries, 72% of all nation states, most countries in the world.
[00:13:45] But when it comes to the number of people who live in countries with capital punishment, it is a different story. Over half of the world’s population lives in countries where capital punishment is still legal and used.
[00:14:01] This is because, of the world’s 10 most populous countries, 9 still have capital punishment.
[00:14:08] The only one that doesn’t is Brazil, which practically abolished it in 1876.
[00:14:15] So, more than half of the world’s population live in a country in which they could theoretically be executed if they commit a serious enough crime.
[00:14:26] And, of course, what is considered a capital crime varies drastically by country, and some capital crimes are celebrated behaviours elsewhere in the world.
[00:14:37] Taking drugs, being gay or deciding to follow a different religion might be perfectly legal and even celebrated behaviours in many countries, but do exactly the same thing in somewhere like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan and you might find yourself beheaded or hung.
[00:14:57] Of course, there is also a religious element to this; most of the Islamic countries where capital punishment is still legal allow it on religious grounds, whereas the majority of non-Islamic countries have a secular legal system.
[00:15:12] In other words, there is a clear division between the justice system and religious doctrine.
[00:15:18] Now, what is really interesting to talk about is public opinion towards capital punishment.
[00:15:25] In the UK, where capital punishment was abolished in 1965, public opinion is split.
[00:15:33] Surveys tend to show that more Brits oppose the death penalty than support it, but the margin is slim.
[00:15:43] The last survey from the market research company YouGov suggested that around 50% of the British population oppose the death penalty while 40% support it, and the remaining 10% are undecided.
[00:15:59] Interestingly, though, when you dig down deeper into surveys like this, support for the death penalty tends to rise when crimes are specified, especially particularly bad crimes.
[00:16:13] Terrorism, multiple murders, or the murder of a child. In these cases, in the UK at least, a majority of the population does support the death penalty over life imprisonment.
[00:16:27] Now, in the case of this survey at least, the respondents weren’t asked why they supported it, but perhaps we can make some educated guesses when looking at surveys from elsewhere.
[00:16:42] In the United States, where 27 out of 50 states have the death penalty, the market research company Gallup has been tracking public opinion on the subject for almost 100 years.
[00:16:55] Although there is broader support for the death penalty in the United States than in the UK, with 53% supporting it and 44% opposing it as of the last survey, support is decreasing and if it continues to decrease at a similar rate, in a decade or so the majority of Americans will oppose the death penalty.
[00:17:18] But what is particularly interesting in this Gallup data is to look at the reasons given by people who support or oppose the death penalty.
[00:17:29] For those who support the death penalty, the overwhelming reason, given by between 40 and 50% of respondents over the past 30 years, is some form of “they deserve it”, or “they killed therefore they should be killed”.
[00:17:46] It is punishment, retribution, that this is the morally and ethically right thing to do.
[00:17:54] And for those who oppose the death penalty, the similarly overwhelming top reason is some variant of “it is wrong to take a life”.
[00:18:05] There were all sorts of other options given in the survey, practical or economic reasons even, but none of these even came close to the emotional responses on both sides: they deserve to be killed, or nobody deserves to be killed.
[00:18:23] And for all of the Enlightenment thinking, for all of the philosophers and moralists studiously documenting the advantages and disadvantages of capital punishment, trying to think through the subject logically and rationally, for most people it remains an emotional decision, a gut instinct.
[00:18:45] Statistically speaking, you, my dear listener, you probably have strong opinions on capital punishment.
[00:18:52] Perhaps you think it is unacceptable in any situation, no matter the gravity of the crime.
[00:18:59] Perhaps you think that there are some crimes so terrible that it is the only solution.
[00:19:05] Perhaps you think that it is an effective tool in the justice system and that it is completely within the government’s mandate to choose to end someone’s life.
[00:19:15] No matter where you stand, it is hard to see capital punishment being abolished worldwide in the near future.
[00:19:23] The overall global trend, over the past 150 years, might have been downward, but it is still a part of the justice system that the majority of the global population lives under.
[00:19:36] And 2024, perhaps surprisingly, was the biggest year since 2015 for executions. According to Amnesty International, 1,153 people were executed last year, which doesn’t include the thousands of people who are believed to have been executed in China.
[00:19:57] Don’t worry, this isn’t really a global trend.
[00:20:00] The reason for the jump is actually simple, it’s all down to Iran, which accounted for 74% of all registered executions in 2023.
