Death Penalty - Summary In my thesis I focused on one of the most discussed and one of the oldest institutes of criminal law - the death penalty. Despite the fact that the death penalty was abolished in most of countries (as a result of the abolitionist movement), some countries still continue to apply it. Also public opinion on this issue is not constant. The purpose of this research is not just to explore all aspects of capital punishment in the modern world, but also to reach a subjective opinion on this issue. This thesis is composed of five chapters. Each deals with the different aspects of the capital punishment. In the first chapter, I focused on the history of capital punishment in the world, from ancient world to the early 20th century. Chapter describes the application of the death penalty in different times and different cultures. I analyze the laws of different nations and countries and describe the methods of executions. I also pay attention to the opinion of well known authors (philosophers and politicians). The second chapter describes the history of the death penalty in Czech Republic, from the early beginning until abolition of death penalty in 1990. The third chapter is devoted to analysis of the current situation in the world. It describes laws and methods of executions in the countries...

M.A. (Philosophy) / Usually when we think of law, we think of rationality and outcomes that are not swayed by emotion. Modern Western society tends to think of emotion and rationality as incompatible. It is a widely-held belief that it is more morally desirable for people to make ‘rational’ decisions rather than ‘emotional’ decisions in life in general. Perhaps in no other area is this distinction between the two more pronounced as in criminal law, where judges who society considers to be making ‘rational’ judicial decisions are revered, and those who society at large considers to be making ‘emotional’ judicial decisions are distrusted. As Terry Maroney (2006: 120) says, “[a] core presumption underlying modern legality is that reason and emotion are different beasts entirely…the sphere of law admits only of reason; and vigilant policing is required to keep emotion from creeping in where it does not belong”. In this dissertation, I propose to look at the virtue of mercy, where mercy is understood to have a significant emotional component, and to answer the question: Should a judge in a criminal trial employ mercy? If so, under what conditions? The importance of the question of whether a judge should employ mercy in a criminal case is that it addresses one part of the larger enquiry into how the state should respond to offenders. As moral beings, our emotional responses to criminals and their crimes are varied. Sometimes we feel anger, at other times disgust, and at other times mercy, grief and sadness.

Magister Psychologiae - MPsych / Education within South Africa has undergone significant change within a short period of time. This change has primarily been written in terms of human rights and the equitable distribution of educational resources. This has necessitated a paradigm shift for many teachers and the study explores some of the factors that have prevented teachers from experiencing a paradigm shift. The introduction of the South African Schools Act of 1996 heralded the start of the complete abolition of corporal punishment within all South African schools. The object of this investigation was to explore teachers' attitudes towards the abolition of corporal punishment and the factors that would contribute towards their attitude. The research explored whether the attitude of teachers, in relation to corporal punishment, had been influenced by the disruptive behaviour of pupils and their perceptions of the efficacy of alternate methods of behaviour management. / South Africa

Since Kingston Penitentiary’s opening in 1835, prison labour has been an integral part of Canada’s penal history. With purported goals such as deterrence, rehabilitation, reintegration, and providing sustenance to the state, the practice of coercing or forcing a prisoner to work while serving a sentence of incarceration was further embedded in the penal landscape in 1980 with the inception of CORCAN, the Correctional Service of Canada’s prison labour program. Despite critiques of the prison as “a fiasco in terms of its own purposes” (Mathiesen, 2006, p. 141), prison labour continues as a mechanism of the state’s penal apparatus. Drawing on political economy of punishment and penal abolitionism literature, this study reveals and disrupts official discourses used to justify and perpetuate this modern form of slavery in Canada. Through a content analysis of 33 Solicitor General of Canada and CORCAN annual reports, I demonstrate how CORCAN’s prison labour program is legitimated as a “positive reform” (Mathiesen, 1974, p. 202) of Canada’s penal system, beneficial to the reintegration of prisoners into society, communities, and the needs of the Canadian state and economy. Underneath this benevolent mask such representations are found to reproduce neoliberal capitalism as the hegemonic form of economic organization, construing prisoners and prison labour as solutions to the gaps and shifts in the national economy and labour market. After outlining these contributions, I suggest ways that future research can reveal and discredit penal ‘solutions’ such as prison labour to eradicate the penal system as a means to address the harms inherent in our social and economic systems.

This thesis examines a widespread yet understudied tourism destination in Canada – the police museum. I visited and collected data at three police museums in the province of Ontario, Canada: the Toronto Police Museum and Discovery Centre in Toronto, the OPP Museum in Orillia, and the RCMP Musical Ride Centre in Ottawa. Engaging with Brown’s (2009) theory of “penal spectatorship”, I investigate how these sites (re)produce and circulate meanings about penality through their different representational practices. I identify three dominant themes and argue that the police museums foster social distance between visitors and those in conflict with the law. By sharing these findings, and along the way reconceptualizing the definition of police museum, identifying fifty-nine police museums in Canada, and presenting a Canadian police museum typology, this thesis lays some groundwork for expanding the horizons of penal spectatorship theory and penal tourism scholarship to the realm of policing.

