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24 paź 2013 · Government’s abysmal track record in administering the death penalty is reason enough to reject the practice. But what does libertarian theory say about the death penalty? After surveying how the death penalty fails as a policy, we tackle this deeper question.
15 sty 2020 · Despite being over 250 years old, On Crimes and Punishments is still relevant to this day. Beccaria was deeply opposed to the death penalty, a rarity for his time when most believed capital punishment was an acceptable response to many crimes.
15 sie 2008 · The issue of capital punishment divides libertarians just as it does other Americans. Debates among libertarians and others generally fall into two areas: the abstract question of whether the state may ever legitimately puts its citizens to death, and the more specific question of whether capital punishment is just and fitting as it is actually ...
23 sie 2021 · As law professor Brandon Garrett notes, jurors today are more likely to reject the death penalty “after hearing a convicted murderer’s life story, including evidence of mental health issues, childhood abuse, and other mitigating circumstances.”
Capital punishment is anathema to liberal notions of human rights and civil liberties. It is time to finally cast it aside as an anachronistic vestige of bygone times. The death penalty is fundamentally incompatible with a truly liberal state. American history is replete with hypocrisies, contradictions, and imperfections.
Indeed, recent public opinion polls show a wide margin of support for the death penalty. But human rights advocates and civil libertarians continue to decry the immorality of state-sanctioned killing in the U.S., the only western industrialized country that continues to use the death penalty.
This review addresses four key issues in the modern (post-1976) era of capital punishment in the United States. First, why has the United States retained the death penalty when all its peer countries (all other developed Western democracies) have abolished it?
