Page 26 - NYLS Magazine • 2014 • Vol. 33, No. 1

Seeking Retribution:

An Inside Look

with Professor

ROBeRT BLeCkeR

PBy Meghan Lalonde

rofessor Robert Blecker is no stranger to
controversy. he subject of an award-winning

2004 documentary, Robert Blecker Wants Me
Dead, Blecker has long been an outspoken advocate

for capital punishment. He has spent countless
hours interviewing death row and other inmates,

corrections oicials, and murder victims’ families,
culminating in the release of his newest book, he

Death of Punishment: Searching for Justice Among the
Worst of the Worst. In it, Blecker draws from those

interviews to illustrate his belief that the criminal
justice system has unjustly separated crime from

punishment.

Blecker is a retributivist, espousing the punishment of
criminals speciically in retribution for the harm they

have inlicted. Among some of the many retributivist
themes laced throughout the book, Blecker argues

that there must be a moral component to deining
crime and that its deinition alone should not be the

basis of sentencing: the crime must also be judged
on a moral scale to determine which crimes are worse

than others. Perhaps most importantly, Blecker
believes, based on thousands of hours of observations

and interviews inside prisons from Connecticut to
Oklahoma, that oten the worst criminals lead the

best lives in prison.

Blecker’s primary argument

is a simple one: the past

counts. Victims should not be But ultimately, morally, for me there is a sort of ‘feel-

forgotten. And those criminals certain’ belief that the past must count.”

who commit the most vicious Critics, however, argue that our criminal justice system

and callous crimes should be equates the severity and nature of the crime with units
of time, and time alone is punishment enough.
punished the most severely.

But merely living life segregated from the general
population of civilians for a period of time isn’t
“his idea of retribution is a deep intuition that
we’ve had culturally, since the ancient Greeks and enough punishment for Blecker. Not when inmates
are permitted to enjoy simple pleasures like
the Old Testament—the voice of our brother’s
blood cries out to us from the ground,” said Blecker television, candy, and sunshine. He argues that life on

during an interview in his oice in January. “he the inside resembles life on the outside so much that
contrasting attitude is, ‘Why cry over spilled blood?’
oten living in prison really isn’t punishment at all.

24 New York Law schooL magaziNe • 2014 • VOL. 33, NO. 1