NCJ Number
188444
Journal
Punishment and Society Volume: 3 Issue: 2 Dated: April 2001 Pages: 299-306
Date Published
April 2001
Length
8 pages
Annotation
This article reviews a book arguing in favor of the abolition of life imprisonment, with emphasis on Germany; the discussion noted that the book’s author, Hartmut-Michael Weber, is a German scholar who had an important part in the more political aspects of the movement to abolish life imprisonment.
Abstract
The review comments that the book covers the somewhat polemical debates about life imprisonment and reveals just how deeply these debates involve fundamental questions about the relationship between the individual and the government in a constitutional democracy. The discussion also commented that the volume’s great strength is the thoroughness with which the author analyzed the supposed constitutional basis of life imprisonment in Germany, although it also includes extensive reference to the position in other countries. The basic constitutional norm in Germany is the statement that human dignity is inviolable and the duty of all government authority is to respect and protect it. Weber concludes that lengthy terms of imprisonment often infringe human dignity to a constitutionally unacceptable extent and that the indeterminacy and the variations in the regimes to which lifers were subject made it particularly destructive of human dignity. Weber criticized the German law, the German definition of murder, and the traditional justifications for punishment used by the Federal Constitutional Court. Weber recommended that imprisonment of not more than 15 years replace life imprisonment for murder. This proposal did not address the related question of possible civil detention for truly dangerous offenders. Weber recognized that the proposal was infeasible politically. Nevertheless, the book is a blow against complacency and may encourage short-term reforms such as reducing the range of crimes for which life sentences can be imposed. List of cases and 13 references