America can learn from ancient Rome how to better deal with crime today. Because democracy generally values all human beings, democratic Rome’s criminal statutes were not designed to repress, but quickly judge and inexpensively rehabilitate. For that reason, Rome did not use prisons, except as places of detention before trial.
One historian of early and middle Roman law summarizes: “Penalties were either pecuniary or they were capital. There was nothing else.”
But capital punishment was seldom utilized, because the law provided for an alternative way out of society: exile.
After the emperors overthrew democracy, penalties multiplied in variety and severity. The convict could be sentenced to hard labor, usually in the mines, or to life as a gladiator, which eventually brought death. Courts had discretion to inflict arbitrary punishments like flogging, crucifixion, burning, walling up alive and feeding the felon to the circus lions.
In all this, a person possessing common sense can see two great lessons. First, the country might want to return to our early practice of dealing with crime expeditiously and humanely before penitentiaries became all the rage. Second, America must by any legal means necessary prevent its governors and presidents from becoming kings and emperors and inflicting whatever damage they want on others.
Kimball Shinkoskey
Woods Cross, Utah
Confederates
not traitors
This is my response to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s editorial opinion printed Jan. 26 stating that Confederates were traitors. My opinion is that they were not. I suspect President Thomas Jefferson would have agreed with me.
There were two schools of thought concerning secession during the period of the Civil War. One said that secession was illegal. The other said secession was legal. The Constitution was silent as to secession in that time frame.
President Lincoln thought secession was legal. He treated the Confederate States of America as if they were a legal separate country from the United States when dealing with them.
If secession was illegal President Jefferson Davis of the Confederate States of America should have been tried for treason, but he was not. There was concern that he might be found innocent and they could not accept that. It wasn’t until 1869, four years after the Civil War ended, that the Supreme Court case of Texas v. White declared that secession was illegal. They had to do that. If they had not it would have meant that secession was legal and that the U.S. was responsible for the Civil War.
The Civil War was a war between two countries: the United States of America and the Confederate States of America.
Remember that the victor gets to write the history or eliminate history as they see it.
Darrell Williams Sr.
McAllen
Editor’s note: From Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address: “I hold that … no state, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence, within any State or States, against the authority of the United States, are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances.”
