Sovereign States and Vengeful Victims: The Problem of the Right to Punish
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Description
‘Revenge,’ said Bacon, ‘is a kind of wild justice’. Is justice then no more than revenge tamed? Or, to put the question less figuratively, how does and should the criminal justice process relate to the sense of injury or grievance felt by those who are in one form or another victims of criminal misconduct? In what interest and for whose sake is punishment imposed by the State on convicted criminals? Is public justice to be considered as something set apart from the vindication of private right, or is it simply one form of process that human beings have devised for protecting the rights each of them has as an individual? These questions have a sharp contemporary point in view of the prominence given by the media nowadays both to the injuries suffered by victims, and to the demands of victims and their families for punishment stiff enough to assuage the sense of grievance or resentment they actually feel. No doubt this demand of victims for satisfaction is locally attuned to the penal conventions of a country’s culture. In the USA only the death penalty will do, in the United Kingdom nothing less than life imprisonment, in the Netherlands, the victim demands a long sentence of 10 years . . . But amidst such local variations, the questions posed here have a resonance throughout ‘Western’ societies of the late twentieth century.
Source Publication
Fundamentals of Sentencing Theory: Essays in Honour of Andrew von Hirsch
Source Editors/Authors
Andrew Ashworth, Martin Wasik
Publication Date
1998
Recommended Citation
MacCormick, Neil and Garland, David W., "Sovereign States and Vengeful Victims: The Problem of the Right to Punish" (1998). Faculty Chapters. 666.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/666
