It can decree an election, or it can decree a coin flip.
Although American courts martial from their inception have had the power to decree capital punishment, they have not long had the authority to try and to sentence members of the armed forces for capital murder committed in the United States in peacetime.
And after death, both lay claim to what Grann calls the "grisly Holy Grail among opponents of capital punishment": a verifiable case of wrongful execution, what Sandra Day O'Connor once decreed a "constitutionally intolerable event".
Suharto decreed a quick and quiet funeral.
He quotes a 16th Century Pontiff who decreed the punishment for pedophilia to be death, and a 1917 bill about the instant excommunication of sex-abusing priests.
What has shocked Pakistan is that a tribal council here, for the first time anyone can remember, decreed gang rape as a punishment to avenge an episode of illicit sex -- one that probably never happened in the first place.
The people of the United States, by an amendment of their fundamental law, have solemnly decreed that, 'except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,' involuntary servitude shall not exist in any form in this country.
But Allah decreed that punishment befall the warring crusaders from where they had not expected.
We had the firm belief that the justice system had decreed what punishment Lee should serve and he served that.
Though, in the words of the Turkish author and philosopher Mustafa Akyol, there is nothing in the Quran that decrees earthly punishment for blasphemy or for apostasy.
First, a decree ordered punishment for anyone attempting to generate disputes, and for those concealing conspiracies against the Junta or other people.