[00:20:12] Now, to wrap things up, the history of capital punishment is a fascinating one that gets us asking questions about the role of the state, human rationality, and the justice system.
[00:20:25] We have thousands of years of evidence to show that executing criminals does stop them from committing more criminal acts–because they are dead–but it doesn’t stop people from becoming criminals, there is zero evidence that it is an effective deterrent.
[00:20:41] So what is capital punishment about?
[00:20:45] Revenge? Justice? Control? The will of God?
[00:20:50] It’s clear that the death penalty isn’t just about stopping crime—it’s deeply tied to our ideas of justice, morality, and control.
[00:21:00] Whether you view it as a necessary tool or an outdated relic, capital punishment forces us to ask questions about what justice truly means, and how far we’re willing to go to uphold it.
[00:21:15] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the veritable hot potato of a topic, capital punishment.
[00:21:21] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:21:25] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:21:29] The obvious question is…do you support or oppose the death penalty, and what are your reasons for your opinion?
[00:21:37] How has public opinion changed in your country, and what do you think the next 50 years will hold?
[00:21:43] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:21:47] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:21:54] And as a quick reminder, this was part two of a three-part mini-series on the general theme of crime and punishment.
[00:22:02] In part one we learned about the history of crime and punishment in the UK, and coming up next will be a deep dive into the evolving role of prison, so keep an eye out for that one.
[00:22:14] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:19] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our three-part series on crime and punishment.
[00:00:27] In case you missed it, in part one we talked about the history of crime and punishment in Britain, and learned about the various ways through British history that Britain dealt with criminals, or people who were suspected to have committed crimes.
[00:00:43] In part three we are going to talk about the evolving role of prisons, and in today’s episode, part two, we’ll talk about the grisly but important subject of capital punishment, otherwise known as the death penalty.
[00:00:56] As a little warning before we start, this episode is about the death penalty, it will contain some descriptions of capital punishment, although we will try to keep it as family-friendly as a discussion about the death penalty can be.
[00:01:11] So, with that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get started and talk about capital punishment.
[00:01:19] The word “capital” is a strange one in English.
[00:01:23] It can mean the main city in a country, the place that is the administrative and governmental centre.
[00:01:31] It can mean money or assets owned by an individual or a company.
[00:01:36] It can mean a large letter, the kind of letter you start a sentence with or use at the start of someone’s name or the name of a town, city or country.
[00:01:47] In old fashioned English, when used as an adjective it even meant “very good”, so you might say “that’s a capital idea”, meaning “that’s a very good idea”.
[00:02:00] But put “capital” in front of punishment and it certainly does not mean “excellent”, at least from the point of view of the person on the receiving end of it.
[00:02:11] In this sense, capital means the most extreme, the highest level of punishment.
[00:02:18] Capital punishment means the death penalty, the state-sanctioned killing of a person for a crime.
[00:02:27] The classical scholars among you might know why this kind of punishment is called “capital”; it is because it comes from the Latin word for head, caput, and many capital punishments involve doing something to someone’s head, typically chopping it off.
[00:02:46] Now, the grim reality of capital punishment is that if you were to draw a large line starting at the beginning of human history and going all the way up to the modern day, only a tiny slither at the very end would be “the bit without capital punishment”, or at least without much capital punishment.
[00:03:08] If you remember from the last episode, 18th century Britain went through a period where there was something called The Bloody Code, which listed 200 different crimes for which execution was a recommended punishment.
[00:03:24] But of course, capital punishment is far from unique to Britain.
[00:03:31] For as long as humans have documented history, there are records of societies killing their citizens as punishment.
[00:03:40] To be precise, the 1700 BC Code of Hammurabi, which was written almost 4,000 years ago in Babylon, lays out 25 different crimes for which people could be put to death.
[00:03:56] Some, you might think “ok, fair enough, that really is a bad crime”, for example stealing the son of another citizen or sneaking into a house and committing rape.
[00:04:07] Others you might think are a little harsh.
[00:04:11] For example, the code specified that, and I’m quoting directly, “if a builder builds a house and a wall falls down and kills the person inside, the builder shall be put to death”.
[00:04:24] Or “if a meeting of criminals takes place in a tavern and the tavern owner doesn’t immediately report it to the authorities, the tavern owner shall be put to death”.
[00:04:36] I can’t imagine that this would have encouraged many people to become builders or tavern owners, if one honest mistake at work could cost them their life.
[00:04:47] Now, while The Code of Hammurabi might be the first recorded instance of a legal code setting out capital punishment, there is evidence that it was used all over the world, it is not as if the idea came from the Middle East and people elsewhere hadn’t thought of it.
