Today we’re talking with Craig Lerner, Professor of Law at George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School, about the moral and political meaning of the death penalty and if its demise is, as we are frequently told, imminent. Professor Lerner, you recently wrote an essay on the death penalty called “Is the Death Penalty Dead?” in the most recent issue of the Claremont Review of Books, which I read and thought significant. You analyzed this punishment through several different ways: political, philosophical, and also a geographical survey of jurisdictions around the world, civilizations around the world, and how they treat the death penalty.
Before we get into your essay, maybe just an obvious question here, one that I think any enlightened, certainly liberal arts professor would ask: Is it not an unmitigated blessing that the Western world has basically abolished the death penalty, America excepted?
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