Ancient Greece's Death Penalty Dilemma and Its Influence on Modern Society

摘要

"... The moral truth, based in the jury's intuition ... is that mysterious mix of reason and emotion that combines to determine whether a person really, not merely rationally, deserves to die." Abolitionists attack capital punishment as cruel. Its administration, they insist, is inconsistent, and the jurisprudence which supports it is incoherent. Furthermore, they claim, death as punishment is disproportionate to any crime and out of step with essential values which are at the core of a mature Western democracy. Their attack is substantive (the law cannot adequately define who deserves to die) and procedural (the process of deciding who lives or dies must, but cannot, simultaneously embrace the two core constitutional values of fairness and consistency). Every individual defendant must be treated as a unique human being and, at the same time, like cases must be treated alike.