7. The Other Death Penalty

2017 ◽  
pp. 167-186
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
The Other

At the Heart of the Death Penalty

2013 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peggy Kamuf
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western Tradition

Derrida's seminar The Death Penalty is to an important extent taken up with unpacking the significance of the fact (a ‘stupefying fact’, he calls it) that there is in our Western tradition no philosophy as such against the death penalty. This essay follows the seminar into the heart of its engagement with that legacy, where it traces out the condition of its own interested abolitionist stand. This condition is named ‘the heart of the other in me’, which is the pulse of every finitude, every ‘my’ life. It also gives the impulse in this essay to follow the thread of the ‘heart’ across the seminar's readings of Rousseau, Genet, Hugo and Camus.

Visual Perspective in Causal Attribution, Empathy and Attitude Change

2003 ◽  
Vol 93 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1035-1046 ◽  
Author(s):  
Özdem M. Önder ◽  
Bengi Öner-özkan
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Attitude Change ◽  
Causal Attribution ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Visual Perspective ◽  
Observer Bias

The aim of the present study was to test the effect of visual perspective on the actor–observer bias. For this aim, we examined the effects of different visual perspectives on individuals' external and internal attributions. In addition to this, we examined the presence or absence of an attitude change toward the death penalty due to participants' visual perspective. One week before the experiment, we measured the participants' attitudes toward the death penalty. Then, during the experiment, films produced by one of the authors of this study were shown to two separate groups of participants. There were two films, each film constituting one of the two levels of visual perception. The content of each film was the memories of a person who was given the death penalty for the murder of his own brother. Level of visual perception was manipulated by using different camera perspectives, one from the actor's point of view and the other from the observer's point of view. At the end of the experiment, participants' attitudes toward the death penalty were measured again.

What is the Nature of the Crime of the Delinquent Daughter in Deuteronomy 22:13-21? A Rejoinder to J. Fleishman's Suggestion

2009 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 446-459
Author(s):  
Meir Malul
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
The Other ◽  
Exact Nature ◽  
Previous Suggestion ◽  
Social Community ◽  
Legal Proceedings ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Law ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
The One

AbstractThe exact nature of the girl's crime in the law of the delinquent daughter in Deut 22:13-21 is examined, starting by a detailed critique of J. Fleishman's previous suggestion in this journal (vol. 58, pp. 191-210) to construe it in the light of the law of cursing the parents in Exod 21:17 and understand it as an innovation and restriction of the latter law. In his view, the girl's sin is tantamount to cursing her parents, which, like the sin of the glatton and drunkard son according to Deut 21: 18-21, meant the undermining of the parents' authority and status, for which both boy and girl deserved the death penalty. In the following critique, it is underlined that the girl's sin is, first, not one of omission but of commission, and, second, it is not against her parents but against her husband, who is also the one to initiate the legal proceedings. A new interpretation is suggested, according to which the girl's crime, defined in v. 21 as an act of and a deed of, consisted not only in concealing her previous loss of virginity from her husband, thus deceiving him and her parents, but also in duping her husband into committing a sin comparable to that of lying with a menstruating, and thus desolate, woman. Being deprived of virginity, and thus of the socially recognized status of a virgin, she became, like Tamar (2 Sam 13:20), “desolate, forlorn”, an unenviable state from which only her seducer/ravisher could redeem her (thus are the sense and goal of the laws of the seduced virgin in Exod 22:15-16 and Deut 22:28-29). Trying to dupe her husband into steping in and performing what custom and law dictated the other man—the seducer/ravisher—should have done, and thus to arrogate to herself a social status she did not deserve, was then tantamount to undermining social structure and striking at the fibers that constituted the essence and integrity of the social community (cf. Prov 30:21-23).

