Origins of the Death Penalty Debate in Britain and the US, 1725-1868

The death penalty is a highly topical issue in many parts of the world. There are a number of pending constitutional challenges to capital punishment in the USA, related to the execution of "retarded" persons and the appropriate permissible age for judicial killing. Also, the execution of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, has raised other issues to do with opening up executions to the public (in McVeigh's case, through closed-circuit television). Mass executions in China, well documented by Amnesty International, have also brought the issue to the forefront of international attention. With a "hanging president" in the White House, and the increasing use of the death penalty in southern states of the USA and elsewhere, the issue is likely to retain its topicality for years to come. The elements of the present-day debate are not much different from those voiced in former times. Indeed, the contents of this seven-volume collection of original writings demonstrate that little has changed in the arguments surrounding capital punishment over the past 175 years.
A list of the key features in the death penalty debate now, as then, includes the issues of deterrence, vengeance and human rights, judicial and state discretion in sentencing and the use of pardons, age limits and mental states of mind, the various costs involved in capital punishment and alternative penalties, the inhumanity of judicial execution and its dehumanizing consequences for society, the different modes of execution and the appropriateness of "public" executions. The original debate in Britain and America involved philosophers, theologians, clergymen, politicians, men of letters and literary figures, some of whom originated in other countries. Among the writers represented in this collection are Henry Fielding, Edmund Burke, Robespierre, William Paley, Jeremy Bentham, Samuel Romilly, Basil Montagu, James Mill, Gilbert Wakefield, Karl Marx, J.S. Mill and William Makepeace Thackeray.