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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE THEORY OF PUNJSHMENT. There was a time when the notion that blood demands blood was held so firmly and so crudely that little distinction was made between intentional and unintentional acts of homicide. Ancient law abounds in traces of this inveterate instinct of primitive humanity. We see the legislator of the Pentateuch endeavoring to limit its operation by the institution of Cities of Refuge, whose walls protected the unintentional homicide against further pursuit by the avenger of blood. We see the same inability to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary homicide in the curious notions of the Canon Law (still, perhaps, theoretically in force) about the irregularity contracted by consecrated persons and consecrated places through the most unwitting bloodshed, and not contracted by the most atrocious violence which involves no physical effusion of blood. We see the same curious but once useful superstition in the old law of Deodand, which required the forfeiture of the inanimate object or the irrational animal which had, in the most accidental way, been the instrument of man's death. Thus even the horse from which a fatal fall had been sustained, or the boat from which a man had drowned himself, were made the subjects of this peculiar application of retributive justice. At the present day the cruder forms of this old-world cry of blood for blood are no longer heard; but what is, perhaps, after all only a more refined form of the same fundamental notion lingers in the theory which makes the primary object of punishment to be retribution. A man has done wrong, therefore for that reason and for no other, it is said, let him be punished. Punishment, we are told, is an end in itself, ?not a means to any end beyond itself. Punishment looks to the past, not to the futur...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217716918 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0217716911 |
| Weight | 1.37 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.94 In |
| List Price | $30.24 |
| Format | Paperback |
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| Pages | 424 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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