John Bessler
speaker
26 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
John Bessler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Beccaria was part of a group in Milan called the Academy of Fists.
So he wrote an essay, for example, on smuggling, in which he used algebra to try to calculate the optimal punishment for smuggling. He studied the chances of statistical probabilities of winning a card game.
That book was translated into English as an essay on crimes and punishments.
The book was novel because it was the first book really to make a comprehensive case against the death penalty.
And he initially published this book anonymously because his fear of being persecuted.
This book became kind of the equivalent of a New York Times bestseller for its day.
I'm a professor of law at the University of Baltimore School of Law, and I also teach as an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center.
This book was read by George Washington. James Madison recommended the Library of Congress purchase the book, and Thomas Jefferson had multiple copies of the book in different languages. Benjamin Franklin, a number of founders were enthralled by Beccaria's ideas.
So we have to look first at the state constitutions. And what we see is that George Mason, who was the drafter of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, he just cobbled together a bunch of the rights that were in the English Bill of Rights, including this prohibition against cruel, unusual punishments, and included it in the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776.
And it was Madison, who was also from Virginia, who decided that that language should be included in the U.S. Bill of Rights in 1791. James Madison actually made a short revision to the language. In England, the prohibition said, ought not. So it was more hortatory in nature. And in the American version, it says, shall not inflict cruel and unusual punishments.
There was some uncertainty about what it actually meant. It's kind of breadcrumbs in a way. When you look back at the history of this originally, there's a few comments that are made.
Objected to the words, nor cruel and unusual punishments, saying the import of them being too indefinite. So he's encapsulating the idea that this is a very general prohibition. There was other people like James Iredell from North Carolina who said it would have been ridiculous, essentially, to categorize all the different punishments that were considered cruel and unusual at that time.
Livermore suggested, well, it's going to be for the courts to actually give some essentially some teeth to this prohibition because we're not defining it explicitly.
Now, in spite of his objection to the inclusion of this language, the first Congress adopted what became the language of the Eighth Amendment, the record reflects, by a considerable majority.
The first case where the U.S. Supreme Court really weighs in is in a case called Weems v. United States in 1910. And in that case, it was actually considering a punishment, kind of a bizarre punishment that was inflicted in the Philippines. At that time, the U.S. had essentially control over the island.
And a guy named Paul Weems was working there, and he was convicted of a crime.
And was actually sentenced to something called cadena.
The Supreme Court looked at that punishment and said, that punishment is unconstitutional.
So there was a guy named Albert Trope who was a natural born citizen of the United States. He was serving in the army in 1944. He actually escaped from an army stockade in Morocco.
And then sentenced to three years at hard labor.
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