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In Massekhet Sanhedrin and Massekhet Makkot we have been learning about the various punishments meted out by the beit din. In point of fact, how often was capital punishment carried out by the Jewish court system?
According to the Mishna on today’s daf if the Sanhedrin killed a single individual in the course of seven years, it was considered to be a destructive, or violent, beit din. Rabbi Elazar ben Azarya says that this is true if the court killed someone every 70 years. Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiva claimed that had they been on the Sanhedrin (during the last 40 years of the Second Temple period the Sanhedrin no longer ruled on capital cases, so neither of them ever served as judges on the high court) no one would have ever been killed. In response Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel said that such behavior would have led to a proliferation of murderers.
In his authoritative talmudic dictionary, 19th-century scholar Marcus Jastrow renders the word chovlanit, employed by the mishnah to describe a court that executes a prisoner once in 70 years, as not merely “destructive,” but rather “tyrannical,” noting that such a court “does not spare human lives.