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How Should We Punish Murder, Jonathan Simon

Jonathan S Simon

One of the “law jobs” of the law of murder is to regulate the level of “penal heat” produced in society by violent crime and its state punishment. The history of the law of murder in both England and the United States can be read as a series of adjustments aimed at ventilating penal heat under particular historical conditions with the aim of protecting increasingly sensitive democratic political institutions from the damage caused by excessive penal heat. In distinguishing murder and manslaughter, and later recognizing degrees of murder and later still the potential for early parole release, the law of …