死刑

死刑(capital punishment)，亦作death penalty。

指对犯下严重罪行的罪犯判死罪的处决。18世纪时，英格兰对几百种具体罪行（特别是侵犯财产权）制定了死刑惩罚。後来启蒙运动的思想家着作、工业劳动阶级的兴起和人道主义运动促使改革这种刑罚。到1970年代，许多国家已取消死刑。1972年美国最高法院裁定当时实行的死刑法律违反宪法，但是後来的一项最高法院的裁定又认为死刑本身是符合宪法的。如今，美国是西方工业国家中唯一准许死刑的国家，但有十二个州和哥伦比亚特区取消死刑。赞成死刑的人认为死刑能使罪犯感到威慑，他们认为无期徒刑的威慑力量不如死刑有效，而且会使其他罪犯和人民处於更大的危险境地，因为杀人犯可能越狱，或获得假释。反对死刑的人认为，不能证明死刑是个有效的威慑工具，判决错误有时会造成无辜者被处决，而且死刑的实施往往不公，多数是施加在那些穷人和得不到保护的人们身上。

English version：

capital punishment

Penalty of death imposed on a criminal convicted of a serious crime. In 18th-century England, hundreds of specific offenses, including many against property, carried a sentence of death. The writings of Enlightenment thinkers, the rise of the industrial working class, and humanitarian movements stimulated reform. By the 1970s many countries had eliminated capital punishment. In 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled capital-punishment laws, as then enforced, unconstitutional, but a later ruling found the death penalty per se to be constitutional. Today the U.S. is the only Western industrialized nation that permits capital punishment, but twelve states and the District of Columbia bar it. Advocates maintain that it deters crime. They claim that life imprisonment is not as effective and exposes other prisoners and (in the event of escape or parole) members of society at large to dangerous criminals. Opponents maintain that the death penalty has never been proved to be an effective deterrent, that errors sometimes lead to the execution of innocent persons, and that capital punishment is applied unequally, mostly to the poor and members of racial minorities.