Part one of term paper
is the lawful infliction of death as a punishment and since ancient times it has been used for a wide variety of offences. The Bible prescribes death(see exodus 21:12 and deuteronomy 22:13) for murder and many other crimes, including kidnapping and witchcraft. By 1500 in England, only major felonies carried the death penalty - treason, murde ...

Part two of term paper
... Cesare Beccaria, the French philosopher Voltaire, and the English law reformers Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Romilly. They argued that the death penalty was needlessly cruel, overrated as a deterrent, and occasionally imposed in fatal error. Along with Quaker leaders and other social reformers, they defended life imprisonment as a more rational alternative. By the 1850s these reform efforts began to bear fruit. Venezuela (1853) and Portugal (1867) were the first nations to abolish the death pena ...