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: “The execution of
the innocent believed guilty is a miscarriage of justice that must be opposed
whenever detected. But such miscarriage of justice do not warrant abolition at
the death penalty. Unless the moral drawbacks of an activity practice, which
include the possible death of innocent lives that might be saved by it, the
activity is warranted. Most human activities like medicine, manufacturing,
automobile, and air traffic, sports, not to mention wars and revolutions, cause
death of innocent bystanders. Nevertheless, advantages outweigh the
disadvantages, human activities including the penal system with all its
punishments are morally justified.” – written in 1982
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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