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Respect and Resistance in Punishment Theory

2009; UC Berkeley School of Law; Volume: 97; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.15779/z38sd8t

1942-6542

Alice Ristroph,

Free Will and Agency

As convicted criminals go, Socrates could hardly have been more accommodating. When his wealthy friend Crito offered to help him escape on the eve of his execution, Socrates firmly declined.1 After he had failed in his defense against the charges of corrupting Athenian youth, and had suggested to no avail an alternative penalty (free meals for life, at public expense), Socrates decided to accept his death sentence without further resistance. Indeed, he was so helpful as to carry out the execution himself: when the jailer arrived with a cup of hemlock, Socrates solicited advice on the most efficacious way to ingest the poison, then obligingly drank to the last drop. At the other extreme in his attitude toward punishment?though perhaps equally suicidal?was Clyde Barrow, the more violent half of the Bonnie and Clyde criminal team that wreaked havoc across the United States in the early 1930s.3 Barrow famously vowed that he would never be taken alive; he promised to resist every effort to apprehend him and, if injured and unable to escape, to take his own life before allowing lawmen to capture him. Barrow escaped from jail once, and killed a number of law enforcement officers on