28 The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area highlighted 115 crimes that were punishable by death. At the same time, a classic example of a country applying the death penalty is England, insofar as it occupies first place in this regard. Back in the 18th century, Sir William Blakestone counted 160 crimes that were punishable by death. There were also eras in history when this number rose to 240 in England.12 Despite all this, human thinking as a whole could not be indifferent to the fate of that being that is now called the supreme value, i.e., man. Back in his day, Jesus Christ maintained: “You have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, do not resist him who is evil.”13 It is possible that these and similar ideas formed the basis for thinkers and politicians in the Middle Ages when they cast doubt on the fairness of the death penalty as a form of punishment under criminal law. For example, in a legal document of King William the Conqueror (stating what he established with his aides after the conquest of England), it was prohibited for any man to be killed or hanged, whatever the crime. The King preferred the criminal to have his eyes poked out and be castrated. Likewise, the laws of King Henry I established pronouncement of a death sentence as being inadmissible on the basis of a single accusation without careful investigation and granting the possibility of vindication by means of “God’s trial”.14 However, these aspirations were nothing more than timid attempts amid an innumerable and endless stream of applications of the death penalty in a qualified form, such as breaking on the wheel, sewing people up in sacks and drowning them, cremation, quartering, burying people alive, interweaving bodies on the wheel, putting heads on stakes, burning corpses after cutting off the head, cutting the hands off corpses, and so on. The new age of the 17th-19th centuries was characterized by outstanding success in the development of legal thinking. In overcoming a theological worldview, the dogmas of Middle Age scholastics collapsed, and issues regarding relations between individuals and their rights, laws and the state, and the role of the state and the law in public life were approached and resolved in a rational manner. Looking at the individual and his needs and social qualities as a starting point for studying law and the state brought about the pronounced axiological aspect of the legal doctrines of the new age. The indisputable status of an individual’s value and the subordination of the law to the worldly interests of individuals were brought to the fore. Taking into account the new tendency that has come about in the development of jurisprudence, entirely new ideas have been expressed regarding the nature of punish12 See I.Ya. Foinitskii, Uchenie o nakazanii v svyazi s tiur’movedeniem (St. Petersburg, 1889), in Anthology, Vol. IV, p. 794. 13 14 The Bible, Matthew 5:38-42. Anthology, Vol. II, p. 84.