Note: it does not mean i am pro-capital punishment.
I agree in theory , that it is correct and just punishment in theory.
But to practical implementation, very difficult.
As i said, Mercy is above the law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_and_corporal_punishment_in_Judaism#Conservative_Judaism
Contemporary attitudes towards capital punishment
Leading rabbis in
Reform Judaism,
Conservative Judaism, and
Orthodox Judaism tend to hold that the
death penalty is a correct and just punishment in theory, but they hold that it should not generally be used (or not used at all)
in practice. In practice the application of such a punishment
can only be carried out by humans whose system of justice is nearly perfect, a situation which has not existed for some time or never existed at all.
Rabbinical courts have given up the ability to inflict any kind of physical punishment, and such punishments are left to the civil court system to administer. But the modern institution of the death penalty is opposed by the major rabbinical organizations of Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Judaism
Reform Judaism
Since 1959, the
Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) and the
Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) have formally opposed the death penalty. The CCAR resolved in 1979 that "both in concept and in practice, Jewish tradition found capital punishment repugnant" and there is no persuasive evidence "that capital punishment serves as a deterrent to crime."
[5]
Conservative Judaism
In
Conservative Judaism the death penalty was the subject of a
responsum by its
Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, which has gone on record as opposing the modern institution of the death penalty:
The Talmud ruled out the admissibility of circumstantial evidence in cases which involved a capital crime. Two witnesses were required to testify that they saw the action with their own eyes. A man could not be found guilty of a capital crime through his own confession or through the testimony of immediate members of his family. The rabbis demanded a condition of cool premeditation in the act of crime before they would sanction the death penalty; the specific test on which they insisted was that the criminal be warned prior to the crime, and that the criminal indicate by responding to the warning, that he is fully aware of his deed, but that he is determined to go through with it. In effect this did away with the application of the death penalty. The rabbis were aware of this, and they declared openly that they found capital punishment repugnant to them… There is another reason which argues for the abolition of capital punishment. It is the fact of human fallibility. Too often we learn of people who were convicted of crimes and only later are new facts uncovered by which their innocence is established. The doors of the jail can be opened, in such cases we can partially undo the injustice. But the dead cannot be brought back to life again. We regard all forms of capital punishment as barbaric and obsolete.
—Rabbi
Ben Zion Bokser, Statement on capital punishment, 1960.
Proceedings of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards 1927-1970, Volume III, pp. 1537-1538
Orthodox Judaism
Orthodox
Rabbi Yosef Edelstein writes:
So, at least theoretically, the Torah can be said to be pro-capital punishment. It is not morally wrong, in absolute terms, to put a murderer to death… However, things look rather different when we turn our attention to the practical realization of this seemingly harsh legislation. You may be aware that it was exceedingly difficult, in practice, to carry out the death penalty in Jewish society... I think it's clear that with regard to Jewish jurisprudence, the capital punishment outlined by the Written and Oral Torah, and as carried out by the greatest Sages from among our people (who were paragons of humility and humanity and not just scholarship, needless to say), did not remotely resemble the death penalty in modern America (or Texas). In theory, capital punishment is kosher; it's morally right, in the Torah's eyes. But we have seen that there was great concern—expressed both in the legislation of the Torah, and in the sentiments of some of our great Sages —
regarding its practical implementation. It was carried out in ancient Israel, but only with great difficulty. Once in seven years; not 135 in five and a half.
—
Rabbi Yosef Edelstein, Director of the Savannah Kollel
Orthodox Rabbi
Aryeh Kaplan writes:
In practice, however, these punishments were almost never invoked, and existed mainly as a deterrent and to indicate the seriousness of the sins for which they were prescribed. The rules of evidence and other safeguards that the Torah provides to protect the accused made it all but impossible to actually invoke these penalties… the system of judicial punishments could become brutal and barbaric unless administered in an atmosphere of the highest morality and piety. When these standards declined among the Jewish people, the Sanhedrin… voluntarily abolished this system of penalties.
—(
Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan,
Handbook of Jewish Thought, Volume II, pp. 170-71
