The Law’s Torturous Path
Welcome Greetings
Introductory Remarks - Prof. Paolo Carta
The use of capital punishment, once the standard punishment around the globe for murder and other felonies, was questioned by English and American Quakers in the seventeenth century for non-homicide offenses such as theft. However, not until the publication of Cesare Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene (1764)—a book that, in the midst of the Enlightenment, criticized both torture and the death penalty—did the world’s anti-death penalty movement (including for the crime of murder) gain traction. This presentation will discuss the law’s torturous path toward universal abolition of the death penalty—from barbaric methods of executions and judicial torture in medieval times and the widespread use of mandatory death sentences to the human rights advocacy of Amnesty International and other NGOs, the adoption of the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and the resolutions of the United Nations calling for a global moratorium on the use of executions. While Beccaria wrote about the death penalty and torture in separate chapters of his popular book, reprinted in multiple editions and translated into French and then into English as An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (1767), the death penalty—when properly conceived in the modern era—should be seen as a form of torture because an immutable characteristic of capital punishment is that it involves the use of credible and torturous death threats. Capital charges, death sentences and executions inflict trauma and severe pain and suffering, and this presentation will argue that capital punishment should be classified under the rubric of torture and be strictly prohibited by international law.
John Bessler - Professor of Law, University of Baltimore School of Law
John D. Bessler is a Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law and an Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. He is the author of multiple books on capital punishment, including The Death Penalty as Torture: From the Dark Ages to Abolition (2017), Cruel and Unusual: The American Death Penalty and the Founders’ Eighth Amendment (2012), and (as editor) U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s Against the Death Penalty (2016). His book about the influence of the Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria, The Birth of American Law: An Italian Philosopher and the American Revolution (2014), won the prestigious Scribes Book Award, an annual award given out since 1961 by the American Society of Legal Writers for “the best work of legal scholarship published during the previous year.” He is also the author of an English-language biography of Beccaria, The Celebrated Marquis: An Italian Noble and the Making of the Modern World (2018). He has also taught at the University of Minnesota Law School, the George Washington University Law School, Rutgers Law School, and the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. In 2018, he was a visiting scholar at the Human Rights Center of the University of Minnesota Law School and received the University System of Maryland Board of Regents’ Faculty Award for Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity.
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