For our final project, we looked for moral paradigms in history of death penalty from the EU and the USA. We will briefly introduce the history of capital punishment in both societies, and then compare them with the Baker’s dozen criteria for moral revolutions. We claim that in EU, the abolition of the death penalty could be viewed as a moral revolution, but in USA the death penalty is closer to a moral reform.
When America was colonized in 1600s, European settlers brought with them capital punishment that Britain used. (Bedau, 1997, p.4). American view of abolition death penalty was highly influenced by an enlightenment thinker Cesare Beccaria’s literature On Crimes and Punishments, in which he advocated the abolition of death penalty. Beccaria thought that there’s no justification for the state’s taking life, since man have no right to destroy a life. (Beccaria, 1764) Benjamin Rush, a founding father of the United States, was influenced by Beccaria. He addressed a speech in Philadelphia in 1787, stated that capital punishment was an unlawful use of power by the state. Benjamin Rush also wrote a paper to oppose the usage of death penalty in America based on Beccaria’s view.(Costanzo, 1997 and Maestro, 1973) His idea led to Pennsylvania to propose “degrees of murder”. (Keedy, 1949) Throughout the years,the abolition movement has been gaining supports. Some states reduced the number of their capital crimes and began abolishing death penalty, but many states still remains the capital punishments.(Bohm, 2017) In the 1970s, there were two cases that impacted the states to move away from the use of capital punishment. In 1972, the Furman v. Georgia case pushes the stop of the death penalty. In this case, a poor, uneducated mentally ill black man, William Furman, was found guilty of murder and then sentenced to death after one day of jury deliberation. Some justice thought death penalty was “cruel and unusual punishment” that violates the Eighth Amendment. Instead of thinking of the unconstitutional perspective, some justices rather considered the lack of specific guidelines thus lead to the judgements based on prejudices. (Coenen, 1972) In fact at the time, middle-class white man were far less likely to receive the death penalty contrary to poor minorities. This actually stopped the executions in US for some years, capital punishment was thought as “arbitrary and capricious”. Georgia established a two-step trial for the capital cases, in the first step, the defendant would be found guilty or not. If one was found guilty, the judge would instruct the jury about how they would decide if the death penalty was appropriate for the case. In 1976, the Gregg v. Georgia case forces the state to reinstate the death penalty, since the states wanted to continue having capital punishment, a challenge was up for the Court to change the way they administer the death penalty. (Crew, 2001) Much has been done on the topic of capital punishment in USA, but it is still a controversial topic, i.e. DNA technology undermining the problem of determining the criminal, religious issue, objections for deterrence of death penalty, etc. Some states abolished death penalty, some still kept. But over the years, according to the polling data, the supports for death penalty has been declining. (Jones, 2016)
With regards to Baker’s Dozen Criteria for a Moral Revolution, the abolition of the death penalty in the United States is closer to a moral reform. The morality was inverted because capital punishment went from acceptable to unacceptable. There are some people either recognize death penalty as cruel or arbitrary in process, thus want to abolish death penalty. But accepting the new paradigm doesn’t actually require a duck-rabbit type paradigm shift, since some states kept the death penalty and only change the way of administering it. The dissidents like Rush and the Supreme Court publicly disseminated their idea, and the idea of abolishing death penalty garnered support, and we have polling data for support. The alternative partially didn’t employ new concepts, but however provided a new way of dictating whether a death penalty ought to be carried out. These were partially justified in terms of incommensurable standards. The new paradigm was partially accepted by the community, and some of the community is still arguing for a full abolishment. The reform movement partially obsolesce the law, since it kept the death penalty but make the process less arbitrary. Some parts of the country still keeps the capital punishment. So we conclude the death penalty mostly as a reform in USA.
The death penalty has been abolished in most European countries. In fact, abolition of the death penalty is now a prerequisite to joining the European Union (EU). According to Amnesty International, every European country has abolished the Death Penalty for peacetime crimes except for Belarus, while the death penalty for wartime crimes has been abolished in every European country except for Belarus and Kazakhstan. When looking at the history of the abolition of capital punishment in Europe, it is important to examine the process of abolition in Great Britain and France. In Great Britain, capital punishment was initially abolished in the 11th century by William the Conqueror, until it was reinstated by his son (Knowles, 2015, p. 6). Opposition to capital punishment was weak in Great Britain until the late eighteenth century, when Sir William Meredith MP “suggested that Parliament consider ‘more proportionate punishments’” (p. 11) in 1770. His proposal was rejected, though his cause was picked up by Sir Samuel Romilly MP, who was greatly influenced by Jeremy Bentham. Romilly succeeded in persuading Parliament to abolish the death penalty in cases of private stealing from the person, but failed in regards to shoplifting, stealing in dwelling houses, and on navigable rivers (p. 11).