[00:05:04] After all, for all its criticisms, one can see why it was considered an effective legal tool.
[00:05:12] It permanently removed people who committed undesirable acts from society, theoretically meaning that there would be fewer people in that society to commit crimes.
[00:05:23] Not only that, but it would act as a deterrent, a reason to encourage people not to commit crimes in the first place. We’ll come to whether that’s true in a bit, but that was the theory at least.
[00:05:36] And with time, as the method of execution became more and more creative and executions were carried out increasingly publicly, deterrent was an ever important reason.
[00:05:51] Nobody wanted to die if they could avoid it, but the prospect of being killed in some gruesome and extremely painful way was an extra reason not to commit a crime and potentially face the same fate.
[00:06:05] So, most societies justified capital punishment through a mixture of removing criminals from society and deterring people from committing criminal acts in the future.
[00:06:17] And there was the extra element of when capital punishment was considered divine punishment, it was the will of God for someone to die.
[00:06:27] From Ancient Israel right through to Medieval Europe, and still in some countries today, people were and still are sentenced to death for crimes deemed contrary to the will of God.
[00:06:40] In countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan this is still the case for blasphemy, and going back to Medieval England, for example, hundreds of women found themselves sentenced to death for crimes associated with witchcraft, which was seen as a religious crime.
[00:07:00] Clearly this was bad news if you were one of the poor women who found herself accused of being a witch and ended up burned at the stake, but there is an argument that this kind of brutality was a necessary step towards a realisation, in Europe at least, of the problems with capital punishment.
[00:07:22] Burning someone at the stake or drowning them in a pond is a horrific thing to do, especially if you later realise that they were completely innocent of the crime that they were accused of.
[00:07:35] And moving into the 17th and then 18th centuries, Enlightenment thinkers started to question capital punishment from a moral and practical perspective.
[00:07:46] In much of Europe at least, this hadn’t really been a major concern for people.
[00:07:52] The death penalty was part and parcel of life, it was how societies had always dealt with criminals, and its use or effectiveness had rarely been questioned.
[00:08:05] However, as we touched on in the last episode, Enlightenment thinkers started to ask these questions.
[00:08:12] Could it ever be morally justified to end someone’s life?
[00:08:17] Was capital punishment really an effective deterrent?
[00:08:22] In other words, did it do what it was meant to do?
[00:08:26] As you might remember from the last episode, a lot of this can be traced back to the great Italian Enlightenment philosopher, Cesare Beccaria, and his seminal work, On Crimes and Punishments.
[00:08:40] Given that capital punishment was so prevalent in Europe at the time, and that it was such a final, non-reversible, sentence, Beccaria dedicated a sizable portion of the book to the subject.
[00:08:54] And he was against it, both on moral and practical grounds. He argued that there was no crime great enough to warrant capital punishment.
[00:09:05] It was morally unacceptable because there was no legitimate social contract under which the state could decide to end someone’s life, so the state deciding to execute someone constituted murder.
[00:09:19] It was also practically a bad idea, because, it was not an effective deterrent, it didn’t actually stop people from committing crimes, no matter how public and no matter how awful the method of execution.
[00:09:34] According to Beccaria, the greatest deterrent is the certainty of punishment, the knowledge that if you commit a crime, you will be caught and punished.
[00:09:45] Because the death penalty was the stated punishment for so many different crimes–often crimes that we would now consider minor crimes–sentences were often passed in an arbitrary and inconsistent manner.
[00:10:00] One judge might decide that someone should be executed for theft of a horse, but another more lenient one, or one who was feeling particularly generous that morning, might decide that a small fine would be sufficient.
[00:10:15] Same crime, but an inconsistent application of the law.
[00:10:21] Beccaria argued that what needed to happen was for the law to be applied uniformly.
[00:10:27] It was this certainty of punishment that would be a better deterrent than thinking, “well, I might be hanged but I could well escape with a small fine”.
[00:10:37] What’s more, and we’ll touch on this in greater detail in the next episode, Beccaria argued that a far greater deterrent than the death penalty was life imprisonment.
[00:10:50] Life imprisonment was, by definition, a longer punishment than a swift execution.
[00:10:57] Instead of being killed in front of a bloodthirsty crowd, and perhaps even being glorified in the process, the criminal would be forced to live out the rest of their days in prison, and it was this, not the threat of execution, that would be a bigger deterrent to would-be criminals.
