Examples of legal safeguards could readily be multiplied. But it is sufficient for our present purpose to sum up these details by saying that the publicity of the trial, the confrontation of the defendant and the plaintiff, the absence of torture, the careful elimination of improper witnesses, the solemn warning to the witnesses, the searching examination of the witnesses, the remarkable requirements for a valid warning, the extraordinarily high standard as to what constituted evidence, the equally extraordinary number of loopholes allowed to the defendant, the limitations on the court, forbidding it to deduce a capital punishment if the Bible did not explicitly call for one, the immediate acquittal by any majority of the judges, the postponement of the final decision if a majority were in favor of death, the obligation on those who had voted against the death penalty of keeping their vote unchanged at the second ballot, together with the permission to change their opinion granted those who had voted in favor of the death penalty, the right of the judges after a condemnation to change their opinion any time before the execution, the constant public appeal for further evidence until the final execution, the prohibition of more than one capital sentence being pronounced in one day, and other innumerable elements of legal interpretation and procedure, all worked to make legal capital punishment impossible of practical application. Practise and Theory In view of the fact that in pre-Christian and the earliest Rabbinic times legal capital punishment was carried out, as has been shown above, it becomes necessary to inquire when and why the practise of capital punishment ceased among the Jewish people. In Biblical times, and in post-Biblical times when the Sadducees controlled Jewish life, the old death penalties were carried out without essential modification. But under Roman rule, a change took place. Schürer claims[185] that from the very beginning of the Roman dominion the Jewish courts lost their competence to judge capital cases. According to the gospel according to John, Pilate is made to say to the Jews, “Take Jesus yourselves and judge him according to your law. The Jews said unto him, ‘It is not lawful for us to put any man to death.’”[186] Talmudic sources state that forty years prior to the destruction of the Temple, i. e., 30 C. E., the right of deciding capital cases was taken from the Jewish courts.[187] But Rab Joseph, R. Hiyya and the school of Hezekiah taught, that this right was taken away from the Jews by the Roman government, from the time that the Temple was destroyed, i. e., 70 C. E.; adding, that the Sanhedrin abolished the practise though not the theory of the four death penalties.[188] Of these two dates given by the Rabbis, the second is apparently correct. The earlier date, 30 B. C. E., probably arose from a misunderstanding. The original statement made by R. Ishmael b. Jose, (end of the second