The final chapter illuminates the book’s most significant implications. It first highlights the project’s improvements on extant versions of proceduralism. Targeting both legal and philosophical proceduralist critiques, it recounts how they fall prey to the retributivist challenge and unwittingly entail wholesale abolition. The procedural abolitionism developed here, it turns out, has no such shortcomings. The second part of the chapter assesses the book’s contributions to the constitutional debate over capital punishment, analyzing Judge Rakoff’s opinion in United States v. Quinones. Rakoff holds that the specter of irrevocable mistake renders capital punishment unconstitutional on substantive due process grounds; this ruling suggests that substantive due process furnishes the vehicle by which proceduralism could make inroads with a future Supreme Court. However, Quinones was overturned, mainly because its emphasis on error correction conflicts with the hallowed value of finality. Chapter 5 argues that the associated concerns do not generate reasons to reject abolitionism.
