The Collaborative International Dictionary
Penal \Pe"nal\, a. [L. poenalis, fr. poena punishment: cf. F. p['e]nal. See Pain.] Of or pertaining to punishment, to penalties, or to crimes and offenses; pertaining to criminal jurisprudence: as:
Enacting or threatening punishment; as, a penal statue; the penal code.
Incurring punishment; subject to a penalty; as, a penalact of offense.
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Inflicted as punishment; used as a means of punishment; as, a penal colony or settlement. ``Adamantine chains and penal fire.''
--Milton.Penal code (Law), a code of laws concerning crimes and offenses and their punishment.
Penal laws, Penal statutes (Law), laws prohibited certain acts, and imposing penalties for committing them.
Penal servitude, imprisonment with hard labor, in a prison, in lieu of transportation. [Great Brit.]
Penal suit, Penal action (Law), a suit for penalties.
Wikipedia
In Ireland, Penal Laws are a series of laws imposed in an attempt to force Irish Roman Catholics and Protestant dissenters (such as Presbyterians) to accept the reformed denomination as defined by the English state established Anglican Church and practised by members of the Irish state established Church of Ireland. All remaining penal laws were finally repealed by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (that is, before the separation of the Irish Free State) by the Government of Ireland Act 1920.
Usage examples of "penal laws".
The corrupt or malicious witness was thrown headlong from the Tarpeian rock, to expiate his falsehood, which was rendered still more fatal by the severity of the penal laws, and the deficiency of written evidence.
Allotting the same proportion to the provinces of Italy, Africa, and perhaps Spain, where, at the end of two or three years, the rigor of the penal laws was either suspended or abolished, the multitude of Christians in the Roman empire, on whom a capital punishment was inflicted by a judicia, sentence, will be reduced to somewhat less than two thousand persons.
Some decades ago, when the penal laws were revamped, they found that it cost more to keep a criminal in prison than to send him to Harvard.
Wray's presence surprised him: the penal laws were not what they had been, but even so the acting Second Secretary of the Admiralty could not possibly be a Catholic.
It is only the sanguinary hue of our penal laws which I meant to object to.
Ipswich was the county seat, and so when Charles II had whimsically decided to enforce the Penal Laws, all of Suffolk’.
Let the advocates of a falsely called Philanthropy plead as they may for the abrogation of the Irregular Penal Laws, I for my part have never known an Irregular who was not also what Nature evidently intended him to be - a hypocrite, a misanthropist, and, up to the limits of his power, a perpetrator of all manner of mischief.