Death Penalty Remains Alive Around World, Arousing Strong Passions : Punishment: In 1992, 1,708 prisoners were executed in 35 countries, four-fifths of them in China and Iran, according to Amnesty International.

China executed 1,079 prisoners in January last year, 62 of them in one day.

In the first 4 1/2 months of 1993, 40 prisoners, half of them convicted drug dealers, were publicly beheaded in Saudi Arabia.

A number of death sentences are carried out in the United States every year. It is the only NATO nation besides Turkey that routinely executes criminals.

The death penalty remains very much alive around the world, arousing strong passions among both proponents and opponents.

In 1992, 1,708 prisoners were executed in 35 countries, four-fifths of them in China and Iran, according to Amnesty International, a London-based prisoners’ rights organization. The toll rose even higher in 1993.

“And these are just the cases we know about,” said Curt Goering, acting executive director of Amnesty International U.S.A. “The true extent is surely much greater.”

At the same time, however, six countries in the last three years have joined the growing list of those that have abolished or limited capital punishment--either in law or in practice--bringing the total to 87.

That leaves 103 countries that use the death penalty.

The most recent executions are but the latest chapter in the age-old story of crimes and punishments.

The Greeks killed messengers who brought bad news, and the Babylonians put to death persons who sold adulterated beer. Accidentally sitting on the king’s throne was cause for execution in ancient Persia.

Witchcraft, perjury, idolatry, adultery and man-stealing were among the offenses punished by death in the Massachusetts Bay Colony of the 1600s. Britain listed 350 capital crimes in 1780.

Iraq reportedly executed dozens of merchants in 1992 for price-gouging.

For a long time, executions were routinely carried out in public. Transfixed onlookers watched prisoners impaled, stoned, burned at the stake, garroted and beheaded.

Today the condemned generally are put to death with less fanfare. The most common methods of execution are firing squad, used in 86 countries, and hanging, in 76. Seven countries still behead criminals, and seven stone them to death.

Three supposedly more humane forms of killing prisoners--electrocution, the gas chamber and lethal injection--have been introduced in the United States.

The most notorious execution tool was the guillotine, which appeared during the French Revolution as a replacement for the ax and sword. It was both less brutal and more democratic. Before its arrival, beheading was only for nobles; commoners were hanged.

The guillotine itself got the ax in 1981, as France joined its Western European neighbors in ending or restricting the death penalty.

The first move in that direction had occurred in 1863, when Venezuela abolished capital punishment. Venezuela was joined by about 15 other countries in the next century.

The abolitionist movement has gained momentum in the last three decades. Robert Badinter, a former French minister of justice and a leader in the campaign against capital punishment in his country, has observed:

“Paint in red the countries where the death penalty is used and in white the countries that are liberated from it, and almost country by country you will see that the map of freedom and the map of abolition fit exactly together--with a few exceptions.”

The most notable exception is the United States, where 36 states have the death penalty.

Watt Espy, an Alabamian who has compiled a history of the death penalty in the United States, said that he has documented 18,555 legal executions since the first one in Plymouth Colony in 1608. He said the actual number may be as high as 25,000.

According to the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center, the peak period was the 1930s, when an average of 167 American executions were carried out each year, with a record 199 in 1935.

Both the number of executions in the United States and public support for them started to decline after World War II. Court challenges led to a moratorium on executions, beginning in 1967.

In 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that judges and juries had imposed death penalties arbitrarily, in violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Four years later the high court clarified its guidelines, opening the way for executions to resume, and it subsequently overturned a number of legal obstacles once used to delay or block executions.

Since then, 215 executions have taken place in the United States, 186 of them in the South, according to the information center.

If one of the more than 2,700 inmates on U.S. Death Rows were executed every day between now and the end of the century, there would still be a backlog.

Public opinion in the United States has shifted during the last quarter-century. Recent surveys indicate that about 80% of Americans favor the death sentence for murderers. The number drops substantially when alternatives, such as life in prison without parole, are offered.

Opposition appears to be stronger outside the United States. The European Parliament, the legislative assembly of the European Community, has called for action against capital punishment. The newly organized, Italy-based international League for the Abolition of the Death Penalty is working to end executions worldwide by 2000.

Once, the chief argument in favor of capital punishment was deterrence. But studies of the deterrent effect have proved inconclusive, so the battleground has shifted to retribution.

“Some crimes are so utterly detestable that the death penalty is the only means of providing victims and the public with the sense that justice has been fulfilled,” said Carlos Zelaya of the Washington Legal Foundation, which supports capital punishment.

Amnesty International counters: “Just as criminal codes do not sanction the raping of rapists or the burning of arsonists’ homes, still less is the deliberate taking of a life by the state an appropriate punishment for murder.”

In the case of capital punishment, the jury is still out.