Professor John Bessler Traces Italian Philosopher’s Abolitionist Legacy in New Book and Article

In 1764, Italian philoso­pher Cesare Beccaria wrote the trea­tise, Dei delit­ti e delle pene, which author John Bessler (pic­tured) says spawned glob­al move­ments for fair and pro­por­tion­al pun­ish­ment and against prac­tices such as tor­ture and the death penal­ty. Beccaria’s book was a best-sell­er that swept across Europe and, trans­lat­ed into English in 1767 as An Essay on Crimes and Punishments, into the American colonies, shap­ing the beliefs of America’s found­ing fathers, and influ­enc­ing lead­ers, rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies, and law reformers. 

In two recent pub­li­ca­tions, Bessler — a law pro­fes­sor and author of numer­ous books on the death penal­ty—traces the last­ing influ­ence of the 18^th-cen­tu­ry Italian noble­man and describes how Beccaria’s advo­ca­cy of equal treat­ment under the law and his pow­er­ful oppo­si­tion to tor­ture and the death penal­ty remains rel­e­vant today and has inspired an inter­na­tion­al move­ment that, he says, now ​“involv[es] scores of high­ly respect­ed anti-death penal­ty activists and organizations.” 

Bessler’s lat­est book, The Celebrated Marquis, takes its title from a com­pli­ment giv­en to Beccaria by the del­e­gates of the Continental Congress. In it, Bessler describes how Beccaria’s ideals have tak­en root in the U.S. and shaped pro­gres­sive crim­i­nal jus­tice reforms across a span of 250 years. His arti­cle, The Abolitionist Movement Comes of Age, pub­lished in the win­ter 2018 issue of the Montana Law Review, chron­i­cles Beccaria’s his­tor­i­cal impact on efforts to abol­ish the death penal­ty across the globe. 

“There was a time when death sen­tences and exe­cu­tions were almost uni­ver­sal­ly embraced through­out the world and when the pun­ish­ment of death was the manda­to­ry pun­ish­ment for a wide array of felonies,” Bessler writes. ​“That has large­ly changed, with those changes in law and prac­tice tak­ing place in many nations.” 

The death-penal­ty debate, Bessler writes, has trans­formed over the cen­turies ​“from one that orig­i­nal­ly focused on absolute pow­er, the divine right of kings, and the assert­ed right of mon­archs to take human life with impuni­ty, to one focused on whether it vio­lates basic or fun­da­men­tal human rights for the state to kill indi­vid­ual offend­ers.” Comparing it to the anti-slav­ery move­ment in the 19^th cen­tu­ry, Bessler says ​“today’s glob­al anti-death penal­ty move­ment … has final­ly come into its own on the inter­na­tion­al stage.” Looking for­ward, he says, one can see a day in the not too dis­tant future in which there is a peremp­to­ry inter­na­tion­al norm against exe­cu­tions and the death penal­ty itself joins tor­ture as a pro­hib­it­ed international practice.