I think that in that case, I forget exactly what the punishment was, but it was comparable. I mean, that sort of I think maybe illustrates your point.Ĭraig Lerner: Right, and a similar case when the bombings in Madrid in Spain.Ĭraig Lerner: Right. Of course, in America you would probably receive the death penalty. But the most he could receive for that crime, I read, was 20 years in jail. Richard Reinsch: What does it mean? What does it exactly mean to abolish the death penalty? Is it in fact an unwillingness, or even not an unwillingness but just a sheepishness about imposing justice on those who commit heinous crimes? A lot of people remarked the Norwegian shooter who murdered 70 teenagers on an island in Norway was a political assassination. But I think there’s a legitimate argument on their side that has been articulated many times over the centuries, and I think still has some viability today. And that the impulse to retain the death penalty is atavistic urge to pursue vengeance, which we should welcome its demise.
I would say certainly there’s a narrative that the decline of the death penalty in the West is an attempt to support higher principles of the enlightenment. Or, I would say that it’s at least a question whether the impulse to abolish the death penalty is unambiguously good, or whether it reflects a diminishing impulse to justice and a sense of a community that demands justice that is not unambiguously good. You analyzed this punishment through several different ways: political, philosophical, and also a geographical survey of jurisdictions around the world, civilizations around the world, and how they treat the death penalty.īefore we get into your essay, maybe just an obvious question here, one that I think any enlightened, certainly liberal arts professor would ask: Is it not an unmitigated blessing that the Western world has basically abolished the death penalty, America excepted?Ĭraig Lerner: Well, I would say no. Professor Lerner, you recently wrote an essay on the death penalty called “I s the Death Penalty Dead?” in the most recent issue of the Claremont Review of Books, which I read and thought significant. Richard Reinsch: Today we’re talking with Craig Lerner, Professor of Law at George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School, about the moral and political meaning of the death penalty and if its demise is, as we are frequently told, imminent. Is the abolition of the death penalty in most western countries an unmitigated good? Craig Lerner, Professor of Law at George Mason’s Scalia Law School, discusses this question and the willingness of liberal societies to defend law and order.