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| John Stuart Mill |
Does fining a criminal show want of respect for property, or imprisoning him, for personal freedom? Just as unreasonable is it to think that to take the life of a man who has taken that of another is to show want of regard for human life. We show, on the contrary, most emphatically our regard for it, by the adoption of a rule that he who violates that right in another forfeits it for himself, and that while no other crime that he can commit deprives him of his right to live, this shall.AUTHOR: John Stuart Mill, FRSE (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873) was a British philosopher, political economist and civil servant. He was an influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy. He has been called "the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century". Mill's conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham. Hoping to remedy the problems found in an inductive approach to science, such as confirmation bias, he clearly set forth the premises of falsification as the key component in the scientific method. Mill was also a Member of Parliament and an important figure in liberal political philosophy.
a speech
against the bill Capital Punishment within Prisons meant to abolish the
death penalty. Given in the House of Commons on 21 April 1868.
… It
would be a great satisfaction to me if I were able to support this Motion. It
is always a matter of regret to me to find myself, on a public question,
opposed to those who are called—sometimes in the way of honour, and sometimes
in what is intended for ridicule—the philanthropists. Of all persons who take
part in public affairs, they are those for whom, on the whole, I feel the
greatest amount of respect; for their characteristic is, that they devote their
time, their labour, and much of their money to objects purely public, with a
less admixture of either personal or class selfishness, than any other class of
politicians whatever. On almost all the great questions, scarcely any
politicians are so steadily and almost uniformly to be found on the side of
right; and they seldom err, but by an exaggerated application of some just and
highly important principle.
On the
very subject that is now occupying us we all know what signal service they have
rendered. It is through their efforts that our criminal laws—which within my
memory hanged people for stealing in a dwelling house to the value of 40s.-laws
by virtue of which rows of human beings might be seen suspended in front of Newgate
by those who ascended or descended Ludgate
Hill—have so greatly relaxed their most revolting and most impolitic
ferocity, that aggravated murder is now practically the only crime which is
punished with death by any of our lawful tribunals; and we are even now
deliberating whether the extreme penalty should be retained in that solitary
case. This vast gain, not only to humanity, but to the ends of penal justice,
we owe to the philanthropists; and if they are mistaken, as I cannot but think
they are, in the present instance, it is only in not perceiving the right time
and place for stopping in a career hitherto so eminently beneficial. Sir, there
is a point at which, I conceive, that career ought to stop.
When
there has been brought home to any one, by conclusive evidence, the greatest
crime known to the law; and when the attendant circumstances suggest no
palliation of the guilt, no hope that the culprit may even yet not be unworthy
to live among mankind, nothing to make it probable that the crime was an
exception to his general character rather than a consequence of it, then I
confess it appears to me that to deprive the criminal of the life of which he
has proved himself to be unworthy—solemnly to blot him out from the fellowship
of mankind and from the catalogue of the living—is the most appropriate as it
is certainly the most impressive, mode in which society can attach to so great
a crime the penal consequences which for the security of life it is
indispensable to annex to it. I defend this penalty, when confined to atrocious
cases, on the very ground on which it is commonly attacked—on that of humanity
to the criminal; as beyond comparison the least cruel mode in which it is
possible adequately to deter from the crime.
