Paul Rosenzweig in The Atlantic: “Pam Bondi transgresses basic principles of criminal law.”

Society for the Rule of Law Charter Member Paul Rosenzweig was in The Atlantic criticizing Attorney General Bondi’s retributive approach to criminal justice against Maduro. “Attorney General Pam Bondi has promised that Maduro and Flores ‘will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.’ Justice in the American system is supposed to be blind and impartial. By contrast, Bondi’s vow of wrathful punishment is profoundly illiberal, suggesting a lust for criminal vengeance.”

Rosenzweig describes how retributive criminal justice departs from the core legal principles that determine how responsible governments prosecute offenders. Before the enlightenment, states would punish criminals in order to retaliate against them for their offenses. “For millennia, punishment was considered morally defensible purely on retributive grounds. That vengeful justification yielded during the Enlightenment.” With the dawn of the Enlightenment and modern concepts of justice, criminal prosecution shifted to concrete pursuit of social good. “The justification for criminal punishment turned away from wrath, toward utilitarian concepts of effectiveness and social benefit. In this view, penal laws and policies were justified if they arguably benefited the majority of the population.” Punishment would incapacitate offenders from further harming society, deter future crimes, and/or rehabilitate individuals into more positive citizens.

Attorney General Bondi’s approach to prosecuting Maduro turns back the clock to pre-Enlightenment attitudes of retribution. “By invoking the ‘wrath’ of justice against Maduro, Trump and Bondi reach even further back into the past, summoning a far older, illiberal, retributive concept that modernity long ago abandoned.”

Read the article here.