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The fantastical idea of virtue and the public good being a sufficient security to the state against the commission of crimes...was never mine. It is only the sanguinary hue of our penal laws which I meant to object to. Punishments I know are necessary, and I would provide them strict and inflexible, but proportioned to the crime. Death might be inflicted for murder and perhaps for treason, [but I] would take out of the description of treason all crimes which are not such in their nature. Rape, buggery, etc., punish by castration. All other crimes by working on high roads, rivers, gallies, etc., a certain time proportioned to the offence... Laws thus proportionate and mild should never be dispensed with. Let mercy be the character of the lawgiver, but let the judge be a mere machine. The mercies of the law will be dispensed equally and impartially to every description of men; those of the judge or of the executive power will be the eccentric impulses of whimsical, capricious designing man.


Thomas Jefferson


#public-good #security #virtue #death



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Removing or preventing corrupting dependence would enable men to be equal in practice. At age 16 Jefferson entered the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg and first met the law professor George Wythe who became his influential mentor. I contemplate it as a blot left in all our constitutions which if not covered will end in their destruction which is already hit by the gamblers in corruption and is sweeping away in its progress the fortunes and morals of our citizens.

Thomas Jefferson (April 13 1743 (April 2 1743 O. Elected Vice President in 1796 when he came in second to John Adams of the Federalists Jefferson opposed Adams and with Madison secretly wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions which attempted to nullify the Alien and Sedition Acts. In 1803 President Jefferson initiated a process of Indian tribal removal and relocation to the Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi River in order to open lands for eventual American settlers.

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