Inaccurate instructions have been shown to interfere with or override the effects of otherwise effective behavioral contingencies. This effect may be mediated by such factors as the discriminability of current contingencies, histories with accurate and inaccurate instructions, and consequences associated with following instructions. The current experiment investigated the effects of instructions (both accurate and inaccurate) on response patterns when paired with feedback regarding correspondence between responding and instructions, feedback indicating potential point loss for non-correspondence, and point loss for non-correspondence. Inaccurate instructions produced only small and temporary disruptions in response patterns, as did the addition of feedback alone and feedback indicating potential point loss. The introduction of escalating point losses contingent on non-correspondence, ranging from 20%-50% of points earned, produced changes in response patterns that corresponded to the inaccurate instructions. These outcomes indicate that the imposition of direct consequences for noncompliance may alter the effects of other contingencies. Depending on the point at which point losses disrupt responding, such effects may be interpreted in terms of point loss avoidance or, alternatively, maximizing point gains.

This dissertation analyzes the obstacles against further cooperation in international economic relations. The first essay explains the gradual nature of trade liberalization. I show that existence of asymmetric information between governments provides a sufficient reason for gradualism to exist. Governments prefer starting small to reduce the cost of partner’s betrayal when there is sufficient degree of information asymmetry regarding the partner’s type. Learning about partner’s incentive structure enhances expectations, encouraging governments to increase their current level of cooperation. Specifically, the uninformed government’s subjective belief for the trading partner being good is improved as the partner acts cooperatively. This updated belief, in turn, lowers the subjective probability of future betrayal, enabling further progress in cooperation. The second essay analyzes the relationship between two countries facing two policy dilemmas in an environment with two way goods and capital flows. When issues are independent and countries are symmetric, signing separate agreements for tariffs (Free Trade Agreements-FTA) and for taxes (Tax Treaties-TT) provides the identical level of enforcement as signing a linked agreement. However, linkage can still improve the joint welfare by transferring the slack enforcement power in a case of asymmetric issues or countries. I report non-results in two cases where the policy issues are interconnected due to technological spillover effect of FDI. Moreover, I show that linking the agreements actually reduces enforcement when agreements are linked under a limited punishment rule and policy variables are strategic substitutes. The third essay investigates the welfare/enforcement consequences of linking trade and environmental agreements. In the standard literature, linking the agreements generate non-trivial results only when there is structural relation between the issues. I focus on institutional design of the linkage and show that even if environmental aspects of international trade are negligible linking the agreements might still have some interesting welfare implications under current GATT Rules. Specifically, when traded goods are substitutes in consumption, linking the environmental agreement with trade agreement under the Withdrawal of Equivalent Concession Rule (Article XXVIII) will reduce the enforcement. However, enforcement in environmental issue increases when the same rule is implemented in the absence of linkage.

What ought to be criminalized? There are many different answers to this question and the justifications vary widely. There are some things that most people seem to be able to agree onbut the opposite is very much true of other behaviors, examples that spring to mind are drugs, prostitution and gambling. The subject matter of this analysis falls square in the latter category. Bad samaritan laws prohibit individuals from refraining to rescue others in peril aslong as the risk to their own safety is minimal. Many countries in the world have passed such laws and yet they remain fiercely contested. At a glance this might seem odd: isn’t it a moral imperative to come to the aid of others who need our help, especially when there is little at stake for ourselves? Few actually contest this principle but there is a big leap from immorality to criminalization. Certain bad behaviors should be of no concern to the state but there are difficulties in deciding what kinds of immoral behavior should be subject to criminalization. This analysis is an attempt to determine whether bad samaritanism is the kind of wrong that merits state punishment. An ideational critique where a variety of arguments from the literature are surveyed, these arguments are then tested against the normative criteria of two theories of punishment: consequentialism and retributivism. Although there is some merit to bad samaritan laws, the author concludes that both traditions should reject them.

Contemporary American capital punishment contains many processual elements, such as the prisoner's last meal and the cleansing of his body immediately before death, that serve no concrete, practical purpose but share a nature with ritual practices. In this project, I utilize a hermeneutic phenomenological lens to identify and list these ritual elements. I also use concepts drawn from the structural functionalist tradition to both analyze the specific purposes the elements serve within individual parts of the death penalty and to discuss the overarching result of the inclusion of these elements within the process as a whole. Ultimately, I find that the ritual elements present in the capital punishment process serve a social control purpose, insulating and reinforcing the death penalty as a whole. Ritual works to do this by controlling the behavior and image of the prisoner and emotionally soothing both participants of the process and the public at large.

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