Against capital punishment

Summary: "Against Capital Punishment offers an innovative proceduralist argument against the death penalty. Worries about the specter of procedural injustice animate many popular and scholarly objections to capital punishment. Philosophers and legal theorists are attracted to procedural abolitionism because it sidesteps controversies over whether murderers deserve death, holding out a promise of persuading those whose favor the death penalty on substantive grounds. Following in this path, Yost's contention is not that the act of execution is substantively immoral; in fact, he presumes the appropriateness of execution for some first-degree murderers and carefully reconstructs the best defenses of the death penalty. Rather, his strategy is to show that the possibility of irrevocable mistakes precludes the just administration of capital punishment. Yost's approach is novel in its breadth and depth. He is the first to provide a comprehensive philosophical defense of the well-known irrevocability argument, analyzing its premises, establishing their validity, and vindicating them against objections. Yost's central claim is that capital punishment is unjust insofar as execution violates the principle of remedy, which requires legal institutions to remedy their mistakes and to compensate those who suffer from wrongful sanctions. The death penalty is repellent to the principle of remedy by dint of its irrevocability. This incompatibility is at the heart of his abolitionist argument: because the wrongly executed cannot enjoy the obligatory remedial measures, execution is impermissible. Yost also takes pains to defend the irrevocability of execution"--