The Waltham Black Act: A Study of the Legislative Attitude Towards Crime in the Eighteenth Century

1945 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Radzinowicz
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Large Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Robin Hood ◽  
Accurate Knowledge ◽  
Guiding Principles ◽  
Almost All

In 1723 a statute was enacted (9 Geo. I, c. 22) bearing the following title: ‘An Act for the more effectual punishing wicked and evil disposed Persons going armed in Disguise, and doing Injuries and Violences to the Persons and Properties of His Majesty's Subjects, and for the more speedy bringing the Offenders to Justice.’ This statute is commonly known as the Waltham Black Act—a name indicative of the local circumstances which led to its being passed. According to Blackstone, the statute was enacted to stop the depredations which were being committed near Waltham, in Hampshire, by persons in disguise or with their faces blacked; he also observes that the technique of these offenders, who operated in the forests of Waltham, seemed to have been modelled on the criminal activities of the famous band of Roberdsmen, or followers of Robert, or Robin, Hood, who committed great outrages in the reign of Richard the First on the border of England and Scotland. An interesting reference to the Waltham Black Act occurs in Gilbert White's ‘The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne in the County of Southampton,’ and it is significant that while Blackstone cautiously refrains from expressing any opinion on this statute, White says that it is ‘severe and sanguinary’ and that ‘it comprehends more felonies than any law that ever was framed before.’ Actually, no other single statute passed during the eighteenth century equalled 9 Geo. I, c. 22, in severity, and none appointed the punishment of death in so many cases. The Waltham Black Act may, in fact, be looked upon as a kind of ‘ideological index’ to the large body of laws based on the death penalty which were in force in England at the end of the eighteenth, and the beginning of the nineteenth, centuries. The main features peculiar to this Act reappear, sometimes in a modified form, in almost all the other capital statutes of the period. Thus, an accurate knowledge of the Waltham Black Act is essential if the structure and guiding principles of the capital enactments in general are to be understood; moreover, the fact that the struggle for the repeal of this extraordinary statute was both intense and prolonged, further enhances the symptomatic importance of the Act, which might otherwise seem to be but an obscure enactment designed to meet a purely local emergency.

scholarly journals RIGHT TO LIFE IN HUNGARY AND IN THE EU: THE EVER-TROUBLESOME ISSUE OF ABORTION

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 83-90
Author(s):  
Ferenc Zoltán Simó
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Termination Of Pregnancy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Right To Life ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Modern Sense ◽  
The Eu

In relation to one of the human rights, right to life, most frequently there are, at least, two challenging fields might be brought up, one is death penalty, and the other is termination of pregnancy or abortion. If one intends to comprehend how abortion has been dealt with historically in the western legal tradition one must first come to terms with two quite different but interrelated historical trajectories, the ancient Judeo-Christian condemnation of prenatal homicide as a wrong justifying retribution; and, there is the juristic definition of "crime" in the modern sense of the word.

Undoing Death I

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian O'Donnell
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
The Other ◽  
Average Period

Capital punishment has been described as a ‘lottery’, implying that it operates at random; but in Ireland a pattern can be discerned. Murderers who avoided execution fell into one of six categories, with a clear gradient in how sympathetically they were viewed, as indicated by the duration of their coercive confinement and the likelihood that mercy would be recommended. At one end of the scale were those who destroyed an unwanted child, 92 per cent of whom aroused the sympathy of judge and jury and who were denied their liberty for 44 months, on average. At the other extreme were those whose treatment was capricious, only 20 per cent of whom received recommendations to mercy and whose average period of coercive confinement was 115 months. This chapter explores cases where the death penalty was imposed for the murder of an infant (usually, but not always, by the mother), romantic entanglements that had lethally soured, and sexual violence resulting in death.

Violence and Hyperbole

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Naas
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
The Other ◽  
Subsequent Work ◽  
History Of ◽  
Philosophical Texts ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

