Click on the headline to link to the Massachusetts Citizens Against The Death Penalty website.
Markin comment:
I have been an opponent of the death penalty for as long as I have been a political person, a long time. While I do not generally agree with the thrust of the Massachusetts Citizens Against The Death Penalty strategy for eliminating the death penalty nation-wide almost solely through legislative and judicial means (think about the 2011 Troy Davis case down in Georgia for a practical example of the limits of that strategy) I am always willing to work with them when specific situations come up. In any case they have a long pedigree extending, one way or the other, back to Sacco and Vanzetti and that is always important to remember whatever our political differences.
**************
Hugo Bedau, Philosopher Who Opposed Death Penalty, Dies at 85
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Published: August 16, 2012
Hugo Bedau, a philosopher who preferred to wrestle with the knottiest of public policy issues rather than reason from the remove of academia — most notably in confronting capital punishment, which he opposed as immoral, unjust and ineffective — died on Monday in Norwood, Mass. He was 85.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Constance E. Putnam. Professor Bedau’s half-century career encompassed several cycles in the national debate over the death penalty: its decline and eventual rejection by the Supreme Court in 1972, its resurrection by the court later that decade, and its suspension in several states more recently. His most ambitious work, “The Death Penalty in America,” revised several times, has been a standard text since it was first published in 1964.
Professor Bedau (pronounced beh-DOUGH) took up the issue as well in “The Case Against the Death Penalty,” a pamphlet distributed widely for many years by the American Civil Liberties Union. Written with the help of Henry Schwarzschild, a former director of the group’s Capital Punishment Project, the publication brought together a number of arguments against the death penalty: that it failed to deter crime (using supporting data); that it was fraught with racial bias, wrongful convictions and excessive financial costs; and that it was ultimately an act of “barbarity.”
“The history of capital punishment in American society clearly shows the desire to mitigate the harshness of this penalty by narrowing its scope,” the pamphlet said in a section titled “Unfairness.” “Discretion, whether authorized by statutes or by their silence, has been the main vehicle to this end. But when discretion is used, as it always has been, to mark for death the poor, the friendless, the uneducated, the members of racial minorities and the despised, then discretion becomes injustice. Thoughtful citizens, who in contemplating capital punishment in the abstract might support it, must condemn it in actual practice.”
The essay, heavily footnoted, was less than 9,000 words long. Professor Bedau’s curriculum vitae was more than 13,000.
“We called him the dean of death penalty scholarship,” said Michael Radelet, a death penalty expert at the University of Colorado who began working with Professor Bedau in the 1980s. “Bedau was the first guy to put it all together and the first to make the general empirical argument against the death penalty — that is, a little race, a little deterrent, a little innocence.”
Hugo Adam Bedau was born on Sept. 23, 1926, in Portland, Ore., to Hugo Adam Bedau and Laura Romeis Bedau. (His parents chose not to name him Hugo Jr.) Young Hugo grew up in the San Francisco area. His father, who did not go to college, had a small library in which Hugo often spent time. He briefly studied naval science at the University of Southern California through the Navy’s V-12 program for officers but was discharged in 1946, after the war ended and before he had graduated.
He received a bachelor’s degree from University of Redlands in Southern California and did his graduate work in philosophy at Boston University and Harvard. The title of his doctoral thesis at Harvard was “The Concept of Thinking.”
Professor Bedau lectured at several universities but spent most of his career in the Boston area as an anchor of the philosophy department at Tufts, beginning in 1966. Among the many awards he received was the Abolitionist Award, given in 1989 by the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
“He articulated the case against the death penalty as well as anyone ever has,” Paul G. Cassell, a law professor, former federal judge and noted proponent of the death penalty, said in an e-mail.
Professor Bedau’s previous marriage, to the former Jan Mastin, ended in divorce. Besides Ms. Putnam, whom he married in 1990, he is survived by four children from his first marriage: Mark, Paul and Guy Bedau and Lauren Bedau Evans; two sisters, Carol Bell and Renee Larsen; and five grandchildren. He lived in Concord, Mass.
Ms. Putnam, a medical historian, said Professor Bedau was teaching at Princeton in the 1950s when the New Jersey Legislature was weighing measures in support of the death penalty. Struck by how little public debate the issue seemed to generate, he began to research capital punishment and eventually became immersed.
“It was anger, disappointment and frustration over discovering that something this significant in the so-called life of a society was going through the Legislature with so little public discussion or debate,” Ms. Putnam said.
Professor Bedau eventually testified on the issue before state legislatures and Congress, spoke to countless library groups, and delivered a series of lectures in 1994 as the Romanell-Phi Beta Kappa professor of philosophy while at Tufts. The lectures were collected in a book, “Making Mortal Choices,” published by Oxford University Press in 1997.
“He wasn’t a front-line protester; that wasn’t his role,” Ms. Putnam said. “His contribution was clarity of thinking.”
