Consideration on the Injustice and Impolicy of Punishing Murder by Death.

One of the rarest of Rush's publications in the trade. The last auction record located is the Pennypacker sale. Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and founder of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, challenged the belief that the death penalty served as a deterrent. Rush believed that having a death penalty actually increased criminal conduct. Indeed, he believed public punishments, then common, to be counterproductive, proposing private containment, labor. solitude, and religious instruction for criminals. He gained the support of Benjamin Franklin and Philadelphia Attorney General William Bradford. Pennsylvania became the first state to consider degrees of murder based on culpability. In 1794, Pennsylvania repealed the death penalty for all offenses except first-degree murder.

No copies are listed in RareBookHub. Institutional copies are held by the Library Company, the Wellcome Collection, Dickinson College and the American Antiquarian Society.

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