If, in
our horror of inflicting death, we endeavour to devise some punishment for the
living criminal which shall act on the human mind with a deterrent force at all
comparable to that of death, we are driven to inflictions less severe indeed in
appearance, and therefore less efficacious, but far more cruel in reality. Few,
I think, would venture to propose, as a punishment for aggravated murder, less
than imprisonment with hard labor for life; that is the fate to which a
murderer would be consigned by the mercy which shrinks from putting him to
death. But has it been sufficiently considered what sort of a mercy this is,
and what kind of life it leaves to him? If, indeed, the punishment is not
really inflicted—if it becomes the sham which a few years ago such punishments
were rapidly becoming—then, indeed, its adoption would be almost tantamount to
giving up the attempt to repress murder altogether. But if it really is what it
professes to be, and if it is realized in all its rigour by the popular imagination,
as it very probably would not be, but as it must be if it is to be efficacious,
it will be so shocking that when the memory of the crime is no longer fresh,
there will be almost insuperable difficulty in executing it. What comparison
can there really be, in point of severity, between consigning a man to the
short pang of a rapid death, and immuring him in a living tomb, there to linger
out what may be a long life in the hardest and most monotonous toil, without
any of its alleviations or rewards—debarred from all pleasant sights and
sounds, and cut off from all earthly hope, except a slight mitigation of bodily
restraint, or a small improvement of diet? Yet even such a lot as this, because
there is no one moment at which the suffering is of terrifying intensity, and,
above all, because it does not contain the element, so imposing to the
imagination, of the unknown, is universally reputed a milder punishment than
death—stands in all codes as a mitigation of the capital penalty, and is
thankfully accepted as such. For it is characteristic of all punishments which
depend on duration for their efficacy—all, therefore, which are not corporal or
pecuniary—that they are more rigorous than they seem; while it is, on the
contrary, one of the strongest recommendations a punishment can have, that it
should seem more rigorous than it is; for its practical power depends far less
on what it is than on what it seems.
There is
not, I should think, any human infliction which makes an impression on the
imagination so entirely out of proportion to its real severity as the
punishment of death. The punishment must be mild indeed which does not add more
to the sum of human misery than is necessarily or directly added by the
execution of a criminal. As my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton [Charles
Gilpin] has himself remarked, the most that human laws can do to anyone in
the matter of death is to hasten it; the man would have died at any rate; not
so very much later, and on the average, I fear, with a considerably greater
amount of bodily suffering. Society is asked, then, to denude itself of an
instrument of punishment which, in the grave cases to which alone it is
suitable, effects its purposes at a less cost of human suffering than any
other; which, while it inspires more terror, is less cruel in actual fact than
any punishment that we should think of substituting for it. My hon. Friend says
that it does not inspire terror, and that experience proves it to be a failure.
But the influence of a punishment is not to be estimated by its effect on
hardened criminals. Those whose habitual way of life keeps them, so to speak,
at all times within sight of the gallows, do grow to care less about it; as, to
compare good things with bad, an old soldier is not much affected by the chance
of dying in battle.
I can
afford to admit all that is often said about the indifference of professional
criminals to the gallows. Though of that indifference one-third is probably
bravado and another third confidence that they shall have the luck to escape,
it is quite probable that the remaining third is real. But the efficacy of a
punishment which acts principally through the imagination, is chiefly to be
measured by the impression it makes on those who are still innocent; by the
horror with which it surrounds the first promptings of guilt; the restraining
influence it exercises over the beginning of the thought which, if indulged,
would become a temptation; the check which it exerts over the graded declension
towards the state—never suddenly attained—in which crime no longer revolts, and
punishment no longer terrifies. As for what is called the failure of death
punishment, who is able to judge of that? We partly know who those are whom it
has not deterred; but who is there who knows whom it has deterred, or how many
human beings it has saved who would have lived to be murderers if that awful
association had not been thrown round the idea of murder from their earliest
infancy?
Let us
not forget that the most imposing fact loses its power over the imagination if
it is made too cheap. When a punishment fit only for the most atrocious crimes
is lavished on small offences until human feeling recoils from it, then,
indeed, it ceases to intimidate, because it ceases to be believed in. The
failure of capital punishment in cases of theft is easily accounted for; the
thief did not believe that it would be inflicted. He had learnt by experience
that jurors would perjure themselves rather than find him guilty; that Judges
would seize any excuse for not sentencing him to death, or for recommending him
to mercy; and that if neither jurors nor Judges were merciful, there were still
hopes from an authority above both. When things had come to this pass it was
high time to give up the vain attempt. When it is impossible to inflict a
punishment, or when its infliction becomes a public scandal, the idle threat
cannot too soon disappear from the statute book. And in the case of the host of
offences which were formerly capital, I heartily rejoice that it did become impracticable
to execute the law. If the same state of public feeling comes to exist in the
case of murder; if the time comes when jurors refuse to find a murderer guilty;
when Judges will not sentence him to death, or will recommend him to mercy; or
when, if juries and Judges do not flinch from their duty, Home Secretaries,
under pressure of deputations and memorials, shrink from theirs, and the threat
becomes, as it became in the other cases, a mere brutum fulmen; then,
indeed, it may become necessary to do in this case what has been done in
those—to abrogate the penalty. That time may come—my hon. Friend thinks that it
has nearly come. I hardly know whether he lamented it or boasted of it; but he
and his Friends are entitled to the boast; for if it comes it will be their
doing, and they will have gained what I cannot but call a fatal victory, for
they will have achieved it by bringing about, if they will forgive me for
saying so, an enervation, an effeminancy, in the general mind of the country.