Markin comment:
I have been an opponent of the death penalty for as long as I have been a political person, a long time. While I do not generally agree with the thrust of the Massachusetts Citizens Against The Death Penalty strategy for eliminating the death penalty nation-wide almost solely through legislative and judicial means (think about the 2011 Troy Davis case down in Georgia for a practical example of the limits of that strategy) I am always willing to work with them when specific situations come up. In any case they have a long pedigree extending, one way or the other, back to Sacco and Vanzetti and that is always important to remember whatever our political differences.
**************
Hugo Bedau, Philosopher Who Opposed Death Penalty, Dies at 85
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Published: August 16, 2012
Hugo Bedau, a philosopher who preferred to wrestle with the knottiest of public policy issues rather than reason from the remove of academia — most notably in confronting capital punishment, which he opposed as immoral, unjust and ineffective — died on Monday in Norwood, Mass. He was 85.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Constance E. Putnam. Professor Bedau’s half-century career encompassed several cycles in the national debate over the death penalty: its decline and eventual rejection by the Supreme Court in 1972, its resurrection by the court later that decade, and its suspension in several states more recently. His most ambitious work, “The Death Penalty in America,” revised several times, has been a standard text since it was first published in 1964.
Professor Bedau (pronounced beh-DOUGH) took up the issue as well in “The Case Against the Death Penalty,” a pamphlet distributed widely for many years by the American Civil Liberties Union. Written with the help of Henry Schwarzschild, a former director of the group’s Capital Punishment Project, the publication brought together a number of arguments against the death penalty: that it failed to deter crime (using supporting data); that it was fraught with racial bias, wrongful convictions and excessive financial costs; and that it was ultimately an act of “barbarity.”
“The history of capital punishment in American society clearly shows the desire to mitigate the harshness of this penalty by narrowing its scope,” the pamphlet said in a section titled “Unfairness.” “Discretion, whether authorized by statutes or by their silence, has been the main vehicle to this end. But when discretion is used, as it always has been, to mark for death the poor, the friendless, the uneducated, the members of racial minorities and the despised, then discretion becomes injustice. Thoughtful citizens, who in contemplating capital punishment in the abstract might support it, must condemn it in actual practice.”
The essay, heavily footnoted, was less than 9,000 words long. Professor Bedau’s curriculum vitae was more than 13,000.
“We called him the dean of death penalty scholarship,” said Michael Radelet, a death penalty expert at the University of Colorado who began working with Professor Bedau in the 1980s. “Bedau was the first guy to put it all together and the first to make the general empirical argument against the death penalty — that is, a little race, a little deterrent, a little innocence.”
Hugo Adam Bedau was born on Sept. 23, 1926, in Portland, Ore., to Hugo Adam Bedau and Laura Romeis Bedau. (His parents chose not to name him Hugo Jr.) Young Hugo grew up in the San Francisco area. His father, who did not go to college, had a small library in which Hugo often spent time. He briefly studied naval science at the University of Southern California through the Navy’s V-12 program for officers but was discharged in 1946, after the war ended and before he had graduated.
He received a bachelor’s degree from University of Redlands in Southern California and did his graduate work in philosophy at Boston University and Harvard. The title of his doctoral thesis at Harvard was “The Concept of Thinking.”
Professor Bedau lectured at several universities but spent most of his career in the Boston area as an anchor of the philosophy department at Tufts, beginning in 1966. Among the many awards he received was the Abolitionist Award, given in 1989 by the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
“He articulated the case against the death penalty as well as anyone ever has,” Paul G. Cassell, a law professor, former federal judge and noted proponent of the death penalty, said in an e-mail.
Professor Bedau’s previous marriage, to the former Jan Mastin, ended in divorce. Besides Ms. Putnam, whom he married in 1990, he is survived by four children from his first marriage: Mark, Paul and Guy Bedau and Lauren Bedau Evans; two sisters, Carol Bell and Renee Larsen; and five grandchildren. He lived in Concord, Mass.
Ms. Putnam, a medical historian, said Professor Bedau was teaching at Princeton in the 1950s when the New Jersey Legislature was weighing measures in support of the death penalty. Struck by how little public debate the issue seemed to generate, he began to research capital punishment and eventually became immersed.
“It was anger, disappointment and frustration over discovering that something this significant in the so-called life of a society was going through the Legislature with so little public discussion or debate,” Ms. Putnam said.
Professor Bedau eventually testified on the issue before state legislatures and Congress, spoke to countless library groups, and delivered a series of lectures in 1994 as the Romanell-Phi Beta Kappa professor of philosophy while at Tufts. The lectures were collected in a book, “Making Mortal Choices,” published by Oxford University Press in 1997.
“He wasn’t a front-line protester; that wasn’t his role,” Ms. Putnam said. “His contribution was clarity of thinking.”
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