Ramteen Arablui
speaker
199 appearances
7 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 13 Aug
Ramteen Arablui’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The Academy of Fists, which definitely sounds like the name of a pop punk band from the 90s, got its name because sometimes their intellectual debates would lead to fights. I know, ironic. But when they weren't fighting, they were thinking.
And in 1764, he wrote a book opposing torture and the death penalty.
on crimes and punishments.
The book also argues that any punishment should be proportional to the crime, which wasn't the case in much of Europe at that time. The English Bill of Rights didn't apply to the rest of Europe, where torture was common.
And then the book kind of blew up and he became known even in America.
This is John Bessler.
He's also authored a number of books about the death penalty, including one called The Death Penalty's Denial of Fundamental Human Rights.
They would quote Beccaria as tensions between the colonies and Great Britain intensified in the late 1700s. And they were looking to enlighten thinkers like him as they imagined a new country free from the crown. His essay on crimes and punishments was so influential that John says it helped catalyze the American Revolution and what would become America's new criminal justice system.
Once the Eighth Amendment was ratified in 1791, it didn't really come up again until the end of the 1800s when two death penalty cases reached the U.S. Supreme Court. There was the case in Utah where the court said the firing squad was constitutional and the second case where the court allowed the country's first execution by the electric chair. That execution did not go smoothly.
But the status quo didn't change. The big turning point for the Eighth Amendment's cruel and unusual punishment clause actually didn't have anything to do with the death penalty at all. It didn't even happen on U.S. soil.
The Philippines actually had its own Supreme Court, but the U.S. Supreme Court could overrule it.
The crime he was convicted of was falsifying records in an alleged attempt to redirect government funds to himself. He was tried according to Philippine law.
Cadena, translated, means chain.
The court said the Philippine law had, quote, no fellow in American legislation.
And it went even further to begin to answer some of the big questions that the founders had when they wrote the Eighth Amendment.
The court was developing the line of reasoning it had started in the late 1800s, emphasizing that as society changes, norms will change too.
In Weems, the court says explicitly, as the views of society change, the way we interpret the Eighth Amendment should change too.
By the way, I'm going to use that term majestic generality in an argument. If anyone's accusing me of being vague, I'm going to be like, it's just my majestic generality. I love that term. Wow. How does Weems change the direction of the way we define this? And then how does that then kind of like interplay with the next big case?
After the winds of the 1950s and 60s, lawyers with the NAACP turned their attention to the death penalty.
There were historical reasons to launch this fight too. The Eighth Amendment banned cruel and unusual punishment. So some Southern states believe that meant a punishment had to be both to be unconstitutional, which means business as usual for white slave owners.
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