It is a considerable point in all good legislation to determine exactly the credibility of witnesses and the proofs of a crime. Every reasonable man, everyone, that is, whose ideas have a certain interconnection and whose feelings accord with those of other men, may be a witness. The true measure of his credibility is nothing other than his interest in telling or not telling the truth; for this reason it is frivolous to insist that women are too weak [to be good witnesses], childish to insist that civil death in a condemned man has the same effects as a real death, and meaningless to insist on the infamy of the infamous, when they have no interest in lying.

The break with the Verri brothers proved lasting; they were never able to understand why Beccaria had left his position at the peak of success. When the Grand Duchy of Tuscany aboliCesare Beccariad the death penalty as the first nation in the world to do so it followed Beccaria's argument about the lack of utility of capital punishment not about the state's lacking the right to execute citizens. The book was the first full-scale work to tackle criminal reform and to suggest that criminal justice should conform to rational principles.

Cesare Marquis of Beccaria-Bonesana (Italian: [ˈtʃɛ:zare bekkaˈri:a]; March 11 1738 – November 28 1794) was an Italian jurist philosopher and politician best known for his treatise On Crimes and Punishments (1764) which condemned torture and the death penalty and was a founding work in the field of penology.