Pre-Buddhist India: A Political, Administrative, Economic, Social and Geographical Survey of Ancient India Based Mainly on the Jataka Stories c4.t7.14

c4.t7.14

Thefts and highway robberies were, as we said before, very common in those days. And it is not at all unnatural that the Jātaka kings very often deal very harshly with these criminals. It seems that no legal procedure, even of the kind of which we have noticed before, was gone through in such cases. Summary justice by the king seems to have been the ordinary course. Whenever a thief was found out,⁴ he was first of all belaboured by the people themselves, and then dragged before the king for punishment.⁵ At least sometimes thorough investigation is carried out to find out the criminal, such as shutting all the city-gates and searching the suspected places.⁶ Fetters for a thief were current.⁷ Though such statements in the summary justice by the king as "off with him, impale him on the stake"⁸ are parts of the fanciful stories, it is nevertheless certain that such inhuman punishments as impaling the criminal on a wooden stake⁹ and the execution by axe¹⁰ were not uncommon. This whole system of execution and the office of the Executioner (Coraghātaka) seems to present¹¹ a realistic picture through the description of the stories which we should note.