Capital Punishment

Abstract When Cesare Beccaria published his celebrated essay On Crimes and Punishments in 1764, he raised both moral and utilitarian objections to capital punishment. It not only was an unacceptably cruel weapon for an enlightened state to employ but also was less effective than imprisonment as a deterrent, and counterproductive in the moral message it conveyed, for it legitimized the very behaviorkilling-which the law sought to repress (Bowers 1984, pp. 6-7).

Those who have continued to support the use of capital punishment for murder have taken the opposite view, namely, that it expresses and reinforces the moral indignation that citizens rightly feel when another citizen is killed, that those who have killed have forfeited their own right to life, and that no other penalty can have such a strong deterrent effect.