IN MEMORIAM: Hugo Adam Bedau

Long-time death penal­ty schol­ar Hugo Adam Bedau died on August 13, 2012 . Dr. Bedau had been the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, and is best known for his work on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Dr. Bedau fre­quent­ly tes­ti­fied about the death penal­ty before the U.S. Congress and many state leg­is­la­tures. He authored sev­er­al books about the death penal­ty, includ­ing The Death Penalty in America (1964; 4^th edi­tion, 1997), The Courts, the Constitution, and Capital Punishment (1977), Death is Different (1987), and Killing as Punishment (2004), and co-authored In Spite of Innocence (1992). This last book, writ­ten with Prof. Michael Radelet of the University of Colorado and Constance Putnam (Dr. Bedau’s wife), con­tained one of the best ear­ly col­lec­tions of peo­ple who had been wrong­ly con­vict­ed in death penal­ty cas­es. In 1997, Bedau received the August Vollmer Award of the American Society of Criminology, and in 2003 he received the Roger Baldwin Award from the ACLU of Massachusetts. Dr. Bedau was a found­ing mem­ber of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

(DPIC Posted, August 13, 2012; pho­to from the Tufts University Department of Philosophy).