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The Code of Hammurabi is a legal document from ancient Babylonia, and it contained the first known death penalty laws. Under the code, twenty-five crimes were punishable by death. These crimes included adultery, and helping slaves escape. Murder was not one of the twenty-five crimes.
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When the first colonists came to the United States, they brought the British penal system with them. A colonist in Virginia could be executed for crimes as small as stealing grapes, killing chickens, or trading with the Natives. The first documented execution in America was for a more serious offense. In the Jamestown colony in 1608 Captain George Kendall was hanged for the capital offense of treason. Among other serious capital crimes in colonial times were murder, rape, heresy, and witchcraft.
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By the start of the American Revolution, the death penalty was used in all 13 colonies. Rhode Island was the only colony that did not have at least 10 crimes punishable by death. The colonies had comparable death statutes which covered arson, piracy, treason, murder, sodomy, burglary, robbery, rape, horse-stealing, slave rebellion, and often counterfeiting. Hanging was the usual sentence. Rhode Island was the only colony which decreased the number of capital crimes in the late 1700's.
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The first federal execution was on June 25, 1790, when U.S. Marshall Henry Dearborn coordinated the hanging of Thomas Bird in Massachusetts. Dearborn spent five dollars and fifty cents for the construction of a gallows and a coffin.
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In 1846, Michigan abolished the death penalty for all crimes, except treason, and replaced the death penalty with life imprisonment. The law took effect the next year, making Michigan the first English-speaking jurisdiction in the world to abolish capital punishment. (In 1962 a constitutional convention passed a proposal to abolish the death penalty for all crimes in Michigan.)
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The Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution is ratified after the Civil War. The amendment extends the Fifth Amendment's protections to the states, stating "nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
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In 1897, U.S. Congress passed a bill reducing the number of federal death crimes. In 1907, Kansas took the 'Maine Law' a step further and abolished all death penalties. Between 1911 and 1917, eight more states abolished capital punishment (Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oregon, Arizona, and Missouri. Tennessee would abolish it in all cases but rape. Votes in other states came close to ending the death penalty.
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At 5:45 a.m. on Aug. 14, 1936, Rainey Bethea became the last person to be publicly executed in the US. Bethea was hanged for raping and murdering a 70-year-old woman in Owensboro, Kentucky. The execution garnered significant media and public attention because it was the first hanging in the US to be conducted by a woman. At least 20,000 people witnessed Bethea's hanging. Bethea's execution was an important contributor to the eventual ban on public executions in America.
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The movement against capital punishment revived again between 1955 and 1972. England and Canada completed exhaustive studies which were largely critical of the death penalty and these were widely circulated in the U.S. Death row criminals gave their own moving accounts of capital punishment in books and film. Convicted kidnapper Caryl Chessman published Cell 2455 Death Row and Trial by Ordeal. Barbara Graham's story was utilized in book and film with I Want to Live! after her execution.
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In Furman v. Georgia, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 on June 29, 1972 that in all cases before the court, the death penalty as administered violated the Eight and Fourteenth Amendments. Furman's decision invalidated the death penalty statutes in several states. Thirty-five states responded to this ruling, not by abolishing capital punishment, but by using Furman as a guideline for developing a constitutionally acceptable statute. Hundreds of sentences were commuted to life imprisonment.
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The Supreme Court reaffirmed the constitutionality of capital punishment for aggravated murder in Gregg v. Georgia. The question presented to the Court in this case was whether the imposition of capital punishment under Georgia's revised death penalty statute was prohibited under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment to the federal Constitution. The Court affirmed these guidelines because Georgia intended them to prevent arbitrary and discriminatory imposition of the death penalty.
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Virginia Governor Ralph Northam signed legislation abolishing the death penalty. The first southern US state to abolish the death penalty, Virginia had, as of Mar. 24, 2021, carried out the most executions in the United States since the country's first execution in Jamestown in 1608.