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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