Immediately after seizing the throne, Elizabeth reportedly vowed never to sign a death warrant, effectively suspending capital punishment for her entire reign.
In the days following her successful coup, Elizabeth is recorded to have made a solemn vow that she would never sign a death warrant during her reign—a pledge she is said to have made in gratitude for her own survival and rise to power. This vow, dated by tradition to shortly after her accession on 7 December 1741, marked the beginning of a de facto suspension of capital punishment throughout the Russian Empire.
While Elizabeth did not formally codify the abolition of the death penalty through a single legislative statute, her policy was consistently maintained throughout her nearly twenty-year reign. Historical records indicate no judicial executions were carried out under her direct authority, an extraordinary anomaly for an 18th-century absolute monarchy where capital punishment was a routine instrument of state power and criminal justice.
This policy represents one of the earliest instances of a European head of state effectively ending capital punishment in practice, predating later Enlightenment-era legal reforms across the continent. Though harsh corporal punishments such as flogging and exile to Siberia continued, and some deaths occurred indirectly through these punishments, Elizabeth's personal refusal to authorize executions was widely noted by contemporaries and later historians as a distinguishing humanitarian feature of her rule, reflecting both personal piety and pragmatic statecraft in an era of frequent political violence.