Controversial Theories on the Death Penalty

Abstract

The question of the right to carry firearms, but especially abolishing the death penalty, had a tremendous impact on the intellectual and political community of the whole world with the ideas of Beccaria that stimulated the urgency also of the founding fathers of the various American colonies to give life to the new Constitutions reforming the existing criminal law and proceeding to the elimination of the capital punishment in many cases. However, after about two hundred and fifty years, the death penalty, which seemed destined to be abolished by the end of the eighteenth century, is still in use in the American legal system and a great subject of debate, despite several Supreme Court rulings. Even in Italy, the period that preceded its unification, was marked by a return to the past with regard to the penal system and the conception of the death penalty. Similarly, although the European continent is “death penalty free”, and the modern criminal law is generally constituted from its rejection of torture, in recent years, with the escalation of acts of terrorism and global tension, it seems to reoccur the relationship between torture and right, as if it was a reconciliation between two old friends and a strategy to re-legalize torture.