A Brief History of the Death Penalty in Romania Between 1900 and 1990

Abstract

There is little, and sometimes unclear, information about the history of the death penalty in Romania in the years between 1900 and 1990. It is difficult to estimate the number of people sentenced to death, and it is almost impossible to do the same for those who were found guilty and sentenced to death, but not executed. Insufficient information and mystification hinder public perception, and the few scientific publications on the subject are filled with inconsistencies that make what is known about it even more uncertain today. From what we have been able to find, we can conclude that the death penalty became widespread in the years before World War I and with every “change of season” (the instauration of the royal dictatorship and the Soviet-type totalitarianism), the laws also changed, including the death penalty. In this article, we examine the crimes for which the death penalty was imposed, the method of execution, the exceptions to the death penalty, the courts that sentenced people, and provide a brief overview of the prisons where this type of punishment was applied.