who is guilty of insubordination in front of the grand court in the Chamber of the Hewn Stone. Contemporary attitudes towards capital punishment Rabbinical courts have given up the ability to inflict any kind of physical punishment, and such punishments are left to the civil court system to administer. The modern institution of the death penalty, at least as practiced in the United States, is opposed by the major rabbinical organizations of Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Judaism. In a 2014 poll, 57 percent of Jews surveyed said they supported life in prison without the chance of parole over the death penalty for people convicted of murder. Orthodox Judaism Orthodox Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan wrote: "In practice, ... these punishments were almost never invoked, and existed mainly as a deterrent and to indicate the seriousness of the sins for which they were prescribed. The rules of evidence and other safeguards that the Torah provides to protect the accused made it all but impossible to actually invoke these penalties ... the system of judicial punishments could become brutal and barbaric unless administered in an atmosphere of the highest morality and piety. When these standards declined among the Jewish people, the Sanhedrin ... voluntarily abolished this system of penalties. On the other hand, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, in a letter to then-New York Governor Hugh Carey, states: "One who murders because the prohibition to kill is meaningless to him, and he is especially cruel, and so too when murderers and evil people proliferate, they [the courts] would [should?] judge [capital punishment] to repair the issue [and] to prevent murder – for this [action of the court] saves the state." According to Yaakov Elman, imprisonment of criminals was impractically expensive under the material conditions of ancient society, which meant that the death penalty and other corporal punishments were the only available options for severe crimes. Thus, use of the death penalty in ancient society would not necessarily imply that the Jewish tradition prefers it in wealthy modern society. Conservative Judaism In Conservative Judaism, the death penalty was the subject of a responsum by its Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, which has gone on record as opposing the modern institution of the death penalty: "The Talmud ruled out the admissibility of circumstantial evidence in cases which involved a capital crime. Two witnesses were required to testify that they saw the action with their own eyes. A