30 C.E.
Jesus is arrested in Gethsemane, brought before high priest Caiaphas, tried before Pontius Pilate, and executed near Jerusalem.

Throughout history people have been put to death for various crimes. Methods of execution have included crucifixion, stoning, drowning, burning at the stake, impaling, and beheading. Executions were public spectacles involving cruel methods, and not reserved for the most serious crimes. Death was the penalty for a variety of less serious offenses.

17th Century
England prescribes death for 14 offenses, but the American colonies impose the death sentence for fewer crimes.

1636
The Massachusetts Bay Colony lists 13 crimes punishable by death, including idolatry and witchcraft.

1692
The daughter and niece of Reverend Samuel Parris of Salem Village became ill. When they failed to improve, the village doctor, William Griggs, was called in. His diagnosis was bewitchment and The Salem Witch Trials begin. This resulted in the death by hanging of nineteen men and women, one man was crushed to death; seventeen others died in prison, and the lives of many were irrevocably changed.

1682
Under William Penn's Great Act, the death penalty is prescribed only for murder and treason in Pennsylvania.

The first significant movement to abolish the death penalty began during the era known as the Age of Enlightenment. In 1764 Italian jurist and philosopherCesare Beccaria published Tratto dei delitti e delle pene (1764; translated as Essay on Crimes and Punishments, 1880). Other individuals who campaigned against executions during this period include French authors Voltaire and Denis Diderot, British philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith, and political theorist Thomas Paine in the United States.

19th Century
Politics and advances in technology influence use of the death penalty.

Dec. 2, 1859
Abolitionist John Brown is hanged for treason, conspiracy and murder at Charles Town, Virginia.

Aug. 6, 1890
Murderer William Kemmler is the first person executed in the electric chair, at New York's Auburn Prison. The "chair" is later installed at Sing Sing Prison.

1900s
A short-lived abolition movement leads to the repeat of numerous state death penalty statutes.

1907
Kansas abolishes capital punishment. But has since reinstated it.

1924
Gee Jon was the first person executed by lethal gas. The state tried to pump cyanide gas into Jon's cell while he slept. This proved impossible because the gas leaked from his cell, so the gas chamber was constructed.

Aug. 22, 1927
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants with anarchist sympathies, are electrocuted in Massachusetts for two murders.

1930s
U.S. executions reach an all-time peak, averaging 167 a year.

August 14, 1936
The last public execution. Rainey Bethea was hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky, before a crowd of 20,000. The public outrage which followed resulted in the complete abolition of public executions in the United States.

1945
After the systematic mass killing of Jews and others during World War II (1939-1945), and the defeat of the National Socialist (Nazi) and Fascist governments of Germany and Italy, those two nations became the first major powers in Europe to abolish capital punishment. The postwar movement to end capital punishment, beginning in Italy and Germany and then spreading, represented a reaction to totalitarian forms of government that systematically violated the rights of the individual.