The Death of Punishment: Searching for Justice Among the Worst of the Worst

Opponents of capital punishment will find this treatise unsettling, if not outright maddening. Blecker, a professor at New York Law School, makes his case for an ethics of retributive punishment—a proportional “eye for an eye”—but ends up getting bogged down in tangential, and occasionally disingenuous, arguments about the current state of the criminal justice system. Blecker notes discrepancies in treatment between “the worst of the worst” and others serving life, or even death sentences, demonstrating that life without parole is not always the harsh sentence many assume. But Blecker is dismissive of abolitionists’ criticisms, even stating that it’s worth the risk of executing the innocent in the pursuit of “the near certainty of justice.” His proposal for Permanent Punitive Segregation—a sentence that would deprive the worst of the worst any pleasures in order to make their time behind bars oppressive—is one that Connecticut has adopted and that other jurisdictions would do well to consider, he says. Blecker’s potentially sympathetic argument about the merits of retributive punishment for mankind’s “monsters” gets lost amid his continual attempts repudiate those who think otherwise. (Nov.)