[00:11:19] And lest I forget, another very important but obvious argument that Beccaria made against capital punishment was its irreversible nature. If someone was wrongly convicted, if evidence later came to light that they were innocent of the crime, capital punishment was irreversible, it could not be undone, someone cannot be un-executed.
[00:11:46] Now, Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments was published in 1764.
[00:11:52] Although you might have been listening to his arguments and nodding along, thinking “that all sounds perfectly reasonable to me”, these ideas were revolutionary at the time.
[00:12:03] Why?
[00:12:04] Well, the prevailing view, at least in most of Europe, was almost diametrically opposite to Beccaria.
[00:12:12] People believed that the state did have the moral right to execute people.
[00:12:17] People believed that capital punishment was an effective deterrent.
[00:12:22] People believed that criminals had forfeited their human rights.
[00:12:27] And the justice system was more about retribution–revenge–and absolute state control than reliable justice.
[00:12:37] It didn’t matter, therefore, if the occasional innocent person was executed; the death penalty was all about cleansing society and deterring future criminals.
[00:12:48] Moving towards the modern day, clearly there still is this division between countries and societies that have come to the conclusion that capital punishment is barbaric and unacceptable, and countries in which it is still considered to be an important part of the justice system.
[00:13:07] As of 2024, there are 112 countries that have abolished capital punishment altogether.
[00:13:15] 7 more have removed the death penalty from regular law, but still have a provision for it under special circumstances, for example during war.
[00:13:25] 22 countries haven’t abolished it officially, but haven’t used it for at least 10 years, so are believed to have internal guidance not to use it.
[00:13:36] So, that’s 141 countries, 72% of all nation states, most countries in the world.
[00:13:45] But when it comes to the number of people who live in countries with capital punishment, it is a different story. Over half of the world’s population lives in countries where capital punishment is still legal and used.
[00:14:01] This is because, of the world’s 10 most populous countries, 9 still have capital punishment.
[00:14:08] The only one that doesn’t is Brazil, which practically abolished it in 1876.
[00:14:15] So, more than half of the world’s population live in a country in which they could theoretically be executed if they commit a serious enough crime.
[00:14:26] And, of course, what is considered a capital crime varies drastically by country, and some capital crimes are celebrated behaviours elsewhere in the world.
[00:14:37] Taking drugs, being gay or deciding to follow a different religion might be perfectly legal and even celebrated behaviours in many countries, but do exactly the same thing in somewhere like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan and you might find yourself beheaded or hung.
[00:14:57] Of course, there is also a religious element to this; most of the Islamic countries where capital punishment is still legal allow it on religious grounds, whereas the majority of non-Islamic countries have a secular legal system.
[00:15:12] In other words, there is a clear division between the justice system and religious doctrine.
[00:15:18] Now, what is really interesting to talk about is public opinion towards capital punishment.
[00:15:25] In the UK, where capital punishment was abolished in 1965, public opinion is split.
[00:15:33] Surveys tend to show that more Brits oppose the death penalty than support it, but the margin is slim.
[00:15:43] The last survey from the market research company YouGov suggested that around 50% of the British population oppose the death penalty while 40% support it, and the remaining 10% are undecided.
[00:15:59] Interestingly, though, when you dig down deeper into surveys like this, support for the death penalty tends to rise when crimes are specified, especially particularly bad crimes.
[00:16:13] Terrorism, multiple murders, or the murder of a child. In these cases, in the UK at least, a majority of the population does support the death penalty over life imprisonment.
[00:16:27] Now, in the case of this survey at least, the respondents weren’t asked why they supported it, but perhaps we can make some educated guesses when looking at surveys from elsewhere.
[00:16:42] In the United States, where 27 out of 50 states have the death penalty, the market research company Gallup has been tracking public opinion on the subject for almost 100 years.
[00:16:55] Although there is broader support for the death penalty in the United States than in the UK, with 53% supporting it and 44% opposing it as of the last survey, support is decreasing and if it continues to decrease at a similar rate, in a decade or so the majority of Americans will oppose the death penalty.
[00:17:18] But what is particularly interesting in this Gallup data is to look at the reasons given by people who support or oppose the death penalty.
[00:17:29] For those who support the death penalty, the overwhelming reason, given by between 40 and 50% of respondents over the past 30 years, is some form of “they deserve it”, or “they killed therefore they should be killed”.
[00:17:46] It is punishment, retribution, that this is the morally and ethically right thing to do.
[00:17:54] And for those who oppose the death penalty, the similarly overwhelming top reason is some variant of “it is wrong to take a life”.
