[Tuna-Fish]

Very trigger-happy laws are often not intended to be implemented exactly as written. If you have done something against a family that the law says you should be executed for, you can probably purchase your life from them. Same goes for all the eye-for-an-eye punishments.

A very different time and place, but in early medieval Iceland if you poked out someone's eye, that someone now owns your corresponding eye. Then you can together come to terms on whether the eye should be also poked or if you can agree on a price to buy it back.

A more statist example, at times in ancient China the law code had execution as punishment on basically every crime that the state got involved in at all. But most of the condemned were not executed, but eventually had their sentence commuted to internal exile (into some other part of China).

[weweweoo]

I've read that also in medieval Finland crimes that were punishable by death rarely resulted in actual execution. Fines and other less harsh punishments were preferred, probably because that way the criminal could still remain a contributing member of the community. Makes sense considering how small the communities were back then in these parts of the world.