Every one who commits a crime is either carried away
by sudden passion, when he thinks of nothing, or else he acts
coolly and with premeditation, and then he is determined in his
action, not by a dubious comparison between the death penalty and
imprisonment for life, but simply by a hope of impunity. This is
especially the case with born criminals, whose main psychological
characteristic is an excess of improvidence, combined with moral
insensibility.
If a convict tells us that he fears death, this merely means that
he has the momentary impression, which cannot, however, restrain
him from crime, for here again, by the same psychological
tendency, he will be subject only to the criminal temptation.
And if it is true that, when the criminal has been tried and
condemned, he fears death more than imprisonment for life (always
excepting condemned suicides, and those who by their physical and
moral insensibility laugh at death up to the foot of the
scaffold), it is none the less necessary to try and to condemn
them.
Indeed statistics prove that the periodic variations of the more
serious crimes is independent of the number of
condemnations and executions, for they are determined by very
different causes.
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