Criminal law is an important tool to maintain the rule of ancient dynasties in China, in which the death penalty is the most important punishment. In ancient times, the death penalty was called capital punishment, great innovation or despair.
By the Zhou Dynasty, there were as many as 500 articles that could be sentenced to death. At the beginning of Han Dynasty, people were ruled by doing nothing, and ordinary people were ignored, so the death penalty was rare. According to Hanshu, after Liu Che ascended the throne, the death penalty clauses increased to 409. Compared with Liu Bang's "Three Chapters of the Law", it is even worse. Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty once said that the death penalty case reached 13472, and there was no place to put the judgment. By the end of the Han Dynasty, there were 1 0,000 death penalty clauses, the highest in China.
Cut sb.' s waist in half and put him to death
Shen Jiaben, a famous expert in criminal law in the late Qing Dynasty, made special statistics on the number of ancient criminal laws.
Changes in the number of death sentences in several representative historical periods are as follows:
Eastern Han Dynasty and Yongyuan period: 6 10 kinds of death penalty;
Three years of Northern Wei Dynasty: 235 kinds of death penalty;
Tang Dynasty: 233 kinds of death penalty;
Song dynasty: according to the criminal law of the Tang dynasty, 3 1 calendar was added, and 60 kinds of praise were added; The total number of death sentences is more than that of the Tang Dynasty.
Yuan Dynasty: 135 kinds of death penalty.
Ming Dynasty: There were 249 kinds of death penalty, 13 kinds of death penalty in Miscellaneous Offenders, and 20 kinds of death penalty in Regulations on Asking for Punishment. The total number of death penalty is more than that of Tang Dynasty, but less than that of Song Dynasty.
Qing Dynasty: At the beginning, the death penalty was reduced in the late Qing Dynasty.
Hot bronze column torture
As can be seen from the above statistics, since the Northern Wei Dynasty, although the number of death sentences in China has repeatedly increased or decreased, the general trend is decreasing. In the history of China, the period with the least death penalty turned out to be the Yuan Dynasty, and the rulers were relatively uncivilized.
In ancient China, there were not only many death penalty clauses, but also many execution methods, which were very famous in Shang Dynasty. According to Zhou Li and Qiu Guan, justice was much more civilized than Shang Dynasty, and the Zhou Dynasty also had horrible punishments such as beheading and dismembering. In the later generations, there will still be years of weeding, but generally few people can enjoy this treatment.
Reducing the death penalty is a manifestation of the progress of China's judicial civilization, and the idea of "cautious punishment" has always existed in various dynasties in China. As early as the ancient Xia dynasty, the idea of "careful killing" appeared. During the Eastern Han Dynasty, the death penalty was replaced by "exile". In the Qing dynasty, if the emperor ordered people to light candles and plain clothes, ministers asked for love three times.