Alright, we have a heavy one today, but an incredibly important one. Daniel sent us this prompt, and I'll just read it out so we can get right into the heart of it. He says, quote, Israel recently passed a bill proposing the death penalty for terrorists who murder, effectively instituting mandatory sentencing. Let's look at the history of the death penalty throughout history and how its application has changed over time, end quote.
It is a massive topic, Corn. And honestly, the timing couldn't be more critical. We are looking at a fundamental shift in legal philosophy happening in real-time. Just this February, the Knesset passed the preliminary reading for this bill. It specifically targets terrorists who murder Israeli citizens with the intent of, and I’m quoting the language here, negating the existence of the State of Israel.
It’s intense. And before we dive into the deep history of how humanity has handled the ultimate punishment, we should mention that today’s exploration is actually powered by Google Gemini 1.5 Flash. It’s helping us sift through these layers of legal history. But Herman, when we talk about this Israeli bill, the word mandatory is what really jumps out at me. Most modern death penalty systems are all about judicial discretion, right? Weighing the person’s life, their childhood, their mental state. This bill seems to want to strip all that away.
That is the crux of the controversy. In the United States, for example, the Supreme Court ruled in nineteen seventy-six, in a case called Woodson versus North Carolina, that mandatory death sentences are unconstitutional. They argued you have to treat people as individual human beings, not just a faceless member of a category. But this Israeli bill, the Death Penalty for Terrorists Law of twenty twenty-four, says that for these specific crimes, the defendant shall be sentenced to death, and this punishment only. There is a tiny window for military courts to opt for life imprisonment, but they have to record special reasons. It’s a move toward what we call categorical justice rather than individual justice.
Which, if we look back at history, is actually a return to the roots of how law began. If you go back far enough, the idea of a judge sitting there thinking, "hmm, was he having a bad day when he committed this murder?" That didn't exist. It was very much "if X then Y." How did that lack of nuance shape early societies? Was it just about efficiency?
It was efficiency born of necessity. In a world without high-security prisons or a complex police force, the state couldn't afford to "manage" criminals. If you were a threat, you were removed. Precisely. If we go back to eighteen hundred before Christ, to the Code of Hammurabi in ancient Mesopotamia, we see the absolute foundation of this. Hammurabi’s Code is famous for Lex Talionis, the law of retaliation. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But what people don't realize is how specific and mandatory those death penalties were. There were over twenty-five different crimes in Hammurabi’s Code that carried a mandatory death sentence.
I remember reading some of those. It wasn't just murder, right? It was things like if a builder builds a house and it collapses and kills the owner, the builder is put to death. It’s very binary. But what if the builder didn't mean for it to collapse? What if there was an earthquake or a freak storm? Did Hammurabi care about "acts of God"?
Not in the slightest. The Code was about the result, not the intent. If the house fell, the builder’s life was the price. It was a strict liability system. It was about restoring a cosmic balance. The state or the king wasn't trying to rehabilitate you. They were trying to fix a hole in the social fabric. If you stole from a temple or a palace, death. If you helped a slave escape, death. If you committed adultery, death. There was no appeal process. There was no ten-year stay on death row. The mechanism was the restoration of order through immediate removal. It’s a very "clean" way of looking at the law, if you can call it that. No messy psychological evaluations. Just a checklist.
But wait, how did they handle cases where the evidence was shaky? If it was that final and that fast, they must have had some way to verify the crime, right? Or was it just "he said, she said" and then off with the head?
Actually, Hammurabi had a very "unique" way of dealing with uncertainty. They used something called the "Trial by Ordeal." If a man was accused of a crime and there wasn't clear evidence, he would be forced to jump into a river. If the river "conquered" him—meaning he drowned—he was guilty, and his accuser got his house. If he survived, the river proved his innocence, and the accuser was put to death for false witness. It sounds insane to us, but it was their way of letting a higher power make the "mandatory" decision when human logic failed.
