Cruel and Unusual: The American Death Penalty and the Founders' Eighth Amendment

by John D. Bessler

Overview

The conventional wisdom is that the founders were avid death penalty supporters. In this fascinating and insightful examination of America’s Eighth Amendment, law professor John D. Bessler explodes this myth and shows the founders’ conflicting and ambivalent views on capital punishment. Cruel and Unusual takes the reader back in time to show how the indiscriminate use of executions gave way to a more enlightened approach—one that has been evolving ever since. While shedding important new light on the U.S. Constitution’s “cruel and unusual punishments” clause, Bessler explores the influence of Cesare Beccaria’s essay, On Crimes and Punishments, on the Founders’ views, and the transformative properties of the Fourteenth Amendment, which made the Bill of Rights applicable to the states. After critiquing the U.S. Supreme Court’s existing case law, this essential volume argues that America’s death penalty—a vestige of a bygone era in which ear cropping and other gruesome corporal punishments were thought acceptable—should be declared unconstitutional.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555537173
Publisher:	Northeastern University Press
Publication date:	01/01/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	464
File size:	981 KB

About the Author

JOHN D. BESSLER is an associate professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law and an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
In Cold Blood
On Crimes and Punishments
The Abolitionists
America’s Founding Fathers
The Eighth Amendment
Capital Punishment in America
The Road to Abolition
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Sister Helen Prejean

“A searing indictment of capital punishment, this pioneering history of the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause is destined to reframe America’s death penalty debate. As a definitive account of the Eighth Amendment’s origins and the Founding Fathers’ own ambivalent views on executions, it will forever change our perceptions of cruelty and penal reform in the founding era. This book, which exposes the brutality of state-sanctioned killing, is a must-read.”

From the Publisher

"A searing indictment of capital punishment, this pioneering history of the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause is destined to reframe America's death penalty debate. As a definitive account of the Eighth Amendment's origins and the Founding Fathers' own ambivalent views on executions, it will forever change our perceptions of cruelty and penal reform in the founding era. This book, which exposes the brutality of state-sanctioned killing, is a must-read."—Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States and The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions

Editorial Reviews

"[E]xcellent history. . . . So how does a society that shed many of its old cruelties — slavery, floggings, lynchings, executions of the criminally insane — still cling to the ultimate punishment? This is what Mr. Bessler's book seeks to answer, and in so doing, it argues persuasively that the death penalty, infested with randomness and bias, is a violation of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments."—Baltimore Sun

“Bessler offers a thought-provoking examination of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment” in the ongoing debate over the constitutionality of capital punishment. . . . As a starting point for reasoned discourse, this is a remarkably thorough, compelling achievement. . . . Highly recommended.”—Choice

“Cruel and Unusual provides a wealth of interesting information.” —Journal of American History

“Bessler sees three paths to abolition: legislative repeal, judicial abolition, and disuse, and maintains that all three are presently at work, and that it is just a matter of time before the United States decides, like Justice Harry Blackmun did prior to his retire- ment from the Supreme Court, that it “shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death.”—Political Science Quarterly

"A searing indictment of capital punishment, this pioneering history of the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause is destined to reframe America's death penalty debate. As a definitive account of the Eighth Amendment's origins and the Founding Fathers' own ambivalent views on executions, it will forever change our perceptions of cruelty and penal reform in the founding era. This book, which exposes the brutality of state-sanctioned killing, is a must-read."—Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States and The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions

From the Publisher