Klaas Rozemond

In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem Hannah Arendt argued that Adolf Eichmann did not fulfill a necessary condition for punishment: he did not have an “intent to do wrong‘. Eichmann wanted to be a law abiding citizen. Thus he was able to commit terrible acts that, according to the laws of Nazi Germany, were not crimes. Because of his inability to think, Eichmann never realized what he was doing. This is what Arendt called the banality of evil. Yet she was of the opinion that Eichmann deserved to be hanged. The reason for the death penalty in his case was the fact that he committed crimes against humanity. Arendt wrote her reasoning in a direct address to Eichmann. She seemed to suppose that Eichmann would have been able to understand this reasoning, in spite of his inability to think. A necessary condition for punishment seems to be the ability of the convict to understand the meaning of punishment and the moral and legal norms which are expressed by punishment. When this ability is absent, punishment of war criminals becomes a political act to eliminate enemies of the human race. That would go against modern conceptions of punishment as a meaningful communicative act towards the perpetrator.

In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem Hannah Arendt concluded that the Eichmann trial taught us the lesson of the ‘fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil’. Arendt explained the concept of banality as thoughtlessness: Eichmann did not realize what he was doing when he planned and executed the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Nazi Germany. In this article Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann’s evil is criticized from an internal perspective: the conclusion that Eichmann was thoughtless cannot be founded on the information Arendt herself gives, especially her reports on Eichmann’s idealism, his knowledge of Kant’s categorical imperative, his Pontius Pilate feeling during the Wannsee Conference, and the two crises of conscience Eichmann experienced during the Holocaust. This information shows that Eichmann clearly realized what he was doing in a moral sense and consciously decided to go on with the Final Solution on the basis of his own convictions as a Nazi

Les Johnston and Clifford Shearing argue in their book, Governing Security, that the state has lost its monopoly on the governance of security. Private security arrangements have formed a networked governance of security in which the criminal law of the state is just one of the many knots or ‘nodes’ of the security network. Johnston and Shearing consider On Crimes and Punishment, written by Cesare Beccaria in the 18th century, as the most important statement of the classical security program which has withered away in the networked governance of the risk society. This article critizes the way Johnston and Shearing analyze Beccaria’s social contract theory and it formulates a Beccarian theory of the criminal law and nodal governance which explains the causes of crime and the rise of nodal governance and defends the central role of the state in anchoring security arrangements based on private contracts and property rights

In their book De slapende rechter Dutch legal psychologists W.A. Wagenaar, H. Israëls and P.J. van Koppen claim that Dutch judges wrongfully convict suspects in certain cases because these judges generally fail to understand the way hypothetical reasoning works in relation to empirical evidence. This article argues that Wagenaar, Israëls and Van Koppen are basically right in their claim that reasoning on evidence in criminal cases should have the form of hypothetical reasoning. However, they fail to apply this form of reasoning to their own analysis of Dutch criminal cases and the causes of wrongful convictions. Therefore, their conclusion that a form of revision of convictions outside of the criminal law system should be introduced does not meet their own methodological standards