Considerations

Benjamin Rush signed the Declaration of Independence. The year after the Bill of Rights was ratified he published the first sustained American argument that the state should stop killing people.

This is that argument, newly modernized.

Rush was a Philadelphia physician. He founded the first American antislavery society. He founded the first prison reform society in the country. In 1792 he set out to prove that executing murderers is unjust...unwise...and contrary to the gospel. A minister writing under the name Theocratos answered him in print. Rush answered back in 1793. That reply forms the second half of this volume.

He already knew the deterrence argument was false. He already knew that executions teach the killing they claim to condemn. He already knew that the penalty falls on the poor...the friendless...the ones nobody comes for. He already knew that juries acquit rather than send a person to die. Two hundred and thirty years of evidence have confirmed all of it.

Rush ends by addressing the generations who would come after him. He expected us to know better. He expected us to act.

This edition presents his complete argument in contemporary language. Every position he took is preserved. Only the prose has been brought forward. A new foreword by Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood, who has stood in the death chamber thirteen times, puts Rush where he belongs...at the beginning of the American case against the death penalty.

Includes the 1792 Considerations, the 1793 Reply to Theocratos, a glossary of terms and a guide to further reading.

The Abolition Classics. The texts that built the case against the death penalty.