Maester Steven, thank you for the quick answer. Though there are several historical accounts of various gruesome executions that took place in the North (13 deserters entombed in the wall, entrails hanged in heart tree, Pink pavilion, flaying, Theon Stark’s Easter Island Corpse Statues, etc), the Starks, in recent times, seemed to have adopted a more moderate stance. Is this correct and if so, why go in that direction and did the North suffer certain drawbacks from this stance on justice?

Well, as I’ve talked about with the Starks and personal justice, I think it’s more a statement of judicial philosophy than moderation per se. 

The Starks essentially invert the normal order of medieval justice as Foucault saw it: rather than making the royal body symbolic and larger than life, it’s made literal as the king becomes the executioner; rather than dwelling on the obliteration and humiliation of the body, the emphasis is on one precise strike with a Valyrian steel sword, almost an artisan guillotine.

In some ways, it’s actually most reminiscent of the classical Greek model that Hesiod wrote about, where lords and kings are local warlords who people come to lay their cases in front of, because they’re the only people around who can enforce judgement. In that situation, carrying out the execution yourself is a dramatic political display, showing off the personal strength and martial prowess of the king which is the proof of their right to rule. 

But I think there’s another purpose to Ned’s thing about “the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. If you would take a man’s life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.” One of Hesiod’s major, major complaints is that the lordly system of justice is corrupt – given that the judges are literal strongmen, they don’t really give a damn about fairness, so the parties come to them with bribes disguised as tribute, and the king sides with the rich man over the poor man. By having the king be personally implicated in the execution, he’s making a public statement that the king is sure that the condemned deserves to die (because if the king kills someone who’s innocent, that’s when supernatural retribution kicks in…) and that therefore the justice system is honest. 

So I think that it’s something that historically worked in favor of the Starks. As with the Justmans, personally identifying the Starks with justice created a strong bond of loyalty between subject and sovereign. And the Starks lived up to their own mythologizing: hence Ned going in person to Bear Island to chop off the head of Jorah Mormont, showing to everyone who sees or hears about his progress from Winterfell that the Stark will uphold the law against anyone, even the lords.