John D. Bessler

Bio: John D. Bessler is an academic researcher from University of Baltimore. The author has contributed to research in topics: Supreme court & Torture. The author has an hindex of 7, co-authored 22 publications receiving 153 citations. Previous affiliations of John D. Bessler include State University of New York System & Georgetown University Law Center.

Death in the Dark: Midnight Executions in America

Abstract: This provocative book provides a comprehensive history of executions in the United States from colonial days to the present. Framing his analysis within the context of the politics of capital punishment and the role of the media in the death penalty debate, John D. Bessler begins by examining the transition from crowded public hangings in town squares to private executions behind prison walls. He then explores the origins and legislative rationales that led to statutory provisions mandating private, nighttime executions.

Revisiting Beccaria’s Vision: The Enlightenment, America’s Death Penalty, and the Abolition Movement

Abstract: In 1764, Cesare Beccaria, a 26-year-old Italian criminologist, penned On Crimes and Punishments. That treatise spoke out against torture and made the first comprehensive argument against state-sanctioned executions. As we near the 250th anniversary of its publication, law professor John Bessler provides a comprehensive review of the abolition movement from before Beccaria's time to the present. Bessler reviews Beccaria's substantial influence on Enlightenment thinkers and on America's Founding Fathers in particular. The Article also provides an extensive review of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence and then contrasts it with the trend in international law towards the death penalty's abolition. It then discusses the current state of the death penalty in light of the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in Baze v. Rees and concludes that there is every reason to believe that America's death penalty may finally be in its death throes.

In the Spirit of Ubuntu: Enforcing the Rights of Orphans and Vulnerable Children Affected by HIV/AIDS in South Africa

Abstract: This Article discusses the traditional African concept of ubuntu, which is frequently cited in South African jurisprudence, and analyzes South Africa's lack of compliance with the human rights of orphans and vulnerable children whose lives have been affected by HIV/AIDS. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa explicitly protects children's rights and various socio-economic rights of concern to children, and the Constitutional Court of South Africa has held such rights to be justiciable. The constitutional rights of South African children affected by HIV/AIDS, however, have been continually violated. This Article discusses how the existence of these constitutional rights may assist orphans and vulnerable children as well as those advocating on their behalf. It also identifies legal strategies pertaining to such rights that may be used to improve the lives of HIV/AIDS-affected children in South Africa.

In the Spirit of Ubuntu: Enforcing the Rights of Orphans and Vulnerable Children Affected by HIV/AIDS in South Africa

Abstract: This Article discusses the traditional African concept of ubuntu, which is frequently cited in South African jurisprudence, and analyzes South Africa's lack of compliance with the human rights of orphans and vulnerable children whose lives have been affected by HIV/AIDS. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa explicitly protects children's rights and various socio-economic rights of concern to children, and the Constitutional Court of South Africa has held such rights to be justiciable. The constitutional rights of South African children affected by HIV/AIDS, however, have been continually violated. This Article discusses how the existence of these constitutional rights may assist orphans and vulnerable children as well as those advocating on their behalf. It also identifies legal strategies pertaining to such rights that may be used to improve the lives of HIV/AIDS-affected children in South Africa.

The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America

Abstract: 1. The prison and the gallows: the construction of the carceral state in America 2. Law, order, and alternative explanations 3. Unlocking the past: the nationalization and politicization of law and order 4. The carceral state and the welfare state: the comparative politics of victims 5. Not the usual suspects: feminists, women's groups, and the anti-rape movement 6. The battered women's movement and the development of penal policy 7. From rights to revolution: prison activism and penal policy 8. Capital punishment, the courts, and the early origins of the carceral state, 1920s-60s 9. The power to punish: the political development of capital punishment, 1972 to today 10. Conclusion: whither the carceral state.

In Defence of Ubuntu

Abstract: The article defends ubuntu against the assault by Enslin and Horsthemke (Comp Educ 40(4):545–558, 2004). It challenges claims that the Africanist/Afrocentrist project, in which the philosophy of ubuntu is central, faces numerous problems, involves substantial political, moral, epistemological and educational errors, and should therefore not be the basis for education for democratic citizenship in the South African context. The article finds coincidence between some of the values implicit in ubuntu and some of the values that are enshrined in the constitution of South Africa and that on that basis argues that ubuntu has the potential to serve as a moral theory and a public policy. The educational upshot of this article’s argument is that South Africa’s educational policy framework not only places a high premium on ubuntu, which it conceives as human dignity, but it also requires the schooling system to promote ubuntu-oriented attributes and dispositions among the learners. The article finds similarities between ubuntu and bildung, whose key advocates, among others was German scholar and intellectual Wilhelm von Humboldt. It argues that it would be ethnocentric, and indeed silly to suggest that the ubuntu ethic of caring and sharing is uniquely African when some of the values which it seeks to promote can also be traced in various Eurasian philosophies.

