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This article aims to prove that gibbets, gallows and patibulary forks have their place in the constitution, conservation and valorisation of a historical judicial patrimony. To this end, it presents the links that people of the past and present have had and still have with hanging structures, the way in which people have perceived and still perceive justice through them. It also analyses this penal patrimony according to different scales of observation (past/present, individual/collective, family/society, private/public, etc.) in terms of heritage, transmission, identity and memory.

If some works have studied the gender representations of judges on litigants, representations regarding members of the jury are less known. This paper intends to look at the moral and civic values required of them, in connection with their masculinity, at a time when only men were considered citizens. Members of the jury couldn’t show any weakness in their manly duty. Indeed, virility was then linked with firmness, rationality, composure and the rejection of sentimentality.

In order to describe narrative and visual conventions regarding minorities and their relation to crime and the justice system, 139 episodes of various American TV series broadcast for the first time between 1950 and 1977, all of which dealing generally with capital punishment or, quite often, specifically with legal execution, have been analyzed for this study. This corpus was studied within its historical context, with the help of archives documenting the story development of different episodes (notably scripts and interviews given by scriptwriters and producers working during the period). In a context of major social and political changes in the United States, this topic was controversial and might have repelled viewers or sponsors. Indeed, the racial tensions in American society, as well as interracial violence, were rarely staged on the small screen. In most fiction at the time, racial minorities seemed protected from discrimination by a commendably colorblind justice system. If it were not the case, then racism was condemned on the program. This form of “affirmative” action was also at play in the rare mise-en-scène of the legal executions of non-white death-row prisoners (often with the actual executions staged off-screen). Furthermore, minority extras appeared more and more often as actors within the justice system, rather than just victims of it. The archival documents show the reluctance of networks and sponsors toward addressing the topic, and the strategies used to accommodate it, which can allow for several interpretations of the same episode, involving the choice of historical and/or geographical setting and of the oppressed minority for the scene, and the often “balanced” representation of different sides of the issue. As a result, the episodes could potentially satisfy audiences with diverse and opposite views.

A number of representative polls have been conducted on the death penalty in recent decades. There were some surveys whose authors were interested not only in the percentage of supporters and opponents of the death penalty, but also in whether this rate varies in different strata of society. Several polls were conducted, in which, in addition to socio-cultural factors, respondents were asked about their general attitudes and some research was also conducted in order to uncover the reasons behind the responses of the interviewees. From all of this, one can gain a clear picture as regards the socio-cultural characteristics of people in general, who are more in favour of the death penalty, as well as regarding what general ttitudes respondents have and for what reasons they formed their views. The subsequent presentation of the Hungarian surveys will help one to see whether distance in time affects the perception of the social need for capital punishment, and how such need changes over time. Overall, the aim of this study is to present a comprehensive human approach to the death penalty; that is, the goal is not to examine how many people have supported or opposed the death penalty in a particular country in a given period of time, but to find out what factors influence commitment to or against capital punishment and the causes thereof, and what factors can change people’s attitudes towards the death penalty.

Before 1981, the death penalty was the ultimate punishment, reserved for the worst criminals. Unless they were spared due to mitigating circumstances, those found guilty of premeditated or aggravated murder were sentenced, in accordance with the penal code, to an ignominious beheading. These people often came from marginal backgrounds. However, criminals who were sentenced to death were not entirely beyond redemption. The President could always grant them pardons and spare them the guillotine. They were then sent to the hard labour camps in French Guyana – another form of elimination, but one which was considered a second chance. From 1908 to 1914, only a minority (less than a third) of these convicts were actually considered to be beyond any form of redemption and undeserving of survival. To help the President make decisions in these matters, the Ministry of Justice sought the advice of those who had worked on these cases (the judge and public prosecutors). Our intention is to look at how the magistrates justified their advice, with reference to reports stored in government and presidential archives. This study fits into a wider field – indeed, recent “moral sociology” studies pay close attention to how the various participants in the penal chain justified their decisions. Judges took into account some general characteristics relating to age, social status and recidivism. But, more than anything, the attitude of the criminal during the trial or in prison, and any display of cynicism, or even of outrageous behaviour, were key factors in the issuing of death sentences. These could be seen as signs that any attempt at “moral correction” would be doomed to failure. Moreover, the severity of the judges was underpinned by the concept of retribution. The issue of “responsibility” was then paramount. The need to create a deterrent effect was also important. The judges’ reports show us that Christian and spiritualist ways of thinking had a profound influence on the practice of penal law – far removed from the growing positivist theories of “social defence”.