That’s a terrifying way to resolve a dispute. "If you can swim, you’re innocent, but if not, the state doesn't have to worry about you anymore anyway." And then you move forward to the Romans. They took that Babylonian foundation and turned it into a massive bureaucratic tool. When you look at the Twelve Tables, which is roughly four hundred fifty years before Christ, they had the death penalty for everything from libel to cutting someone's crops at night. But the Romans added a layer that I think is relevant to the current debate in Israel: the distinction of citizenship.
That is a huge point, Corn. Roman law was highly stratified. If you were a Roman citizen, you generally had a right to appeal to the people, and your execution method, if it came to that, was usually decapitation by sword. It was quick, relatively dignified. But if you were a non-citizen, a rebel, or a slave, you got the cross. Crucifixion wasn't just about killing someone; it was a state-sponsored billboard. It was an advertisement for what happens when you defy the Roman order.
It’s that public deterrent factor. It’s not just about the person dying; it’s about everyone else watching them die. It’s psychological warfare. I mean, think about the Appian Way after the Spartacus revolt. Six thousand people crucified along the road. You can't walk into Rome without seeing what the state is capable of. Does that tie into the "terrorism" aspect of the modern bill? The idea of making the punishment a public statement?
The Romans understood that for a diverse, sprawling empire, the law had to be visible and terrifying to those outside the "citizen" circle. It was a tool of pacification. If you look at the current Israeli bill, the language about "negating the existence of the State" suggests that the crime isn't just murder—it’s an act of political defiance. The Roman response to political defiance was always the most public and painful death possible.
But how did the Romans justify that legally? Was there a specific crime for "attacking the state"?
They called it Crimen Laesae Maiestatis—the crime of injured majesty. Originally, it was about treason or revolt against the Republic, but under the Emperors, it expanded to cover almost anything that insulted the dignity of the state. If you were found guilty of maiestas, the death penalty was mandatory and often involved the confiscation of all your property, essentially erasing your family’s future as well. It was a total strike against the individual's entire existence.
Which brings us to the British. I know you’ve been looking into the Bloody Code. Two hundred capital offenses? That seems like an exaggeration, surely. I mean, the British are known for being polite and having tea, not for being the most execution-happy nation in Europe.
It sounds like hyperbole, but it was the literal reality of the English legal system by the year eighteen hundred. It was nicknamed the Bloody Code for a reason. You could be hanged for pickpocketing more than one shilling. You could be hanged for "strong evidence of malice" in a child between seven and fourteen years old. You could be hanged for cutting down an ornamental tree in a park or for being in the company of gypsies for a month.
Wait, cutting down a tree? That feels like a bit of an overreaction. I mean, I like a good oak as much as the next sloth, but hanging a guy for it? What was the logic there? Was there a tree shortage in the 1700s?
It reflects the anxiety of the ruling class at the time. Property rights were becoming the new religion. As the Industrial Revolution began and the gap between rich and poor widened, the elite felt vulnerable. The state didn't have a professional police force like we do now—the "Bobbies" didn't exist until 1829. They couldn't catch every criminal. So, their strategy was to make the punishment for the ones they did catch so terrifyingly absolute that no one would dare try it. It was a system built entirely on the theory of deterrence.
But how do you even manage that many executions? If there are 200 capital crimes, weren't the gallows constantly busy?
They were. Tyburn in London became a site of "execution carnivals." Thousands of people would come out to watch. But here’s the twist: the system started to buckle under its own weight. The problem, as history showed, was that it didn't actually work. Juries started refused to convict people because they didn't want to hang a teenager for stealing a loaf of bread. They would intentionally undervalue stolen goods—saying a gold watch was worth only eleven pence—just to keep the sentence below the capital threshold. This was known as "pious perjury."
So the severity of the law actually made it less effective because the humans running the system had a conscience. That’s a fascinating feedback loop. The law was so "mandatory" that the only way to get justice was to lie about the facts of the case. It’s like the system was trying to be a machine, but the people were the sand in the gears.
