When the Sanhedrin was in power, if someone intentionally killed someone but there was no advance warning to him, how did Beis Din punish him?
I’m certain that someone will pop up and say something along the lines of “machnisim oso l’kippah.” But I’ve always wondered about the parameters of how such a thing was carried out.
First of all, IIRC correctly, when discussed in the Gemara, it was not in the context of using it to punish people who could not, for technical reasons, be executed by the courts, but rather as a punishment for recidivist sinners — people who would commit the same (malkus-level) sins over and over again. But I don’t think there is discussion of using it for one-time cases where, for absence of the required criteria, a standard capital punishment could not be carried out.
For example, there is the case of Shimon ben Shetach, who saw a man chase another man into an alley while holding a knife. When he finally arrived there, he saw the persued laying on the ground bleeding from a knife wound and the other man standing over him holding the bloody knife.
There was pretty much no doubt that the man had committed the murder. And yet, SbS was pained over the matter that he could not bring the murderer to justice since he alone witnessed it (and presumably did not issue a warning beforehand as well). Ultimately, the matter was handled by the True Judge, who caused the murder to die from (IIRC) a snake bite.
But the point is this: if machnisim oso l’kippah was an option, by would SbS have been so pained? The obvious answer is that it was not an option and that, absent the Divine intervention that ultimately happened, the man would have gotten away with the deed.
The Wolf