The aim of this essay is to understand the underlying motivation behind Derrida’s initial objections to Foucault in his 1963 “Cogito and the History of Madness” and the way these objections anticipate so much of Derrida’s subsequent work. Beyond a disagreement over how to read a crucial moment in Descartes’ Meditations regarding the Cogito’s relation to madness, the “Cogito” essay provides a full-fledged theory of the relationship between history, language, and reason, on the one hand, and madness, silence, and death, on the other. Only through understanding this configuration is it possible to understand why Derrida would call Foucault’s The History of Madness not just a mistaken or misguided text but a “totalitarian” one. After outlining the reasons for Derrida’s strident critique of Foucault’s work on the basis of this underlying opposition between history and madness or reason and silence, Naas demonstrate how this same configuration is at work in early texts such as “Violence and Metaphysics,” right up through Derrida’s final seminars on The Beast and the Sovereign and, especially, The Death Penalty. Naas concludes by pointing out that while Derrida’s theoretical questions were always very different than Foucault’s, both thinkers ended up, curiously, on the same side in their critique of today’s carceral system and its forms of punishment. Only by taking into account both the similarities and the differences between Derrida and Foucault, in both their political positions and their philosophical texts, can we today really “do justice” to the history of their infamous debate.

It Serves you Right

Philosophy ◽  
1962 ◽  
Vol 37 (142) ◽  
pp. 293-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. R. Manser
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
The Other ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Good Starting Point

In this paper I want to examine the notion of desert, which seems to have been neglected by contemporary philosophers. Apartfrom its interest in its own right, it is important to be clear about the meaning of the word if there is to be any understanding of the idea of punishment. And that we are confused over the whole issue of punishment is obvious both from the remarks of professional philosophers and from the comments of the ‘man in the street’. Because of this confusion, the discussion of any actual punishment seems to take place between two parties who never get to grips with the arguments of the other, as in the whole debate over the death penalty. To one set of people, it is obvious that the retention of hanging depends to a large extent on the question of its effectiveness in deterring murderers; to another it is equally obvious that the murderer ‘deserves’ to hang, and that there is no more to be said about the matter. Capital punishment is not a good starting-point for a discussion of punishment in general, for death is clearly unique among penalties; in addition, the topic gives rise inevitably to much sentimentality and resulting muddle-headedness.

scholarly journals “On the other hand the accused is a woman…”: Women and the Death Penalty in Post-Independence Ireland

2017 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynsey Black
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
The Other ◽  
Advanced Age ◽  
Considerable Time ◽  
Domestic Servant ◽  
Other Hand

Hannah Flynn was sentenced to death on February 27, 1924. She had been convicted of the murder of Margaret O'Sullivan, her former employer. Hannah worked for Margaret and her husband Daniel as a domestic servant, an arrangement that ended with bad feeling on both sides when Hannah was dismissed. On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1923, while Daniel was at church, Hannah returned to her former place of work, and killed 50-year-old Margaret with a hatchet. At her trial, the jury strongly recommended her to mercy, and sentence of death was subsequently commuted to penal servitude for life. Hannah spent almost two decades in Mountjoy Prison in Dublin, from where she was conditionally released on October 23, 1942 to the Good Shepherd Magdalen Laundry in Limerick. Although there is no precise date available for Hannah's eventual release from there, it is known that “a considerable time later,” and at a very advanced age, she was released from the laundry to a hospital, where she died. The case of Hannah Flynn, and the use of the Good Shepherd Laundry, represents an explicitly gendered example of the death penalty regime in Ireland following Independence in 1922, particularly the double-edged sword of mercy as it was experienced by condemned women.

scholarly journals Long-Term Sentence in the Laws of the Former SFRY and Contemporary European Criminal Law

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Simović ◽  
Vladimir Simović
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
The Other ◽  
Criminal Sanction ◽  
Prison Sentence ◽  
Life Imprisonment ◽  
Conditional Release ◽  
European Criminal Law

Life imprisonment is the term for a prison sentence based on which a convicted person remains in prison for their whole life. After the death penalty, it is the severest criminal sanction. Many countries have introduced it in their legislation as a substitute for the death penalty. On the other hand, many legislations have, along with the long-term sentence, introduced the possibility of the convicts’ release, most often conditional release. From the second half of the 20th century onwards, life imprisonment as well as the death penalty has most often been regarded an inhumane and inefficient sanction, given that people sentenced to life imprisonment are considered permanently excluded from society, that is, losing any kind of interest in rehabilitation. This paper analyses the issues related to long-term sentences - life imprisonment in the countries of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) and in the contemporary European criminal law.

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