Robert Blecker, a pro­fes­sor at New York Law School, has writ­ten a new book sup­port­ing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, The Death of Punishment: Searching for Justice among the Worst of the Worst. Blecker urges read­ers to con­sid­er his ret­ribu­tivist argu­ment for the death penal­ty: ​“We ret­ribu­tivists view pun­ish­ment dif­fer­ent­ly,” he wrote. ​“We don’t pun­ish to pre­vent crime or remake crim­i­nals. We inflict pain – suf­fer­ing, dis­com­fort – to the degree they deserve to feel it.” He would impose the death penal­ty not only on some mur­der­ers, but also on cor­po­rate lead­ers respon­si­ble for the death of inno­cent peo­ple. On the oth­er hand, he would spare many among those now on death row because they are not the ​“worst of the worst.” Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School called the book ​“an elo­quent, unspar­ing, often coun­ter­in­tu­itive, and some­times painful med­i­ta­tion on why, whom, and how a decent soci­ety should decide to pun­ish, and what those ques­tions can teach us about uni­ver­sal truths of moral­i­ty and justice.”

(R. Blecker, ​“The Death of Punishment: Searching for Justice among the Worst of the Worst,” Palgrave MacMillan (2013); DPIC post­ed Nov. 15, 2013). See Books and Death Row.

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