NCJ Number
198771
Journal
Criminal Justice Ethics Volume: 21 Issue: 2 Dated: Summer/Fall 2002 Pages: 12-21
Date Published
2002
Length
10 pages
Annotation
This article discusses retribution and its failure to justify the use of death as punishment.
Abstract
The retributivist defender seeks to defend the death penalty by claiming that an offender deserves to suffer precisely the treatment inflicted on the victim. Because this country is not prepared to rape the rapist and assault the assailant, this theory is absurd and morally repugnant. The retributivist defender seeks to find the “moral equivalent” of the offender’s criminal act, ruling out immoral acts and restricting available penalties to morally acceptable forms of punishment. Whatever method the moral equivalence theorist uses to eliminate such acts as torture could also be used to eliminate death. Another way to justify the death penalty is to combine the basic retributivist approach with a consensual theory of punishment. Criminals would be subject to an agreed upon roster of deserved penalties, allocated according to general moral principles they endorse. It would not be necessary to justify the death penalty since a treatment to which an offender has himself consented is at least presumptively morally acceptable. Another version of conventional retributivism views the offender as agreeing to norms that govern the institution under which he is punished. There is reason to believe that rational individuals concerned to protect their bodily security would proceed according to a system of rights to bodily integrity, rather than independently adopting measures that appear to increase security directly. It is the desire to protect this system of rights that lies behind the retributivist’s conception of punishment in the first place. 17 notes