DEUT867 According to Jewish tradition, the corpus of Oral Law was given along with the Written Torah at the very same time, in order to render the bare bones legal system of Torah verses into a working Jewish society of law for everyday living. Therefore, if we examine the details of capital punishment along with the details of its oral laws, we will discover that it was almost impossible to actually punish a perpetrator of any of these crimes or sins with the death penalty. For example, while the Torah says that a court needs two witnesses to convict a murderer [this verse], it does not set down the conditions or details about those witnesses or what they saw. The details of all the conditions that need to occur, which are specified in the Oral Law, make it almost impossible to actually convict a murderer or perpetrator of any of the sins mentioned above. The Talmud on tractates Sanhedrin and Makkot discusses the specific elements and conditions of all that must occur in order to convict a murderer in a Jewish court. For example, the two witnesses have to be adult Jewish men who keep the Commandments, know the Oral Law fairly well, and have legitimate professions. Both witnesses must have been able to see each other at the time of the act or sin. The witnesses must be able to speak clearly, without any speech impediment or hearing deficit. They are invalidated if they are related to the accused or to each other. In addition, the witnesses have to give a warning to the person right before the sin, saying that the sin he or she is about to commit is a capital offense. If the warning is not delivered within proximally ten seconds before the sin/crime, it is not valid. In that short time period after the warning, the sinner has to respond that he or she is familiar with the punishment, is going to commit the crime/sin anyway, and then begin to act immediately thereafter. In court, the following conditions must also be present: The judges have to examine each witness separately, and if even one point of their evidence is contradictory (even the eye color of the sinner), the witnesses' testimony is not admitted. Of the twenty-three Jewish judges in a capital case, a simple majority vote of twelve to eleven is not enough to convict (it needs to be at least thirteen to ten) and if all twenty-three unanimously vote to convict, the sinner goes free (based on the logic that if at least one judge cannot find something exculpatory about the accused, then there is something wrong with the court). Thus, it would be nearly impossible to satisfy each and every one of these conditions. While the punishment of death for sins or crimes is clearly stated in order to show the severity of each sin or act, and while the person who commits such crimes may indeed deserve to be killed, in practice, Judaism and Jewish courts could almost never actually convict and put someone to death.
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