Becarria - "On Crimes and Punishments"

Caesare Beccaria – On Crimes and Punishments

Thesis: Beccaria in On Crimes and Punishments criticizes the unjust nature of the criminal penal system.

True relations between sovereigns and their subjects, and between nations

· Commerce – “reanimated” = nations are spurred by a “tacit rivalry of industriousness”

o Praises this competitiveness as “most human and truly worthy of rational beings”

Addresses the ignorance of criminal procedures – “very few persons have studied and fought against the cruelty of punishments and the irregularities of criminal procedures”

Proper punishment of crimes

· Questions the utility and necessity for things such as the death penalty, torture, etc.

· “by defending the rights of man and of unconquerable truth, I should help to save from the spasm and agonies of death some wretched victim of tyranny or of no less fatal ignorance, the thanks and tears of one innocent mortal…would console me for the contempt of all mankind”

Torture

· practiced by most nations during a trial of the accused

· “no man can be called guilty before a judge has sentenced him”

o cannot inflict punishment on a citizen without the certainty of his innocence

· “the impression of pain may become so great that, filling the entire sensory capacity of the tortured person, it leaves him free only to choose what for the moment is the shortest way to escape from pain”

· Argues that torture places the innocent in a worse situation than the guilty