For what else than effeminancy is it to be so much more shocked by taking a
man's life than by depriving him of all that makes life desirable or valuable?
Is death,
then, the greatest of all earthly ills? Usque adeone mori miserum est?
Is it, indeed, so dreadful a thing to die? Has it not been from of old one
chief part of a manly education to make us despise death—teaching us to account
it, if an evil at all, by no means high in the list of evils; at all events, as
an inevitable one, and to hold, as it were, our lives in our hands, ready to be
given or risked at any moment, for a sufficiently worthy object? I am sure that
my hon. Friends know all this as well, and have as much of all these feelings
as any of the rest of us; possibly more. But I cannot think that this is likely
to be the effect of their teaching on the general mind. I cannot think that the
cultivating of a peculiar sensitiveness of conscience on this one point, over
and above what results from the general cultivation of the moral sentiments, is
permanently consistent with assigning in our own minds to the fact of death no
more than the degree of relative importance which belongs to it among the other
incidents of our humanity. The men of old cared too little about death, and
gave their own lives or took those of others with equal recklessness. Our
danger is of the opposite kind, lest we should be so much shocked by death, in
general and in the abstract, as to care too much about it in individual cases,
both those of other people and our own, which call for its being risked. And I
am not putting things at the worst, for it is proved by the experience of other
countries that horror of the executioner by no means necessarily implies horror
of the assassin. The stronghold, as we all know, of hired assassination in the
18th century was Italy; yet it is said that in some of the Italian populations
the infliction of death by sentence of law was in the highest degree offensive
and revolting to popular feeling.
Much has
been said of the sanctity of human life, and the absurdity of supposing that we
can teach respect for life by ourselves destroying it. But I am surprised at
the employment of this argument, for it is one which might be brought against
any punishment whatever. It is not human life only, not human life as such,
that ought to be sacred to us, but human feelings. The human capacity of
suffering is what we should cause to be respected, not the mere capacity of
existing. And we may imagine somebody asking how we can teach people not to
inflict suffering by ourselves inflicting it? But to this I should answer—all
of us would answer—that to deter by suffering from inflicting suffering is not
only possible, but the very purpose of penal justice.
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| [PHOTO SOURCE: http://victimsfamiliesforthedeathpenalty.blogspot.com.au/2015/04/john-stuart-mills-quote-in-favor-of.html] |
Does fining
a criminal show want of respect for property, or imprisoning him, for personal
freedom? Just as unreasonable is it to think that to take the life of a man who
has taken that of another is to show want of regard for human life. We show, on
the contrary, most emphatically our regard for it, by the adoption of a rule
that he who violates that right in another forfeits it for himself, and that
while no other crime that he can commit deprives him of his right to live, this
shall.
