execution

(ĕk'sĭ-kyū'shən)
n.

1. 1. The act of executing something.
   2. The state of being executed.
2. The manner, style, or result of performance: The plan was sound; its execution, faulty.
3. The act or an instance of putting to death or being put to death as a lawful penalty.
4. Law.
   1. The carrying into effect of a court judgment.
   2. A writ empowering an officer to enforce a judgment.
   3. Validation of a legal document by the performance of all necessary formalities.
5. Archaic. Effective, punitive, or destructive action.

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Way in which a commercial or advertisement delivers or communicates the advertising message-for example, through emotional appeal, fear appeal, or positive appeal. In some advertising circles, the execution is considered more important than the message, and many copywriters use this theory as a copywriting approach.

Law: signing, sealing, and delivering of a contract or agreement, making it valid.


Securities: carrying out a trade. A broker who buys or sells shares is said to have executed an order.

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Capital punishment has, historically, been a mainstay of most systems of judicial punishment, although it is only recently that systematic work has been carried out by historians either on the incidence of the use of the death penalty, or on its broader cultural significance. If we confine ourselves to Europe in the late medieval and early modern periods, we find that at least initial studies have been completed on England, France, Amsterdam, and parts of Germany. The English and German evidence in particular suggests that levels of capital punishment rose in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and dropped in the later seventeenth and eighteenth, although both levels of execution and methods of killing varied enormously between individual territories. Perhaps more interestingly for the history of the body, it is possible to trace changes in the ceremonial of execution. The continental European evidence is perhaps more relevant here than the English: in England, condemned criminals were usually hanged, whereas in many continental states what were considered more atrocious crimes were followed by aggravated punishments. Perhaps the best documented of these is breaking on the wheel, where the condemned was tied by the arms and legs to a large wheel, the limbs being subsequently broken. Other refinements (rarely administered) were the tearing of the flesh of the condemned with red-hot pincers, the cutting off of hands, and the cutting out of tongues.

Obviously, study of both the actual practice of execution (public in most European states and in North America before the nineteenth century) and the symbolism and rituals attached to the phenomenon is of considerable interest to historians of the human body. Unfortunately, direct comment on this matter was rarely made by contemporaries, and the historian of such matters has usually to work by inference. It is therefore interesting to consider the remarkable commentary that the English judge and legal writer Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634) made on the punishment in England for male commoners convicted of High Treason, namely hanging, drawing, and quartering. Here the various elements of the punishment are directly related to contemporary ideas surrounding various parts of the human body.

The convicted person was dragged to the place of execution on a hurdle, and since ‘God hath made the head of man the highest and most supreme part, as being the chief grace and ornament’, Coke wrote that ‘he must be drawn with the head declining downward, and lying so near the ground as may be, being thought unfit to take the benefit of the common air’. The convicted man would then be hanged by the neck, but only briefly, before he could die, and was then ‘to have his privy parts cut off and burnt before his face as being unworthily begotten, and unfit to leave any generation after him’. After this, ‘his bowels and inlay'd parts’ were to be ‘taken out and burnt, who inwardly had conceived and harboured in his heart such horrible treason’ (it should be noted that every effort would be made to keep the convicted man alive and sensible up to this point). The traitor's head, ‘which had imagined the mischief’, would then be cut off, and, finally, his body would be quartered, ‘and the quarters set up in some high and eminent place, to the view and detestation of men, to become a prey for the fowls of the air’. It is instructive that Coke followed through this discussion of punishment in terms of the symbolism of body parts with a medical analogy: ‘and this is a reward due to traitors, whose hearts be hardened: for that it is a physic of state and government, to let out the corrupt blood from the heart’.

In England the usual means of capital punishment was hanging, which left the body more or less intact, and hence in good condition for the fate which awaited the bodies of many condemned criminals: dissection in the medical schools. Elizabethan legislation had allowed for a limited supply of such corpses to be made available for dissection, but the rising professional standards of the eighteenth-century physician made the legal supply insufficient, and a brisk trade developed in the bodies of the hanged until, in 1752, an act was passed making it easier for the bodies of executed murderers to be sent to the anatomy classes. Interestingly, fear that such a fate should attend the corpse of a convicted criminal frequently provoked crowd action, led by the relatives or friends of the deceased, who attempted to rescue the corpse in hopes of keeping it intact and giving it a decent burial. Here we see popular ideas about the body coming into direct conflict with official ones. It should also be remembered that the corpses of executed criminals were thought to have therapeutic powers, and that a touch from their hands was considered efficacious in curing illness or injuries. Moreover, the practice of gibbeting, that is leaving the corpses of especially heinous criminals to rot in public places (normally the location where the crime had been committed), was another way in which the body of the convicted would enter the domain of the general consciousness.

The folklore which surrounded executions was rendered redundant when, in the nineteenth century, most states began to carry out death sentences in private, while a few abolished the death penalty altogether. The causes and significance of this shift have given rise to considerable theorizing among historians, social scientists, philosophers, and commentators on penal policy. One of its central themes, however, has been that of changing attitudes to the human body, and, more particularly, changing sensibilities about the infliction of pain and suffering. But whether displayed on a public scaffold in the eighteenth century, or the result of a scientific killing within the confines of a modern prison, the body of the executed criminal remains a vivid and striking symbol of the power of the law.