[00:18:05] There were all sorts of other options given in the survey, practical or economic reasons even, but none of these even came close to the emotional responses on both sides: they deserve to be killed, or nobody deserves to be killed.
[00:18:23] And for all of the Enlightenment thinking, for all of the philosophers and moralists studiously documenting the advantages and disadvantages of capital punishment, trying to think through the subject logically and rationally, for most people it remains an emotional decision, a gut instinct.
[00:18:45] Statistically speaking, you, my dear listener, you probably have strong opinions on capital punishment.
[00:18:52] Perhaps you think it is unacceptable in any situation, no matter the gravity of the crime.
[00:18:59] Perhaps you think that there are some crimes so terrible that it is the only solution.
[00:19:05] Perhaps you think that it is an effective tool in the justice system and that it is completely within the government’s mandate to choose to end someone’s life.
[00:19:15] No matter where you stand, it is hard to see capital punishment being abolished worldwide in the near future.
[00:19:23] The overall global trend, over the past 150 years, might have been downward, but it is still a part of the justice system that the majority of the global population lives under.
[00:19:36] And 2024, perhaps surprisingly, was the biggest year since 2015 for executions. According to Amnesty International, 1,153 people were executed last year, which doesn’t include the thousands of people who are believed to have been executed in China.
[00:19:57] Don’t worry, this isn’t really a global trend.
[00:20:00] The reason for the jump is actually simple, it’s all down to Iran, which accounted for 74% of all registered executions in 2023.
[00:20:12] Now, to wrap things up, the history of capital punishment is a fascinating one that gets us asking questions about the role of the state, human rationality, and the justice system.
[00:20:25] We have thousands of years of evidence to show that executing criminals does stop them from committing more criminal acts–because they are dead–but it doesn’t stop people from becoming criminals, there is zero evidence that it is an effective deterrent.
[00:20:41] So what is capital punishment about?
[00:20:45] Revenge? Justice? Control? The will of God?
[00:20:50] It’s clear that the death penalty isn’t just about stopping crime—it’s deeply tied to our ideas of justice, morality, and control.
[00:21:00] Whether you view it as a necessary tool or an outdated relic, capital punishment forces us to ask questions about what justice truly means, and how far we’re willing to go to uphold it.
[00:21:15] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the veritable hot potato of a topic, capital punishment.
[00:21:21] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:21:25] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:21:29] The obvious question is…do you support or oppose the death penalty, and what are your reasons for your opinion?
[00:21:37] How has public opinion changed in your country, and what do you think the next 50 years will hold?
[00:21:43] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:21:47] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:21:54] And as a quick reminder, this was part two of a three-part mini-series on the general theme of crime and punishment.
[00:22:02] In part one we learned about the history of crime and punishment in the UK, and coming up next will be a deep dive into the evolving role of prison, so keep an eye out for that one.
[00:22:14] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:19] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our three-part series on crime and punishment.
[00:00:27] In case you missed it, in part one we talked about the history of crime and punishment in Britain, and learned about the various ways through British history that Britain dealt with criminals, or people who were suspected to have committed crimes.
[00:00:43] In part three we are going to talk about the evolving role of prisons, and in today’s episode, part two, we’ll talk about the grisly but important subject of capital punishment, otherwise known as the death penalty.
[00:00:56] As a little warning before we start, this episode is about the death penalty, it will contain some descriptions of capital punishment, although we will try to keep it as family-friendly as a discussion about the death penalty can be.
[00:01:11] So, with that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get started and talk about capital punishment.
[00:01:19] The word “capital” is a strange one in English.
[00:01:23] It can mean the main city in a country, the place that is the administrative and governmental centre.
[00:01:31] It can mean money or assets owned by an individual or a company.
[00:01:36] It can mean a large letter, the kind of letter you start a sentence with or use at the start of someone’s name or the name of a town, city or country.
[00:01:47] In old fashioned English, when used as an adjective it even meant “very good”, so you might say “that’s a capital idea”, meaning “that’s a very good idea”.
[00:02:00] But put “capital” in front of punishment and it certainly does not mean “excellent”, at least from the point of view of the person on the receiving end of it.
[00:02:11] In this sense, capital means the most extreme, the highest level of punishment.
[00:02:18] Capital punishment means the death penalty, the state-sanctioned killing of a person for a crime.
[00:02:27] The classical scholars among you might know why this kind of punishment is called “capital”; it is because it comes from the Latin word for head, caput, and many capital punishments involve doing something to someone’s head, typically chopping it off.
