An A.C.L.U Demon, Hugo Adam Bedau,
died on this date, August 13, 2012. Although he was a staunch opponent of the
death penalty, there were several things he did say that were in favor of
capital punishment. We will post one of his quotes here.
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Hugo Adam
Bedau
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QUOTE: “Most
people have a natural fear of death- it’s a trait man have to think about what
will happen before we act. If we don’t think about it consciously, we will
think about it unconsciously. Think- if every murderer who killed someone died
instantly, the homicide rate would be very low because no one likes to die. We
cannot do this, but if the Justice system can make it more swift and severe, we
could change the laws to make capital punishment faster and make appeals a
shorter process. The death penalty is important because it could save the lives
of thousands of potential victims who are at stake.”
AUTHOR: Hugo Adam Bedau (September 23, 1926 – August 13, 2012) was the Austin
B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Tufts University, and is best
known for his work on capital punishment. He has been called a "leading
anti-death-penalty scholar" by Stuart Taylor Jr., who has quoted Bedau as
saying "I'll let the criminal justice system execute all the McVeighs they
can capture, provided they'd sentence to prison all the people who are not like
McVeigh."
Bedau gained his PhD from Harvard University in 1961 and subsequently
taught at Dartmouth College, Princeton University and Reed College before
joining Tufts in 1966. He retired in 1999. Bedau was a founder of the National
Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and served many years on its board of
directors, including several as chairman. He was a member of the American Civil
Liberties Union, for whom he has written on the death penalty.
He is author of The Death Penalty in America (1st edition, 1964; 4th
edition, 1997), The Courts, the Constitution, and Capital Punishment (1977),
Death is Different (1987), and Killing as Punishment (2004), and co-author of
In Spite of Innocence (1992). On the occasion of Bedau's retirement, Norman
Daniels said of The Death Penalty in America: "It is the premier example
in this century of the systematic application of academic philosophical skills
to a practical issue, and the flood of work in practical ethics that has
followed can rightfully cite Hugo's work as its starting point."
Bedau also published important work on the theory of civil disobedience.
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