This article examines the twenty-year moratorium on the death penalty in 18th-century Russia during the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna. The paper analyses the most important reasons for the unofficial abolition of capital punishment and the correlation between the decision of the empress and the events of the palace coup of 1741. The moratorium on the death penalty raised the urgent issue of “pardoned convicts”, whose conditions of detention on Rågervik Island are also described in the article. Such a harsh and peremptory humanisation of criminal penalties undertaken solely on the internal motives of the empress aroused the displeasure of the Senate and affected the preparation of the draft of the New Law Code. Only the death of Elizabeth prevented the impending conflict of the throne with the court elite. The moratorium on the death penalty considerably influenced not only the internal political climate of subsequent reigns, but also the foreign perception of the Russian Empire. Three years after the death of Elizabeth in 1764, the Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria published his famous treatise On Crimes and Punishments, in which he proved the inconsistency of the death penalty, both in terms of the concept of a social contract and in terms of the effectiveness in the prevention of serious crimes. Beccaria used the ‘Great Example of the Russian Empress’ as an important argument not only in his famous treatise, but also in discussions with Leopold I, duke of Tuscany, who was the first to abolish the death penalty in Europe in 1786 under the influence of the philosopher’s arguments.

This article discusses how the debate on the death penalty is approached in Algeria, based on media controversy over child abduction cases. Our work is built around the «moral panic» generated by the extent of media coverage of these abduction cases. It shows how this has led not only to a review of a 1993 decision suspending the execution of the death penalty, but also to a demand by the ulemas, the associations and the media to apply the death penalty in cases involving the kidnapping of children. This debate has generated a confrontation of ideas between abolitionists and human rights defenders on the one hand and death penalty advocates on the other.

A few months after the publication of the French translation of his book Causing Death and Saving Lives (in French Questions de vie ou de mort, Labor et fides, 2017), Jonathan Glover was kind enough to return to some of the theses defended in this book. In forty years, this work has become a classic of applied ethics in the English-speaking world. Glover tackled a series of questions involving the lives of men and women, including abortion, infanticide, suicide, euthanasia, the death penalty and war. We asked him here about the method he considers the best in moral philosophy, and returned to his criticism of certain dominant ideas at the time (doctrine of sacred life, the distinction between acts and omissions, the principle of double effect, etc.). Jonathan Glover also discusses some of the positions of his former students Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For this special issue dedicated to Jonathan Glover, Peter Singer was asked to reflect on the influence that the book Causing Death and Saving Lives had on him, as well as the Glover seminar in Oxford that Peter Singer attended in the late 1960s. One of Peter Singer's recurring arguments is the criticism of the traditional distinction between acts and omissions. But Glover is no stranger to this questioning, even if the two thinkers do not seem to want to draw exactly the same conclusions. What is at stake is this: what are we really responsible for and how demanding should our morality be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this special issue on Jonathan Glover and his applied ethics, Jeff McMahan was asked to review the influence of Questions of Life and Death (Labor et fides, 2017), published forty years ago in its original version. Jeff McMahan, Glover's former student, has since developed his own ethics of killing. We wanted to know what he had learned from Glover's philosophy, which he recognized as a pioneer in applied ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I return to the origins of J. Glover's chapter on the death penalty in Causing Death and Saving Lives, that is, a 1957 article by Hart, "Murder and the Principles of Punishment: England and the United States." In this article, Hart defends, like Glover, the abolition of the death penalty by relying on a utilitarian strategy consisting in, inter alia, reversing the burden of proof: as long as we do not have the proof that the death sentence can save more lives than prison, we will not be allowed to use it, since it is prima facie a greater evil than prison. In fact, it causes greater harm, is more expensive and is not remissible. More than fifty years after the publication of this article, we still have no proof of a greater effectiveness of the death penalty. Some studies even suggest that the death penalty could be harmful and have a brutalizing effect. Throughout my article, I explore the strengths and weaknesses of the utilitarian approach to criminal sanctions, which I oppose, following Hart and Glover, with two other approaches: the pacifist approach and the retributive approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the cultural context of nineteenth-century Spain, Emilia Pardo Bazán uses literature to raise public awareness on the death penalty. Considering the seriousness of the issue, she thought that emotions – not reason – could allow people to have a better understanding and to form their own opinion. Thus, in La piedra angular, through the fictional word of Marineda, she examines the controversies linked to the legal, human, and moral legitimacy of capital punishment and to the figures of both the criminal and the executioner, but also to the nature of truth and public opinion.

