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Perhaps the most moving polemic against the death penalty is Albert Camus' Reflections on the Guillotine. Camus' sharp opposition to the death penalty may have derived from the force of the one story that he repeatedly heard about his father, who had died before Camus was one year old:1
Shortly before the war of 1914, an assassin whose crime was particularly repulsive (he had slaughtered a family of farmers, including the children) was condemned to death in Algiers. He was a farm worker who had killed in a sort of bloodthirsty frenzy but has aggravated his case by robbing his victims. The affair created a great stir. It was generally thought that decapitation too mild a punishment for such a monster. This was the opinion, I have been told, of my father, who was especially aroused by the murder of the children. One of the few things I know about him, in any case, is that he wanted to witness the execution, for the first time in his life. He got up in the dark to go to the place of execution at the other end of town amid a great crowd of people. What he saw that morning he never told anyone. My mother relates merely that he came rushing home, his face distorted, refused to talk, lay down for a moment on the bed, and suddenly began to vomit. He had just discovered the reality hidden under the noble phrases with which it was masked. Instead of thinking of the slaughtered children, he could think of nothing but that quivering body that had just been dropped onto a board to have its head cut off.2
My3 emotional response to the death penalty came about under quite different circumstances, and unlike Camus, left me agnostic about the death penalty. The main work that I did in the early years of my career centered on formal aspects of the process of proof, including the constitutional interest in proof beyond reasonable doubt. It so happened that derivatives of these questions were present in every capital case tried during that time, and thus I was consulted by both sides in the legal battles, and began taking some pro bono cases. In representation of this sort, engagement with...