The death penalty is the killing of a person as punishment for a crime. It is sometimes called "capital punishment", and people on whom the penalty is imposed are "sentenced to death" or "given the death sentence".
Throughout the world societies have invented many ways of carrying out the death penalty: impaling condemned prisoners on stakes, stoning them to death, dismembering them (tearing or cutting them into pieces), cutting off their heads, etc. Nowadays in the few countries that still carry out the death penalty, the methods have become less obviously cruel: hanging, shooting and administering lethal injections are the main ones.
In Zimbabwe the law says that the death penalty must be carried out by hanging the condemned person by his neck until he is dead.