“The bandages signify death,” says Derrida, “the condemnation to death; when they fall away, out of use, undone, untied, untying, they signify, like a detached signifier, that the dead one is resuscitated." Like a detached signifier, indicating a metaphorical relationship between signification and the bandages. But, when we follow the metonymy of bandages in Derrida’s Death Penalty seminar volume one, the bandages appear as the figure for figuration itself. More specifically, they are a sign that needs interpretation; a sign that the bandages are detached from the body; a sign that the word, or sign, is detached from the thing.

Danuta „Inka” Siedzik was a nurse. During the Second World War she belonged to the Home Army and to the independence organizations, which fighted with communist rule after the war. She was sentenced to death penalty and shot in jail in Gdańsk at the age of 17 for her service and fight. She belongs to cursed soldiers, that means activists of anti-communist underground. Although she died in 1946, her memory has been cultivated only for a dozen or so years. The aim of the article was an analyze of documents and interpret of legal regulations, which applied to Inka’ case. In the article compared content of the documents with regulations and that time. No moral judgment was made on the court’s decision, but were presented only the facts.

O objetivo principal deste trabalho foi investigar o julgamento moral de estudantes do ensino médio e de licenciaturas sobre pena de morte e redução da maioridade penal. Para tanto, utilizou-se como suporte teórico e empírico a tipologia do desenvolvimento moral de Lawrence Kohlberg. Participaram deste estudo 200 estudantes que responderam, além de uma lista que solicitava informações de alguns dos seus dados biodemográficos, a questões relacionadas à pena de morte e à redução da maioridade penal. De um modo geral, os participantes opinaram favoravelmente pela pena de morte e pela redução da maioridade penal, e, em defesa de suas opiniões, utilizaram, sobretudo, argumentos típicos dos estágios hierarquicamente inferiores da tipologia kohlberguiana, havendo, contudo, algumas diferenças entre as respostas em função do grau de escolaridade. Esses resultados foram discutidos com base na teoria kohlberguiana e em estudos empíricos que tratam dos temas pena de morte e redução da maioridade penal.The aim of this study was to investigate the moral judgments of students of high school and degrees on the death penalty and the reduction of criminal majority. Thus, it was used to support the theoretical and empirical typology of moral development of Lawrence Kohlberg. The study included 200 students who responded, beyond a list that requested information from some of their bio-demographic data, questions related to death penalty and reduction of criminal majority. In general, participants opined in favor of the death penalty and the reduction of criminal majority, and in defense of their views, used mainly typical arguments hierarchically lower stages of the Kohlberg's typology there, however, some differences between the responses according to level of schooling. These results were discussed taking into consideration the Kohlberg's theory and empirical studies dealing with the issues of death penalty and reduction of criminal majority.

The author analyses a discussion on death penalty that took place in Belgrade, at the end of the socialist era, between Igor Primorac and Ivan Jankovic. Primorac attacked the utilitarian justification of the socialist penal system, though he agreed on different, retributive grounds that death penalty for premeditated murder should be preserved. Jankovic advocated utilitarian ideas and rejected the death penalty as an atavistic aberration. In the first part of the article, their main arguments are presented and their contextual meaning is being explained. In the second part of the article, the author analyses those arguments and concludes that a) retributivism has not been the philosophy of death penalty during its history, b) that retentionist conclusions do not follow from retributive premises, c) that utilitarianism, in spite of its historical connection with abolitionism, can justify death penalty, d) that since the problem cannot be resolved on moral grounds alone, it should be resolved on political grounds, and e) that political considerations require the abolition of death penalty.

Jeremy Bentham is best known as the founding father of utilitarianism, a moral philosophy that values ‘happiness’ more than all other goals in life. According to this creed, policies should be directed at ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’. Besides formulating this general principle, Bentham wrote about several specific topics including the death penalty, which he passionately opposed. He did so, however, without applying his own utilitarian method. In this article the relationship between death penalty and happiness is studied empirically. Average happiness of citizens is compared in states with and without death penalty. Comparisons are made across 127 nation states in the early 2000s and among 47 federal states within the US over the years 1970-2000. The results show that Bentham, from the perspective of his own ethical philosophy, was too negative about the death penalty. It hardly undermines the happiness of nation states and it does not undermine the happiness of American states at all. If one opposes the death penalty, it should be done for non-utilititarian reasons.

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At the beginning of Delitto e perdono Adriano Prosperi recalls the killing of Osama Bin Laden, regarded as an act of justice by the American people and its president. Then, his book goes on spurring useful remarks about the history of the idea of conviction to death as a repair. One of the main threads of western thought about capital punishment can be found in contrasting vengeance and mercy from XI century, when Christ’s sacrifice became the ideal link for most criminal codes. In fact, every executed man could hope for God’s forgiveness and for his own soul’s salvation at the foot of the Cross. Face to the advices of Confortatori, which until XIX century escorted all men sentenced to death to the scaffold, almost none refused to agree to religious solace, and so the execution proceeding became a sacramental act.

