The right to punish, therefore, is an aspect of the sovereign's right to make war on his enemies: to
punish belongs to that absolute power of life and death which Roman law calls, merum imperium
(absolute power), a right by virtue of which the prince sees that his law is respected by ordering the
punishment of crime' (Muyan de Vouglans, xxxiv). But punishment is also a way of exacting
retribution that is both personal and public, since the physico-political force of the sovereign is in a
sense present in the law: 'One sees by the very definition of the law that it tends not only to prohibit,
but also to avenge contempt for its authority by the punishment of those who violate its prohibitions'
(Muyart de Vouglans, xxxiv). In the execution of the most ordinary penalty, in the most punctilious
respect of legal forms, reign the active forces of revenge.
The public execution, then, has a juridico-political function. It is a ceremonial by which a
momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. It restores that sovereignty by manifesting it at its
most spectacular. The public execution, however hasty and every day, belongs to a whole series of
great rituals in which power is eclipsed and restored (coronation, entry of the king into a conquered
city, the submission of rebellious subjects); over and above the crime that has placed the sovereign in
contempt, it deploys before all eyes an invincible force. Its aim is not so much to re-establish a
balance as to bring into play, as its extreme point, the dissymmetry between the subject who has
dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength. Although redress
of the private injury occasioned by the offence must be proportionate, although the sentence must be
equitable, the punishment is carried out in such a way as to give a spectacle not of measure, but of
imbalance and excess; in this liturgy of punishment, there must be an emphatic affirmation of power
and of its intrinsic superiority. And this superiority is not simply that of right, but that of the physical
strength of the sovereign beating down upon the body of his adversary and mastering it by breaking
the law, the offender has touched the very person of the prince; and it is the prince - or at least those
to whom he has delegated his force - who seizes upon the body of the condemned man and displays it
marked, beaten, broken. The ceremony of punishment, then, is an exercise of 'terror'. When the
jurists of the eighteenth century began their polemic with the reformers, they offered a restrictive,
'modernist' interpretation of the physical cruelty of the penalties imposed by the law: if severe
penalties are required, it is because their example must be deeply inscribed in the hearts of men. Yet,
in fact, what had hitherto maintained this practice of torture was not an economy of example, in the
sense in which it was to be understood at the time of the idealogues (that the representation of the
penalty should be greater than the interest of the crime), but a policy of terror: to make everyone
aware, through the body of the criminal, of the unrestrained presence of the sovereign. The public
execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power. In the seventeenth century, and even in
the early eighteenth century, it was not, therefore, with all its theatre of terror, a lingering hang-over
from an earlier age. Its ruthlessness, its spectacle, its physical violence, its unbalanced play of forces,
its meticulous ceremonial, its entire apparatus were inscribed in the political functioning of the penal
system.
This enables us to understand some of the characteristics of the liturgy of torture and execution -
above all, the importance of a ritual that was to deploy its pomp in public. Nothing was to be hidden
of this triumph of the law Its episodes were traditionally the same and yet the sentences never failed
to list them, so important were they in the penal mechanism: processions, halts at crossroad and
church doors, the public reading of the sentence, kneeling, declarations of repentance for the offence
to God and to the king. Sometimes questions of precedence and ceremonial were settled by the court
itself: 'The officers will ride according to the following order: namely, at the head two police
sergeants, then the patient; after the patient, Bonfort and Le Corre on his left will walk together,
followed by the clerk of the court and in this manner shall go to the market square at which place the
judgement shall be carried out' (quoted in Corre, 7). Now, this meticulous ceremonial was not only
legal, but quite explicitly military. The justice of the king was shown to be an armed justice. The
sword that punished the guilty was also the sword that destroyed enemies. A whole military machine
surrounded the scaffold: cavalry of the watch, archers, guardsmen, soldiers. This was intended, of
course, to prevent any escape or show of force; it was also to prevent any outburst of sympathy or
anger on the part of the people, any attempt to save the condemned or to have them immediately put
to death; but it was also a reminder that every crime constituted as it were a rebellion against the law
and that the criminal was an enemy of the prince. All these reasons- whether a matter of precaution in
particular circumstances or a functional element in the performance of the ritual – made the public
execution more than an act of justice; it was a manifestation of force or rather, it was justice as the
physical, material and awesome force of the sovereign deployed there. The ceremony of the public
torture and execution displayed for all to see the power relation that gave his force to the law.
Justice, Desert, and Punishment
https://youtu.be/BBJTeNTZtGU
Question
In 1,000 words explain the relationship between Justice, Desert, and Punishment in the plot of In
Cold Blood. Focus your analysis on the interplay of desert and punishment and its overarching
relationship to justice, while including two peer-reviewed sources.
Bonus Question
Explain whether or not there is a strong philosophical foundation for the concept of desert.
Sample Solution