Notes at an Unfinished Lunch

Abstract

This reports a state legislator's conversation with a judge and a prosecutor about capital punishment. The notion that the death penalty can be made deterrent if certain principles of learning are applied is examined and, by reductio ad absurdum, is disproved: the fun damental requirement for effectiveness of the death penalty is that barbarous forms of public execution be established. The obvious point that such savage methods never worked originally is left unstated.