Lethal Theatre: Performance, Punishment, and the Death Penalty

Abstract: I’m not going to struggle physically against any restraints. I’m not going to shout, use profanity or make idle threats. Understand though that I’m not only upset, but I’m saddened by what is happening here tonight . . . . If someone tried to dispose of everyone here for participating in this killing, I’d scream a resounding, “No.” I’d tell them to give them all the gift that they would not give me, and that’s to give them all a second chance . . . . There are a lot of men like me on death row—good men—who fell to the same misguided emotions, but may not have recovered as I have. Give those men a chance to do what’s right. Give them a chance to undo their wrongs. A lot of them want to fix the mess they started, but don’t know how . . . . No one wins tonight. No one gets closure. —Napoleon Beazley1

Educating for Ubuntu/Botho: Lessons from Basotho Indigenous Education

Abstract: This article reflects on shocking and horrifying incidents of moral indiscretion that have become commonplace in South Africa. The aim is to understand why human beings would carry out such shocking and horrific acts on fellow human beings. The article draws on Dismas Masolo’s book Self and Community in a Changing World to unpack the notion of personhood. It draws lessens on Basotho indigenous education. The choice of Basotho indigenous education is premised on the assumption that it is the author’s own native knowledge with which he is most familiar, and about which he can write uninhibitedly.

The Execution Spectacle and State Legitimacy: The Changing Nature of the American Execution Audience, 1833-1937

Abstract: This paper examines the role of the audience in the process that transformed executions from public spectacles to hidden rituals, and makes visible the ambiguities and uncertainties that accompanied the transportation of capital punishment from its monarchical origins to a modern democratic setting. From this vantage point, the evolving responses to concerns associated with the execution audience share many characteristics with efforts to control other problematic audiences. And yet, the particular forms that audience manipulation in the context of executions took cannot be fully understood without considering the occasion that brought the audience into being. Viewed as a mirror held up to the execution, the audience, whether conceptualized as a rowdy crowd or a solemn group of witnesses, emerges as a constitutive element of the execution and, in this sense, carries the potential to grant, or deny, legitimacy to the event and, by extension, capital punishment itself. Introduction During the nineteenth century, the execution in America underwent a major transformation from a large and rowdy public spectacle to a hidden and tightly controlled ritual (Fearnow 1996; Lofland 1976; Madow 1995; Masur 1989). Typically described as uncivilized, irrational, and ignorant, the public execution crowd triggered at least three intertwining concerns for nineteenth-century reformers. First, the rowdiness of the crowd made it increasingly difficult to maintain a clear distinction between a solemn execution and a festive holiday celebration. second, the lowly members of the crowd were seen as especially vulnerable to the violence displayed, thus leading to fears that the public execution might have a brutalizing impact on those watching rather than serving as a source of moral (re)invigoration. Finally, the crowd itself, by its size and social composition, came to be viewed as a political challenge of sorts, most directly in relation to the pending execution, but also in the more general sense of carrying within itself the power to challenge the authority staging the event (ranging from disrespect and mockery to threats and riotous disruptions). Initially conceived of as a simple adjustment to the execution event-remove the execution from the troublesome crowd by bringing it inside the jail yard-the transformation came to involve a series of organizational modifications that turned the execution into an event that was qualitatively different from the public execution; these modifications included the site of execution (from public to private), the size of the audience (from large to small), the gender composition of the spectators (from mixed crowds to male witnesses), the class character of the event (from popular/mixed to middle-class/professional), the method of execution (from hanging to more "scientific" methods), and the jurisdiction of the execution (from local to state). How can we account for this transformation? Scholars have identified a range of historical developments that contributed to the demise of the public spectacle, such as the rationalization of authority, democratization, cultural changes, and technological/medical advances, but these insights do not immediately translate into an explanation for what the execution event was changing into. That is, the transformation of the execution, I argue here, is best viewed not as a passive and unidirectional response to inexorable external pressures, but instead as a series of evolving and open-ended responses to the problems associated with an actively criticized institution situated in the midst of the social and political upheavals of the nineteenth century. While the role of the crowd in making the nineteenth-century execution spectacle problematic is fairly well documented, much less attention has been paid to the continued role played by subsequent audiences in the various organizational responses aimed at rescuing capital punishment from the rubble of public executions. …