[00:02:46] Now, the grim reality of capital punishment is that if you were to draw a large line starting at the beginning of human history and going all the way up to the modern day, only a tiny slither at the very end would be “the bit without capital punishment”, or at least without much capital punishment.
[00:03:08] If you remember from the last episode, 18th century Britain went through a period where there was something called The Bloody Code, which listed 200 different crimes for which execution was a recommended punishment.
[00:03:24] But of course, capital punishment is far from unique to Britain.
[00:03:31] For as long as humans have documented history, there are records of societies killing their citizens as punishment.
[00:03:40] To be precise, the 1700 BC Code of Hammurabi, which was written almost 4,000 years ago in Babylon, lays out 25 different crimes for which people could be put to death.
[00:03:56] Some, you might think “ok, fair enough, that really is a bad crime”, for example stealing the son of another citizen or sneaking into a house and committing rape.
[00:04:07] Others you might think are a little harsh.
[00:04:11] For example, the code specified that, and I’m quoting directly, “if a builder builds a house and a wall falls down and kills the person inside, the builder shall be put to death”.
[00:04:24] Or “if a meeting of criminals takes place in a tavern and the tavern owner doesn’t immediately report it to the authorities, the tavern owner shall be put to death”.
[00:04:36] I can’t imagine that this would have encouraged many people to become builders or tavern owners, if one honest mistake at work could cost them their life.
[00:04:47] Now, while The Code of Hammurabi might be the first recorded instance of a legal code setting out capital punishment, there is evidence that it was used all over the world, it is not as if the idea came from the Middle East and people elsewhere hadn’t thought of it.
[00:05:04] After all, for all its criticisms, one can see why it was considered an effective legal tool.
[00:05:12] It permanently removed people who committed undesirable acts from society, theoretically meaning that there would be fewer people in that society to commit crimes.
[00:05:23] Not only that, but it would act as a deterrent, a reason to encourage people not to commit crimes in the first place. We’ll come to whether that’s true in a bit, but that was the theory at least.
[00:05:36] And with time, as the method of execution became more and more creative and executions were carried out increasingly publicly, deterrent was an ever important reason.
[00:05:51] Nobody wanted to die if they could avoid it, but the prospect of being killed in some gruesome and extremely painful way was an extra reason not to commit a crime and potentially face the same fate.
[00:06:05] So, most societies justified capital punishment through a mixture of removing criminals from society and deterring people from committing criminal acts in the future.
[00:06:17] And there was the extra element of when capital punishment was considered divine punishment, it was the will of God for someone to die.
[00:06:27] From Ancient Israel right through to Medieval Europe, and still in some countries today, people were and still are sentenced to death for crimes deemed contrary to the will of God.
[00:06:40] In countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan this is still the case for blasphemy, and going back to Medieval England, for example, hundreds of women found themselves sentenced to death for crimes associated with witchcraft, which was seen as a religious crime.
[00:07:00] Clearly this was bad news if you were one of the poor women who found herself accused of being a witch and ended up burned at the stake, but there is an argument that this kind of brutality was a necessary step towards a realisation, in Europe at least, of the problems with capital punishment.
[00:07:22] Burning someone at the stake or drowning them in a pond is a horrific thing to do, especially if you later realise that they were completely innocent of the crime that they were accused of.
[00:07:35] And moving into the 17th and then 18th centuries, Enlightenment thinkers started to question capital punishment from a moral and practical perspective.
[00:07:46] In much of Europe at least, this hadn’t really been a major concern for people.
[00:07:52] The death penalty was part and parcel of life, it was how societies had always dealt with criminals, and its use or effectiveness had rarely been questioned.
[00:08:05] However, as we touched on in the last episode, Enlightenment thinkers started to ask these questions.
[00:08:12] Could it ever be morally justified to end someone’s life?
[00:08:17] Was capital punishment really an effective deterrent?
[00:08:22] In other words, did it do what it was meant to do?
[00:08:26] As you might remember from the last episode, a lot of this can be traced back to the great Italian Enlightenment philosopher, Cesare Beccaria, and his seminal work, On Crimes and Punishments.
[00:08:40] Given that capital punishment was so prevalent in Europe at the time, and that it was such a final, non-reversible, sentence, Beccaria dedicated a sizable portion of the book to the subject.
[00:08:54] And he was against it, both on moral and practical grounds. He argued that there was no crime great enough to warrant capital punishment.