And that’s a warning for any modern mandatory system. When you take away the judge’s ability to be merciful, the jury—or the public—finds other ways to subvert the law. But let’s bring this back to the present day and the specific situation in Israel. Because Israel has this very strange, almost unique relationship with the death penalty. They’ve only ever executed one person in their entire history as a modern state.
Adolf Eichmann. Nineteen sixty-two. It is the singular exception that proves the rule. After the founding of the state in nineteen forty-eight, Israel inherited the British Mandate’s laws, which included the death penalty for murder. But by nineteen fifty-four, the Knesset voted to abolish it for civilian murder. They kept it on the books only for four very specific things: treason during wartime, crimes against humanity, genocide, and crimes against the Jewish people.
And Eichmann fit those last three like a glove. He was the architect of the Final Solution. But even then, wasn't there a massive internal debate in Israel about whether to do it? Some people forget that it wasn't a foregone conclusion.
Huge. Even with a Nazi war criminal, there were voices saying that Israel should be "the light unto the nations" and show that it was above the cycle of killing. Philosophers like Martin Buber actually petitioned against the execution. They argued that executing Eichmann wouldn't bring back the dead and might actually cheapen the memory of the Holocaust by making it a matter of a simple hanging. But the consensus was that for a crime of that magnitude, for the industrial slaughter of six million people, no other punishment was symbolically adequate. It wasn't about deterrence—no one thought hanging Eichmann would stop future genocides—it was about pure retributive justice.
It’s worth noting that after Eichmann was hanged, his body was cremated and his ashes were scattered in international waters. They didn't even want his remains on Israeli soil. It was a total erasure. But that was a unique historical moment. For seventy-odd years, that was the status quo. The law existed, but it was essentially a "break glass in case of another Holocaust" measure. Even with the most horrific terrorist attacks over the decades, Israel didn't use it. They captured terrorists, tried them, and gave them life sentences. Why the sudden shift now?
It’s a combination of factors. Part of it is a response to the increasing brutality of "lone wolf" attacks, where individuals aren't necessarily part of a structured cell you can dismantle through intelligence. The proponents of this new bill, like National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, argue that the current system isn't working as a deterrent. They point to the fact that terrorists are often released in prisoner swaps—like the Shalit deal in twenty-eleven where over a thousand prisoners were traded for one soldier. The argument is: if they’re dead, they can’t be traded, and they can’t kill again.
That’s a very pragmatic, almost cold-blooded argument. "Dead men tell no tales, and they certainly don't get traded for hostages." But that brings up the counter-argument we see in modern counter-terrorism research. If you’re dealing with someone who is seeking "martyrdom," does the threat of a death sentence actually deter them, or does it give them exactly what they want? It’s like threatening a sloth with a nap. It’s not a punishment; it’s a goal.
That is exactly what the security establishment in Israel is worried about. Many former heads of the Shin Bet and the Mossad have come out against this bill. They argue it turns the execution into a massive propaganda event. It creates a focal point for more violence. If a terrorist dies in a shootout with police, it’s one thing. If they are executed by the state in a controlled environment three months later, they become a martyr with a calendar date. It gives the extremist groups a recruitment tool that never expires.
Plus, there’s the technical concern of the "90-day fast track" in the bill. Let’s talk about that. Most death penalty cases in the U.S. take twenty years of appeals. This bill wants it done in three months. That is a blink of an eye in legal terms.
It’s a legal whirlwind. How do you even prepare a defense in that time? It prohibits the Commander of the IDF from commuting the sentence. It removes the requirement for a unanimous panel of judges. A simple two-to-one majority can send someone to the gallows. The goal is clearly to prevent the "dead letter" phenomenon where a law exists but is never used. But the risk of a mistake, or the inability to present new evidence, becomes astronomical when you’re moving that fast.