The death penalty dramatically signifies that society does not excuse or condone the taking of innocent lives. It symbolizes the value of the innocent victim. Incapacity can be imposed by long terms ofimprisonment, particularly for habitual offenders; the policy of "keeping criminals off the streets" does indeed protect the public for a period of time, although it is done at a considerable cost. The object of deterrence is to make the certainty and severity of punishment so great as to inhibit potential criminals from committingcrimes. The best available estimates of the certainty of punishment for serious crime suggest that very few crimes actually result in jail sentences for the perpetrators.

Copyright of Vingtième Siècle is the property of Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The European Union has played a leading role in the adoption of a UN resolution on a moratorium on capital punishment, resolution which involved strong opposition geeting very clear spatial contours. This article, based on intensive use of UN documentation, demonstrates the value of a geographical approach to the UN system. The study of texts (resolutions, minutes of meetings), the mapping of voting results and trajectories of states contribute to highlight great political contemporary blocs and question the normative power, often postulated but rarely demonstrated, of the European Union.

The aim of this paper is to examine the discursive construction of emotions in a series of French parliamentary debates concerning the abolition of death penalty (1791-1981). In the first part, I set out the methodological tenets of this research. I begin by discussing the choice of the corpus. The challenge is to set a corpus which despite being chronologically scattered, is strongly coherent, in terms of theme and genre. This kind of coherence is essential, I will argue, as it allows for diachronic comparisons. I then turn to the sciences of language, where I attempt to examine the descriptive resourcesthey provide in order to grasp how emotions are constructed in discourse. What is at stake here is to identify the main “observable phenomena”. Scholars working in the field of linguistics and discourse analysis strive to determine the various types of relationshipbetween emotions, on the one hand, and language data, on the other: they offer a set of categories,and claim, for instance, that emotions may be “expressed” or “aimed for” by speakers. The question of what constitutes relevant material is also the subject of much interest: when it comes to emotions, scholars tend to highlight the significance of the paraverbaland the non-verbal material. I engage in a critical discussion of the main categories and try to determine which are the most useful considering the characteristics of the corpus. The second part of the paper is devoted to a case study. I look at France’s first parliamentary debate on the abolition of the death penalty, which takes place between May 30 and June 1, 1791 at the Assemblée Constituante. Here, my objective is to bring out the main features of pathos, which orators who oppose the death penalty use during this debate. I suggest that this pathos relies on a particular topos, which depicts the execution as a “spectacle”.I describe this specific use of pathos in some detail. In conclusion, I attempt to look at it from a diachronic perspective and compare it with other uses of pathos which are found in the later debates (1848 and 1908). Such a perspective allows us to identify significant alterations in the way abolitionist orators construct emotions in their discourse.

This article studies the Supreme Court’s most recent death penalty jurisprudence, in particular Atkins and Ropers’ in which it ruled mentally retarded and juvenile defendants could no longer be executed. They were seen as victories by the supporters of human rights. This article also focuses on the impact of federalism in the decision of the United States to keep the death penalty.

Copyright of Autrepart is the property of Presses de Sciences Po and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Transitional justice in Belgium after the First World War in the area of criminal justice (1918--1928). -- After the First World War, from 1918 until 1928, Belgium experienced a form of transitional justice, especially in the area of criminal justice. In order to meet demands for revenge fostered among the population against various individuals accused of high treason, the death penalty was reinstated for a number of political crimes, military tribunals were given powers to hear cases of offences against state security committed by civilians, and the judicial branch of Public Prosecutions (Ministère Public) was empowered to prosecute the same offences in connexion with the military prosecuting officers (auditeurs militaires). As a result, arbitrary arrests and detention occurred in several cases, the rights of the defence were curtailed, some criminal statutory provisions were allowed to be applied retrospectively, criminal law tended to be construed extensively, indictments were based on an arbitrary selection, and, although the law excluded forfeiture of private property and assets which had been acquired through dealings and collaboration with the enemy, that hurdle was circumvented by the procedural device of introducing the Belgian State as a private litigant in criminal proceedings (partie civile) in order to obtain compensation for the crimes committed by the defendants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study on the geographic aspect of death penalty in Texas, as it is characterized by a very clear spatial differentiation, observable even at a county level. The purpose of the article is to show that death penalty can be a geographic topic, as long as its spatial expression allows to determine the existence of a legal spatial framework. The spatial logic of the way that the Texan executing counties are distributed is analyzed. Parallels are drawn between demographic and ethnic parameters and legal characteristics.