[00:09:05] It was morally unacceptable because there was no legitimate social contract under which the state could decide to end someone’s life, so the state deciding to execute someone constituted murder.
[00:09:19] It was also practically a bad idea, because, it was not an effective deterrent, it didn’t actually stop people from committing crimes, no matter how public and no matter how awful the method of execution.
[00:09:34] According to Beccaria, the greatest deterrent is the certainty of punishment, the knowledge that if you commit a crime, you will be caught and punished.
[00:09:45] Because the death penalty was the stated punishment for so many different crimes–often crimes that we would now consider minor crimes–sentences were often passed in an arbitrary and inconsistent manner.
[00:10:00] One judge might decide that someone should be executed for theft of a horse, but another more lenient one, or one who was feeling particularly generous that morning, might decide that a small fine would be sufficient.
[00:10:15] Same crime, but an inconsistent application of the law.
[00:10:21] Beccaria argued that what needed to happen was for the law to be applied uniformly.
[00:10:27] It was this certainty of punishment that would be a better deterrent than thinking, “well, I might be hanged but I could well escape with a small fine”.
[00:10:37] What’s more, and we’ll touch on this in greater detail in the next episode, Beccaria argued that a far greater deterrent than the death penalty was life imprisonment.
[00:10:50] Life imprisonment was, by definition, a longer punishment than a swift execution.
[00:10:57] Instead of being killed in front of a bloodthirsty crowd, and perhaps even being glorified in the process, the criminal would be forced to live out the rest of their days in prison, and it was this, not the threat of execution, that would be a bigger deterrent to would-be criminals.
[00:11:19] And lest I forget, another very important but obvious argument that Beccaria made against capital punishment was its irreversible nature. If someone was wrongly convicted, if evidence later came to light that they were innocent of the crime, capital punishment was irreversible, it could not be undone, someone cannot be un-executed.
[00:11:46] Now, Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments was published in 1764.
[00:11:52] Although you might have been listening to his arguments and nodding along, thinking “that all sounds perfectly reasonable to me”, these ideas were revolutionary at the time.
[00:12:03] Why?
[00:12:04] Well, the prevailing view, at least in most of Europe, was almost diametrically opposite to Beccaria.
[00:12:12] People believed that the state did have the moral right to execute people.
[00:12:17] People believed that capital punishment was an effective deterrent.
[00:12:22] People believed that criminals had forfeited their human rights.
[00:12:27] And the justice system was more about retribution–revenge–and absolute state control than reliable justice.
[00:12:37] It didn’t matter, therefore, if the occasional innocent person was executed; the death penalty was all about cleansing society and deterring future criminals.
[00:12:48] Moving towards the modern day, clearly there still is this division between countries and societies that have come to the conclusion that capital punishment is barbaric and unacceptable, and countries in which it is still considered to be an important part of the justice system.
[00:13:07] As of 2024, there are 112 countries that have abolished capital punishment altogether.
[00:13:15] 7 more have removed the death penalty from regular law, but still have a provision for it under special circumstances, for example during war.
[00:13:25] 22 countries haven’t abolished it officially, but haven’t used it for at least 10 years, so are believed to have internal guidance not to use it.
[00:13:36] So, that’s 141 countries, 72% of all nation states, most countries in the world.
[00:13:45] But when it comes to the number of people who live in countries with capital punishment, it is a different story. Over half of the world’s population lives in countries where capital punishment is still legal and used.
[00:14:01] This is because, of the world’s 10 most populous countries, 9 still have capital punishment.
[00:14:08] The only one that doesn’t is Brazil, which practically abolished it in 1876.
[00:14:15] So, more than half of the world’s population live in a country in which they could theoretically be executed if they commit a serious enough crime.
[00:14:26] And, of course, what is considered a capital crime varies drastically by country, and some capital crimes are celebrated behaviours elsewhere in the world.
[00:14:37] Taking drugs, being gay or deciding to follow a different religion might be perfectly legal and even celebrated behaviours in many countries, but do exactly the same thing in somewhere like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan and you might find yourself beheaded or hung.
[00:14:57] Of course, there is also a religious element to this; most of the Islamic countries where capital punishment is still legal allow it on religious grounds, whereas the majority of non-Islamic countries have a secular legal system.
[00:15:12] In other words, there is a clear division between the justice system and religious doctrine.
[00:15:18] Now, what is really interesting to talk about is public opinion towards capital punishment.
[00:15:25] In the UK, where capital punishment was abolished in 1965, public opinion is split.