Think about the paperwork alone! In a standard capital case, you have thousands of pages of discovery, forensic cross-examinations, and mitigation experts who look into the defendant's entire life history. If you compress that into 90 days, you aren't doing a trial; you're doing a ceremony. It’s almost a return to the "Drumhead Court-Martial" style of justice where the verdict is decided before the first witness is called.
And there’s the "two-tiered" aspect that Daniel’s notes mentioned. This is where it gets really thorny from a constitutional and international law perspective. The way the law is structured, it applies to "residents of the Area"—meaning the West Bank—but it excludes Israeli citizens.
Right. So you have a situation where, theoretically, an Israeli settler and a Palestinian resident could commit the exact same act of violence in the same geographic location, but they would be tried in different court systems with different sentencing mandates. The settler goes to an Israeli civilian court where the death penalty for murder was abolished in nineteen fifty-four. The Palestinian goes to a military court where, under this new law, the death penalty would be mandatory.
That’s a nightmare for any legal system that claims to be based on "equal justice under the law." It’s basically codifying a distinction based on nationality or residency status within the same territory. I can see why human rights groups are losing their minds over this. But Herman, looking at the global picture, where does this put Israel? Is the world moving toward the death penalty or away from it? Because it feels like Israel is swimming against a very strong current here.
The trend is overwhelmingly toward abolition. In nineteen seventy-seven, only sixteen countries had abolished the death penalty. By twenty-twenty-four, that number has climbed to over one hundred and ten. If you include countries that have a moratorium or haven't executed anyone in ten years, it’s nearly three-quarters of the world. In twenty twenty-two, only fifty-five countries actively used it. Even in Africa and Southeast Asia, regions that traditionally held onto capital punishment, we’re seeing a massive wave of repeals.
And the ones that do use it are a pretty specific list, right? It’s not exactly a "Who’s Who" of liberal democracies.
It’s a very concentrated list. China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United States account for about ninety percent of all known executions. Even in the U.S., it’s declining. Many states have abolished it or have gubernatorial moratoriums. So for Israel to move from a seventy-year moratorium back to mandatory sentencing is a complete reversal of the global democratic trend. It’s moving back toward the "Bloody Code" style of thinking—that the only way to handle an existential threat is through the ultimate finality of the state.
It’s a fascinating tension. On one hand, you have the historical weight of the Holocaust and the desire for Israel to be a moral leader. On the other hand, you have a population that has been under constant, grueling terrorist pressure for decades, feeling like the "humane" approach is being viewed as weakness by their enemies. Does the state have a "right" to be merciful if its citizens are being targeted specifically because of that mercy?
And that’s the emotional core of it. When you talk to proponents of the bill, they aren't talking about Hammurabi or the Twelve Tables. They’re talking about the families of victims. They’re talking about the sense of injustice when a murderer sits in a prison with a television and three meals a day while their victims are gone. There was a recent interview with a mother of a victim who said that seeing the killer's face in the news every time there's a prisoner swap talk is like being stabbed all over again. It’s a return to the "eye for an eye" sentiment because, for many, that’s the only thing that feels like actual justice.
But how does this affect the military judges themselves? I mean, if I’m a judge and I’m told I have to sentence someone to death, regardless of the nuances of the case, doesn't that take away my professional purpose?
It turns them into bureaucrats of death. And that’s a huge psychological burden. In the U.S., many judges in states with mandatory sentencing laws—before they were struck down—talked about the "moral injury" of being forced to hand down a sentence they felt was disproportionate. If you take away the judge’s ability to look at the "why," you’re essentially saying the judge’s wisdom doesn't matter. Only the statute matters.
But then you have the practical side. If this passes the final readings and becomes law, how do you actually carry it out? Hanging? Lethal injection? The bill says hanging, which is how they did it with Eichmann. But can you imagine the international pressure on the first execution since nineteen sixty-two? It would be a global media circus. Every human rights organization on the planet would be parked outside the prison.
