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Against Capital Punishment develops an innovative argument against the death penalty that sidesteps questions about the morality of execution itself. Yost argues that the irrevocability of the death penalty calls for its abolition. In so doing, he explores the extent of legal institutions' responsibility to remedy their mistakes and solves the problems that sabotage other versions of procedural abolitionism.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Chapter One: Death and Retribution
- Chapter Two: The Necessity of Execution
- Chapter Three: The Irrevocability of Execution
- Chapter Four: The Argument for Abolition
- Chapter Five: The Prospects of the New Proceduralism
- References
About the author
Benjamin S. Yost is Professor of Philosophy, Adjunct at Cornell University.
Summary
The specter of procedural injustice motivates many popular and scholarly objections to capital punishment. So-called proceduralist arguments against the death penalty are attractive to death penalty abolitionists because they sidestep the controversies that bedevil moral critiques of execution. Proceduralists do not shoulder the burden of demonstrating that heinous murderers deserve a punishment less than death. However, proceduralist arguments often pay insufficient attention to the importance of punishment; many imply the highly contentious claim that no type of criminal sanction is legitimate.
In Against Capital Punishment, Benjamin S. Yost revitalizes the core of proceduralism both by examining the connection between procedural injustice and the impermissibility of capital punishment and by offering a comprehensive argument of his own which confronts proceduralism's most significant shortcomings. Yost is the first author to develop and defend the irrevocability argument against capital punishment, demonstrating that the irremediability of execution renders capital punishment impermissible. His contention is not that the act of execution is immoral, but rather that the possibility of irrevocable mistakes precludes the just administration of the death penalty.
Shoring up proceduralist arguments for the abolition of the death penalty, Against Capital Punishment carries with it implications not only for the continued use of the death penalty in the criminal justice system, but also for the structure and integrity of the system as a whole.
Additional text
The death penalty is the most severe punishment available for those countries, like the United States, that still retain it...Benjamin Yost's defense of procedural abolitionism opens a new, convincing front as to why all of us, including retributivists, should not support death as a punishment...Against Capital Punishment is more than just an excellent work developing to a greater extent a compelling proceduralist approach to abolition of capital punishment; it is a rigorously researched and comprehensive take on the justifiability of execution as punishment.