[00:15:33] Surveys tend to show that more Brits oppose the death penalty than support it, but the margin is slim.
[00:15:43] The last survey from the market research company YouGov suggested that around 50% of the British population oppose the death penalty while 40% support it, and the remaining 10% are undecided.
[00:15:59] Interestingly, though, when you dig down deeper into surveys like this, support for the death penalty tends to rise when crimes are specified, especially particularly bad crimes.
[00:16:13] Terrorism, multiple murders, or the murder of a child. In these cases, in the UK at least, a majority of the population does support the death penalty over life imprisonment.
[00:16:27] Now, in the case of this survey at least, the respondents weren’t asked why they supported it, but perhaps we can make some educated guesses when looking at surveys from elsewhere.
[00:16:42] In the United States, where 27 out of 50 states have the death penalty, the market research company Gallup has been tracking public opinion on the subject for almost 100 years.
[00:16:55] Although there is broader support for the death penalty in the United States than in the UK, with 53% supporting it and 44% opposing it as of the last survey, support is decreasing and if it continues to decrease at a similar rate, in a decade or so the majority of Americans will oppose the death penalty.
[00:17:18] But what is particularly interesting in this Gallup data is to look at the reasons given by people who support or oppose the death penalty.
[00:17:29] For those who support the death penalty, the overwhelming reason, given by between 40 and 50% of respondents over the past 30 years, is some form of “they deserve it”, or “they killed therefore they should be killed”.
[00:17:46] It is punishment, retribution, that this is the morally and ethically right thing to do.
[00:17:54] And for those who oppose the death penalty, the similarly overwhelming top reason is some variant of “it is wrong to take a life”.
[00:18:05] There were all sorts of other options given in the survey, practical or economic reasons even, but none of these even came close to the emotional responses on both sides: they deserve to be killed, or nobody deserves to be killed.
[00:18:23] And for all of the Enlightenment thinking, for all of the philosophers and moralists studiously documenting the advantages and disadvantages of capital punishment, trying to think through the subject logically and rationally, for most people it remains an emotional decision, a gut instinct.
[00:18:45] Statistically speaking, you, my dear listener, you probably have strong opinions on capital punishment.
[00:18:52] Perhaps you think it is unacceptable in any situation, no matter the gravity of the crime.
[00:18:59] Perhaps you think that there are some crimes so terrible that it is the only solution.
[00:19:05] Perhaps you think that it is an effective tool in the justice system and that it is completely within the government’s mandate to choose to end someone’s life.
[00:19:15] No matter where you stand, it is hard to see capital punishment being abolished worldwide in the near future.
[00:19:23] The overall global trend, over the past 150 years, might have been downward, but it is still a part of the justice system that the majority of the global population lives under.
[00:19:36] And 2024, perhaps surprisingly, was the biggest year since 2015 for executions. According to Amnesty International, 1,153 people were executed last year, which doesn’t include the thousands of people who are believed to have been executed in China.
[00:19:57] Don’t worry, this isn’t really a global trend.
[00:20:00] The reason for the jump is actually simple, it’s all down to Iran, which accounted for 74% of all registered executions in 2023.
[00:20:12] Now, to wrap things up, the history of capital punishment is a fascinating one that gets us asking questions about the role of the state, human rationality, and the justice system.
[00:20:25] We have thousands of years of evidence to show that executing criminals does stop them from committing more criminal acts–because they are dead–but it doesn’t stop people from becoming criminals, there is zero evidence that it is an effective deterrent.
[00:20:41] So what is capital punishment about?
[00:20:45] Revenge? Justice? Control? The will of God?
[00:20:50] It’s clear that the death penalty isn’t just about stopping crime—it’s deeply tied to our ideas of justice, morality, and control.
[00:21:00] Whether you view it as a necessary tool or an outdated relic, capital punishment forces us to ask questions about what justice truly means, and how far we’re willing to go to uphold it.
[00:21:15] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the veritable hot potato of a topic, capital punishment.
[00:21:21] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:21:25] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:21:29] The obvious question is…do you support or oppose the death penalty, and what are your reasons for your opinion?
[00:21:37] How has public opinion changed in your country, and what do you think the next 50 years will hold?
[00:21:43] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:21:47] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:21:54] And as a quick reminder, this was part two of a three-part mini-series on the general theme of crime and punishment.
[00:22:02] In part one we learned about the history of crime and punishment in the UK, and coming up next will be a deep dive into the evolving role of prison, so keep an eye out for that one.
[00:22:14] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:19] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