After Romilly’s death in 1818, Sir James Mackintosh MP became the leader of the abolitionist movement in Britain. In 1823, the Judgement of Death Act was enacted, abolishing the mandatory death penalty and giving judges the discretion to reduce the mandatory death sentences for crimes other than treason and murder to lesser punishments, such as imprisonment or transportation (p. 12). By 1861, the number of capital offences had been reduced to just four by the Criminal Law Consolidation Acts of that year, and the Capital Punishment Amendment Act of 1868 provided for the carrying out of capital punishment within prisons (Knowles, 2015, p. 13). The 20th century saw the imposition of a number of restrictions on the use of the death penalty, as the minimum age for execution was raised to 18 in 1908 and “capital murder” was introduced as a new offence in 1957 (p. 19). Following the atrocities of World War II, many began to reflect on the value of human life, and in April 1948, the House of Commons voted in favor of a bill introduced by Sydney Silverman to suspend the death penalty for five years (p. 20). The amendment was defeated in the House of Lords, but Silverman introduced the Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Bill in 1964 in another attempt to abolish capital punishment in Britain. The Bill passed, and capital punishment was suspended for a period of five years. By 1969, the appropriate resolutions were passed by both Houses of Parliament the 1965 act became permanent, completely abolishing the death penalty in England, Scotland, and Wales (p. 56).
France has a different path to abolition. Prior to 1791, there were a variety of methods of capital punishment in France, depending on the crime and the status of those condemned to death. However, the first campaign towards the abolition of the death penalty began in 1791, only for the National Assembly to refuse to pass such a law. The National Assembly instead declared that there would be only one method of execution: by guillotine. The death penalty was briefly abolished in 1795, only to be reinstated by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1810. In 1908, Aristide Briand submitted a draft law on the abolition of the death penalty, but the bill was rejected. The death penalty was practiced regularly in France up until the 1950’s and 60’s, until 1977 when the last man would be executed in France. In 1981, Francois Mitterand championed an effort to abolish capital punishment in France, and a bill was passed in October of that year abolishing the death penalty in France.
With regards to Baker’s Dozen Criteria for a Moral Revolution, the abolition of the death penalty in the United Kingdom and France accurately represents a moral revolution. In both cases, morality was inverted when death as a punishment went from being acceptable to unacceptable. In the UK, many recognized that death was too harsh a penalty for almost all crimes in their existing system, and so they conceived of an alternative paradigm in which death is not a punishment for a crime. In France, many saw the death penalty as a violation of human rights, and as cruel and unusual punishment. In both cases, the alternative paradigm was incompatible with the established paradigm, and required a duck-rabbit paradigm shift from valuing honor to valuing human life. Abolitionists in France and the UK publicly disseminated their alternative paradigm (the abolition of the death penalty) and garnered public support, eventually leading to the employment of new concepts and language and requiring alternative laws. The use of alternative laws and practices was justified in terms of incommensurable criteria, namely that people could not be punished with death in a society that has abolished the death penalty. The new paradigm of abolition was accepted by the community at large because it affirmed the value of human life, and this obsolesced concepts and language related to capital punishment. Finally, the pre-revolutionary practices have generally been dismissed as idiosyncratic or shameful, as many in Europe view the death penalty as immoral and heinous.
Reference
- Amnesty International. (n.d.). Amnesty International. Retrieved from https://www.amnesty.org/en/
- Bedau, H. (1997). The death penalty in America: current controversies. New York, NY: Oxford University.
- Bohm, R. M. (2017). Deathquest: an introduction to the theory and practice of capital punishment in the United States. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
- Capital punishment in France. (2017, June 04). Retrieved June 06, 2017, from
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_France
- Coenen, D.T. (1972). Furman v. Georgeia. Retrieved from, http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/government-politics/furman-v-georgia-1972
- Crew, B. (2001). The death and resurrection of capital punishment. In Johnson, J. (Ed.), Historic U.S. Court Cases: An Encyclopedia, Volume 1. New York: Routledge.
- Di Beccaria, C.B. (1764). An Essay on Crimes and Punishments. Retrieved from, http://files.libertyfund.org/files/2193/Beccaria_1476_EBk_v6.0.pdf.
- Jones, J.M. (2016, October 25). U.S. Death Penalty Support at 60%. Retrieved from, http://www.gallup.com/poll/196676/death-penalty-support.aspx.
- Keedy, E.R. (1949, May). History of the Pennsylvania Statute Creating Degrees of Murder. Retrieved from, http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=8778&context=penn_law_review.
- Knowles, J. B. (2015). The abolition of the death penalty in the United Kingdom: how it happened and why it still matters. London: The Death Penalty Project.