It would be a diplomatic earthquake. And it would likely trigger a massive wave of unrest in the West Bank and Gaza. This is why many people think that even if the law passes, it might still remain a "dead letter." The political cost of actually pulling the lever might be higher than any government is willing to pay. It’s one thing to pass a law to please your political base; it’s another thing to actually hang a person while the UN is threatening sanctions and your allies are calling you for "clarification."
It’s the difference between a "could" and a "must." Mandatory sentencing is the state saying, "We don't trust our judges to be tough enough, so we’re taking the choice away." Which, ironically, is exactly what the ancient kings did. They didn't want judges; they wanted executors of the royal will. If the law says "shall be sentenced to death," the judge is just a rubber stamp.
It’s the shift from law as a process of deliberation to law as a weapon of state defense. And when you look at the history of the death penalty, it almost always fluctuates based on the state’s sense of security. When the state feels strong and stable, it can afford to be merciful and focus on rehabilitation. When the state feels under siege, it retreats to the most primitive and absolute form of control. Think about the French Revolution. They started with high-minded ideals about the rights of man, but as soon as the Republic felt threatened by internal and external enemies, out came the guillotine.
The "Reign of Terror" was basically just a very fast-tracked mandatory sentencing system. If you were an "enemy of the people," you were dead. No questions asked. It’s a dark mirror to look into. But let's look at the actual logistics of the guillotine for a second—wasn't that actually designed to be "humane"?
That’s the irony of it. Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin wanted a device that would end life instantly and painlessly, regardless of social class. Before that, nobles were beheaded and commoners were hanged or broken on the wheel. The guillotine was supposed to be "equal justice." But because it made execution so efficient and "clean," it actually allowed the state to kill thousands more people than they ever could have with a sword or a rope. Efficiency in the death penalty often leads to more death, not more justice.
So, looking back at the prompt, we’ve gone from Hammurabi’s eye-for-an-eye, to Rome’s public crucifixions, to England’s Bloody Code where you’d hang for stealing a shilling, to the modern abolitionist movement. And now we’re seeing this potential "relapse" in Israel driven by modern security crises. It’s not a straight line of progress, is it? It’s more of a pendulum.
A pendulum that’s currently swinging back toward the dark side for many observers. But for others, it’s a necessary correction. What I find most interesting is the "90-day" clause. That’s a direct attempt to cut through the "death row" phenomenon we see in the West. In the U.S., the average time between sentencing and execution is nearly twenty years. Proponents of the Israeli bill would say that’s not a punishment; it’s a life sentence with a very expensive legal bill. They want the punishment to be swift and certain.
But swiftness and certainty are the enemies of accuracy. That’s the lesson of the last fifty years of DNA evidence. We’ve seen hundreds of people exonerated from death row in the U.S. because we finally had the technology to prove we were wrong. If you hang someone in ninety days, you don't get a chance to be wrong. You can't exhume a body and say "my bad" if a new witness comes forward five years later.
And that is the ultimate weight of the death penalty. It’s the one mistake the state can’t fix. When Israel executed Eichmann, there was no doubt. He admitted who he was and what he did. He had a trail of documents a mile long. But in cases of modern terrorism, where identities can be mistaken and evidence can be circumstantial, that ninety-day window is terrifying from a due process perspective. Remember the Demjanjuk case?
Right, the guy they thought was "Ivan the Terrible" from Treblinka. He was sentenced to death in Israel in nineteen eighty-eight. That case went on for years.
And five years later, the Supreme Court overturned it because new evidence from Soviet archives suggested he wasn't the guy. He was a different guard, but not "Ivan." If they had a ninety-day fast-track law back then, they would have executed an innocent man—or at least, a man who wasn't the specific monster they were looking for. That case had a huge impact on the Israeli psyche. It reminded them why they stopped doing executions in the first place. It showed that even with a "sure thing," the fog of war and history can hide the truth.
