The Death Penalty Abroad

Abstract

Up to approximately the First World War, the issues involved in the controversy over the death penalty were relatively clear and simple. On one side there was the camp of the abolitionists. They were the humanitarians, the liberals, the progressives. Their movement, started in its contemporary form by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, was intrinsically connected with the development of the ideologies of the western society of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their argument ran along very clear-cut lines: capital punishment is below human dignity, functionally it does not do enough good to justify itself, and it leads to evil consequences. Opposing the abolitionists were the conservatives, the old-fashioned, the less-educated people, who either did not worry about the executions of criminals or even felt that these were indispensable to keep the human race in line. Now the abolitionists, now the conservatives, had the upper hand; but on the whole, the abolitionists seem to have better expressed the spirit of the epoch, and step by step the number of capital offenses listed in the criminal codes, the number of death sentences imposed by the courts, and the number of executions actually performed steadily diminished in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The issue of capital punishment for so-called political offenses was also quite clear. Except for some debatable borderline cases, the distinction between a criminal act and a political offense was pretty well established and generally agreed upon. The abolitionists attempted, of course, to expand also into the area of political offenses, but although they were in all probability responsible here too for some decrease in executions, they found the governmental tendency to exterminate the opponents of its political power an especially tough nut to crack. As a result, the abolitionists concentrated on the ordinary crimes and partly closed their eyes to political executions, which, by the way, were not very frequent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries except for the outburst of the French Revolution. The abolitionists had a hard time also with offenses within the military machine of the state and offenses in wartime. Here, as in the case of the political offenses, they met with the hard fact that the military simply would not give up the death penalty, usually arguing that, since the military personnel is professionally exposed to the threat of death, no effective control is possible without a like threat. Likewise, in time of war, when martial law was introduced, the threat to the very existence of the state and the lives of its people was successfully employed 137