Further, circumstantial or presumptive evidence was disallowed. The witnesses had to have seen each other when the act was committed,[159] and had to have seen the act itself, and not only what went before it or what followed it. For instance, even in early Rabbinic days, Simon ben Shetach (fl. 80 B. C. E.), who undoubtedly believed in and imposed the death sentence during his lifetime,[160] did not consider the strongest circumstantial evidence as evidence. It is related[161] that he once saw one man pursuing another. He followed them and found the pursued man murdered and the pursuer holding a sword dripping with blood. Simon said to the murderer: ‘Either you or I killed this man. But what can I do? Your blood guilt is not delivered into my hands; for the Torah says[162] that you can be condemned only by the actual testimony of two or more witnesses. May God who knows the inward thoughts requite the one who committed this murder.’[163] In these and in similar ways, tradition developed the rules contained in the Torah, that two witnesses were needed and that the witnesses themselves had to carry out the death sentence. As the number of necessary conditions increased, it became virtually impossible in a capital case to obtain unassailable testimony adequate for a condemnation. Many other legal refinements made it still more certain that no one would ever be legally condemned to death. For example, murder was not punishable by death, as we have seen, if it could be proved to have been not fully premeditated or intentional. Thus, if the murderer had meant to kill one man and had killed another; or had he meant to wound him on the thigh and instead had struck him on the heart and killed him, capital punishment could not be meted out, since the criminal intent to kill was not present.[164] Again, if the murderer were weak-minded, or intoxicated, or a deaf-mute, or a minor, or acting under compulsion or acting in self defence,[165] etc., he could not be condemned to death. Or again, if the man murdered had been fatally ill or for any other reason would not have lived had he not been murdered, the guilty man was not considered liable to the death penalty. And even if the murderer was suffering from an illness that in the ordinary course would shortly kill him, the court would not anticipate God’s decree by carrying out the death penalty. But over and above these thick protecting hedges which made it virtually impossible to obtain a death sentence, there were many other considerations which further removed the possibility of executing a capital sentence. Thus there was a thoroughgoing rule that no punishment affecting the personality of a man[166] might be imposed on a deduction a fortiori.[167] Unless there was explicit Biblical warrant for the death penalty, it was prohibited to deduce this penalty by rules of interpretation, a principle in itself that worked consistently towards moderating the severity of the written law.