But Herman, what about the deterrent effect on the groups themselves? Is there any evidence that a mandatory death penalty stops the organizations from planning attacks, even if it doesn't stop the individual suicide bomber?
Most intelligence analysts say no. In fact, it often has the opposite effect. Groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad use the threat of execution to harden their operatives. It becomes a badge of honor. "If they kill you, you are a martyr; if they imprison you, you are a hero." By making death mandatory, the state effectively removes the middle ground. There's no room for negotiation, no room for informants to flip in exchange for their lives. You’ve backed everyone into a corner where the only exit is a grave.
It’s a lot to weigh. You have the desire for justice, the need for deterrence, the risk of propaganda, the danger of wrongful conviction, and the fundamental question of what kind of society you want to be. It’s not just a legal question; it’s a soul-searching question for a nation. Does the death penalty make a society safer, or just more vengeful?
The data on safety is inconclusive at best. Most studies show no significant difference in homicide rates between states with the death penalty and those without. But the "vengeance" factor is real. It’s a powerful political drug. When people feel helpless in the face of violence, the state offering a life-for-a-life feels like a form of empowerment. It’s a way of saying, "We are taking control back."
Even if that control is an illusion. It reminds me of the old saying: "Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves." One for your enemy and one for yourself. If Israel moves forward with this, they aren't just changing a law; they’re changing the moral fabric of their judicial system. They’re moving back toward Hammurabi’s world.
And that’s why this bill is such a flashpoint. It’s forcing Israel to decide if it wants to stay aligned with the European and Western tradition of abolition and judicial discretion, or if it wants to forge a new path that prioritizes national security and retributive justice above those norms. It’s a choice between the "Enlightenment" model of law and the "Ancient" model of law.
It also makes me think about how this affects international relations. If Israel starts executing prisoners, does that make it harder for them to extradite suspects from Europe?
Oh, absolutely. Most EU countries have strict laws against extraditing anyone to a country where they might face the death penalty. So, ironically, by passing a "tough on crime" law, they might actually be making it harder to bring terrorists to justice if those terrorists flee to Europe or other abolitionist nations. It’s a classic example of unintended consequences. You build a bigger hammer and suddenly you can't reach the nails anymore.
Well, I think we’ve thoroughly unpacked the history and the current stakes. It’s a grim topic, but one we can’t ignore. It’s fascinating how a bill in 2024 can send us all the way back to 1800 BC just to understand the logic behind it. History really is just one long, repeating conversation about how we handle our worst impulses.
It really is. And the answer to "how we handle it" seems to change every few centuries, only to circle back to where we started. We think we’ve outgrown the gallows, and then a new crisis makes them look like a solution again. It’s a cycle of fear and response.
It makes you wonder what the next "evolution" will be. Will we ever reach a point where the state simply doesn't have the power to kill, or is that power too central to the definition of a "state" to ever truly give up?
Max Weber defined the state as the entity that has the "monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force." The death penalty is the ultimate expression of that monopoly. Giving it up is, in a way, the state voluntarily limiting its own power. Some see that as progress; others see it as a dangerous abdication of duty.
Before we wrap up, I want to say thanks to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop, for keeping us on track and making sure we didn't wander too far into the Roman weeds.
And a big thanks to Modal for providing the GPU credits that power the AI systems we use to research and produce this show. Without that processing power, we’d still be flipping through paper encyclopedias trying to find the Twelve Tables.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you found this dive into the history of the death penalty useful, or if you have your own thoughts on the Israeli legislation, we’d love to hear from you. Does mandatory sentencing ever make sense? Or is it a relic that belongs in the past? You can find all our previous episodes and ways to subscribe at myweirdprompts dot com.
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Thanks for listening. We’ll see you in the next one, hopefully with something a little lighter. Maybe the history of the marshmallow?
I think we could all use a marshmallow after this one. Take care.
Bye everyone.