There is
one argument against capital punishment, even in extreme cases, which I cannot
deny to have weight—on which my hon. Friend justly laid great stress, and which
never can be entirely got rid of. It is this—that if by an error of justice an
innocent person is put to death, the mistake can never be corrected; all
compensation, all reparation for the wrong is impossible. This would be indeed
a serious objection if these miserable mistakes—among the most tragical
occurrences in the whole round of human affairs—could not be made extremely
rare. The argument is invincible where the mode of criminal procedure is
dangerous to the innocent, or where the Courts of Justice are not trusted. And
this probably is the reason why the objection to an irreparable punishment
began (as I believe it did) earlier, and is more intense and more widely
diffused, in some parts of the Continent of Europe than it is here. There are
on the Continent great and enlightened countries, in which the criminal
procedure is not so favorable to innocence, does not afford the same security
against erroneous conviction, as it does among us; countries where the Courts
of Justice seem to think they fail in their duty unless they find somebody
guilty; and in their really laudable desire to hunt guilt from its hiding places,
expose themselves to a serious danger of condemning the innocent. If our own
procedure and Courts of Justice afforded ground for similar apprehension, I
should be the first to join in withdrawing the power of inflicting irreparable
punishment from such tribunals. But we all know that the defects of our
procedure are the very opposite. Our rules of evidence are even too favorable
to the prisoner; and juries and Judges carry out the maxim, "It is better
that ten guilty should escape than that one innocent person should
suffer," not only to the letter, but beyond the letter. Judges are most
anxious to point out, and juries to allow for, the barest possibility of the
prisoner's innocence. No human judgment is infallible; such sad cases as my
hon. Friend cited will sometimes occur; but in so grave a case as that of
murder, the accused, in our system, has always the benefit of the merest shadow
of a doubt.
And this
suggests another consideration very germane to the question. The very fact that
death punishment is more shocking than any other to the imagination,
necessarily renders the Courts of Justice more scrupulous in requiring the
fullest evidence of guilt. Even that which is the greatest objection to capital
punishment, the impossibility of correcting an error once committed, must make,
and does make, juries and Judges more careful in forming their opinion, and
more jealous in their scrutiny of the evidence. If the substitution of penal
servitude for death in cases of murder should cause any declaration in this
conscientious scrupulosity, there would be a great evil to set against the
real, but I hope rare, advantage of being able to make reparation to a
condemned person who was afterwards discovered to be innocent. In order that
the possibility of correction may be kept open wherever the chance of this sad
contingency is more than infinitesimal, it is quite right that the Judge should
recommend to the Crown a commutation of the sentence, not solely when the proof
of guilt is open to the smallest suspicion, but whenever there remains anything
unexplained and mysterious in the case, raising a desire for more light, or
making it likely that further information may at some future time be obtained.
I would
also suggest that whenever the sentence is commuted the grounds of the
commutation should, in some authentic form, be made known to the public. Thus
much I willingly concede to my hon. Friend; but on the question of total
abolition I am inclined to hope that the feeling of the country is not with
him, and that the limitation of death punishment to the cases referred to in
the Bill of last year will be generally considered sufficient. The mania which
existed a short time ago for paring down all our punishments seems to have
reached its limits, and not before it was time. We were in danger of being left
without any effectual punishment, except for small of offences. What was
formerly our chief secondary punishment—transportation—before it was abolished,
had become almost a reward. Penal servitude, the substitute for it, was
becoming, to the classes who were principally subject to it, almost nominal, so
comfortable did we make our prisons, and so easy had it become to get quickly
out of them. Flogging—a most objectionable punishment in ordinary cases, but a
particularly appropriate one for crimes of brutality, especially crimes against
women—we would not hear of, except, to be sure, in the case of garotters,
for whose peculiar benefit we reestablished it in a hurry, immediately after a
Member of Parliament had been garrotted. With this exception, offences, even of
an atrocious kind, against the person, as my hon. and learned Friend the Member
for Oxford [Mr.Neate] well remarked, not only were, but still are,
visited with penalties so ludicrously inadequate, as to be almost an
encouragement to the crime. I think, Sir, that in the case of most offences,
except those against property, there is more need of strengthening our
punishments than of weakening them; and that severer sentences, with an
apportionment of them to the different kinds of offences which shall approve
itself better than at present to the moral sentiments of the community, are the
kind of reform of which our penal system now stands in need. I shall therefore
vote against the Amendment.
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"Contemplate
that if Hitler falls into our hands we shall certainly put him to death. Not a
Sovereign who could be said to be in hands of Ministers, like Kaiser. This man
is the mainspring of evil. Instrument - electric chair, for gangsters no doubt
available on lend-lease."
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