See the Jewish attitude to the death penalty. There is a long list of crimes for which the penalty prescribed in the Torah is death, but interpretation has made the definition of these crimes so narrow, and the rules of evidence so strict, that it is effectively impossible for someone to meet the conditions to actually be condemned to death.
This happened a very long time ago. Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah, writing in the first century CE when Jewish courts which theoretically had the authority to sentence someone to death still existed, said that such a court which passed a death sentence every seventy years would be considered unusually bloodthirsty.
