Death Penalty

William S. Lear rael at zopyra.com
Sat Mar 6 06:45:30 PST 1999


On Friday, March 5, 1999 at 18:19:32 (-0500) Michael Hoover writes:
>...
>writing about US slavery, Tocqueville suggested that restraint in
>punishment extends as far as our sense of equality and no further...

Pulling back the historical thread just a bit further:

In the effort to find a substitute for the death penalty, he

[Jefferson] and the other revisors had chief recourse, not to

retaliation --- which actually was invoked in relatively few

cases --- but to public labor. This was to be performed on roads,

canals, and other public works; and he afterwards concluded that

it would not have reformed the offenders. When tried elsewhere

the experiment proved unsuccessful. The exhibition of criminals

as a public spectacle on the highroads with shaved heads and mean

clothing produced in them an abandonment of self-respect which

plunged them into the most desperate and hardened depravity.

---Dumas Malone, *Jefferson the Virginian* (Little, Brown and

Company: 1948, pp. 272-3).

Bill



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