Robert Badinter's 1981 Speech Against Death Penalty

Extract

[...] Robert Badinter explains that dictatorships want to control the citizen to the end, including their life. He thinks it is not normal that twelve men, twelve jurors, can decide, in a trial that lasts only a limited time, the life of another man. This is what Victor Hugo said when he said that only God should be able to choose whether to give life or not to another man. Robert Badinter also explains that it would be regrettable to want to succumb to the law of retaliation, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth". [...]

[...] At the 42nd minute of the speech, he also takes the concrete example of condemned to death who could suffer from physical or mental disabilities and who no longer represented any danger or were not certainly responsible for their crimes in case of mental deficiency. It is for these different reasons that Robert Badinter proposes this speech of nearly an hour and a half in which he condemns the death penalty, because he thinks it is not deterrent, but also because he thinks it is immoral. [...]

[...] Robert Badinter explains in particular why, in his opinion, the death penalty has no deterrent value, but he also explains why, in his opinion, the death penalty is contrary to morality and that is why writers such as Victor Hugo and Albert Camus have risen up against it before him. Robert Badinter, for example, links dictatorship and the death penalty. He explains that the great democracies, particularly the great Western democracies, have largely abolished the death penalty, while dictatorships apply it. [...]