Revisiting Death's Difference: The Philosophical Anthropology of the U.S. Death Penalty and the Impossibility of Capital Due Process
| Author | G.P. Marcar |
| Position | Ph.D., Centre for Theology and Public Issues, University of Otago, New Zealand |
| Pages | 181-208 |
Within the United States, legal challenges to the death penalty have held it to be a
“cruel and unusual” punishment (contrary to the Eighth Amendment) or arbitrarily
and unfairly enacted (contrary to the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments). The Eighth
Amendment requires that punishments not be disproportionate or purposeless. In
recent rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court has adopted a piecemeal approach to this
matter. In regard to particular classes of defendant, the Court has sought to rule
on whether death is likely to be a proportional and purposeful punishment, as well
as whether—given the condition of these defendants—such a determination can
Instead of asking whether, given the nature of certain categories of human defendant,
the death penalty is constitutional in their case, I will begin by asking what—given
the nature of the U.S. death penalty—one must believe about human beings for death
to be a proportionate punishment. From this, I will argue that to believe that these
further argued that the beliefs required for the U.S. death penalty’s proportional and
purposeful instigation (pursuant to the Eighth Amendment) are not congruent with
the demands of legal due process.
Capital Punishment, Proportionality, Eighth Amendment, Due Process, Death
Penalty, Philosophical Anthropology
© 2020 G.P. Marcar, published by Sciendo.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
A. The Severity of Death as a Penal Sentence ..................................
B. The Irrevocability of Death ..........................................................
C. Summary ......................................................................................
9 Br. J. Am. Leg. Studies (2020)
A. Deterrence ...................................................................................
B. Retribution ...................................................................................
..........................................................
2. The Weight of Death: An Especially Severe Punishment .............
3 The Weight of the State: An Especially Severe Punisher ..............
4. Summary
C. Incapacitation .............................................................................
1. The Court’s Jurisprudence of Dangerous Capital Defendants:
and ..................................................................
2. The Proportionality of Incapacitation ..........................................
D. Summary: Penal Goals and the Philosophical Anthropology of
Capital Punishment .....................................................................
182
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