— J. A. Sharpe

See also killing.

noun

1. The act of beginning and carrying through to completion: discharge, effectuation, performance, prosecution. See do/not do.
2. One's artistic conception as shown by the way in which something such as a dramatic role or musical composition is rendered: interpretation, performance, reading, realization, rendering, rendition. See performing arts.

n

Definition: carrying out of a task
Antonyms: abandoning, disregard, failure, forgetting, ignorance, leaving, neglect

n

Definition: killing
Antonyms: birth

This entry contains information applicable to United States law only.

The carrying out of some act or course of conduct to its completion. In criminal law, the carrying out of a death sentence ().

The process whereby an official, usually a sheriff, is directed by an appropriate judicial writ to seize and sell as much of a debtor's nonexempt property as is necessary to satisfy a court's monetary judgment.

With respect to contracts, the performance of all acts necessary to render a contract complete as an instrument, which conveys the concept that nothing remains to be done to make a complete and effective contract.

With regard to seizures of property, executions are authorized in any action or proceeding in which a monetary judgment is recoverable and in any other action or proceeding when authorized by statute. For example, the victim of a motor vehicle accident may institute a civil lawsuit seeking damages from another party. If the plaintiff wins the lawsuit and is awarded money from the defendant as a part of the verdict, the court may authorize an execution process to pay the debt to the plaintiff.

Ordinarily, execution is achieved through a legal device known as a writ of execution. The writ serves as proof of the property owed by the defendant, who is called the judgment debtor, to the plaintiff, or judgment creditor. The writ of execution commands an officer of the court, usually a sheriff, to take the property of the debtor to satisfy the debt. Ordinarily, a writ of execution cannot be issued until after an appropriate court issues a judgment or decree determining the rights and liabilities of the parties involved.

Any type of personal property is subject to seizure under an execution, provided existing laws do not prescribe specific exemptions. Such property may include jewelry, money, and stocks. In most states, real property, including land, is also subject to execution. Intellectual property, which includes patents, copyrights, and trademarks, is generally immune to execution.

An execution on a judgment is typically issued by the clerk of the court in which the judgment was rendered. The clerk cannot issue an execution unless directed to do so by the judgment creditor or the judgment creditor's attorney. The time within which an execution must issue varies from one jurisdiction to another. The writ must be delivered to the sheriff or his or her deputy before it can properly be said that the writ has been issued.

The levy of the execution is the act by which the officer of the court appropriates the judgment debtor's property to satisfy the command of the writ. The levy must be made by an officer duly qualified to act under the terms of the writ. In most states, the judgment debtor has the right to select and indicate to the officer the property upon which the levy is to be made.

An execution creates a lien that gives the judgment creditor qualified control of the judgment debtor's property. In most jurisdictions, an execution lien binds all property, personal or real, that is subject to levy. It is sometimes called a general lien because it attaches to all the defendant's property.

After the sheriff has levied, it is her or his duty to sell the property seized. An execution sale is a sale of property by a sheriff as an officer acting under the writ of execution. An execution sale should be conducted so as to promote competition and obtain the best price. If necessary, the sheriff can employ an auctioneer as an agent to sell the property, in order to procure the most favorable price and to collect the proceeds.

Body Executions

Execution against a person is by writ of capias ad satisfaciendum (Latin for "to take the body to court to pay the debt"). Under this writ, the sheriff arrests and imprisons the defendant until the defendant satisfies the judgment or is discharged from doing so. Such an execution is not intended as punishment for failure to pay the judgment. It is permitted for the purpose of compelling the debtor to reveal property fraudulently withheld from his or her creditor and from which the judgment can be satisfied.

In most jurisdictions, defendants in lawsuits based on contracts are not subject to body executions unless they have committed fraud. Under the statutes in some jurisdictions, imprisonment for debt has been abolished entirely.

Statutes providing for the issuance of body executions to enforce judgments handed down in civil suits ordinarily do not conflict with provisions against imprisonment for debt. Among the civil, or tort, actions in which the writ is generally allowed are those involving fraud or deceit, and those for neglect or misconduct in office or professional employment. A body execution is also generally proper in actions to recover for injuries to person or reputation, including libel and slander, and in actions to recover for malicious prosecution.

See: capital punishment.

The completion of a buy or sell order for a security. The execution of an order happens when it is completely filled, not when it is placed by the investor. When the investor places the trade, it goes to a broker, who then determines the best way for it to be executed.

Investopedia Says:
Brokers are required by law to give investors the best execution possible, and can attempt to execute the transaction in the following ways:

1. Order to the Floor: This can take some time as it goes through human hands. The floor broker will need to get the order and fill it.
2. Order to Market Maker: On exchanges such as the Nasdaq, market makers are in charge of different stocks. The investor's broker may direct the trade to one of these market makers for execution.
3. Electronic Communications Network (ECN): An extremely quick method, whereby computer systems electronically match up buy and sell orders.
4. Internalization: If the broker's firm holds an inventory of the stock in question, it may decide to execute the order from its own inventory.

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Find out the various ways in which a broker can fill an order, which can affect costs. Understanding Order Execution
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For a list of words related to execution, see:

• Prison and Punishment - execution: putting to death of person convicted of crime, usu. by electrocution, gas chamber, firing squad, hanging, injection, or guillotine
• Unnatural Deaths - execution: putting to death as legal punishment for crime

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See words rhyming with "execution."

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Common misspelling(s) of execution

• excecution