Seminar with Antony Duff (Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Stirling)

The Rights (and Responsibilities) of the Guilty

The seminar will be a hybrid meeting. It will be held in room 110 in Pałac Larischa (Bracka 12) and on Teams on October 26, 2022 (Wednesday, 17:30 CEST). 

Abstract:

Defendants in criminal trials, whether innocent or guilty, enjoy the range of procedural rights that belong with the idea of due process or a fair trial. On some views, these rights properly or paradigmatically belong to the innocent, since they protect us against the risk of a mistaken conviction; the guilty enjoy these rights parasitically, since they must be presumed innocent until proven guilty; therefore a guilty person who is convicted after an unfair trial is not really wronged. I will resist this view: procedural rights properly belong to all defendants,in virtue of their role as citizens who are called to answer a charge of criminal wrongdoing.

My main concern, however, is with rights that offenders have in virtue of being offenders. The most controversial right in this context is the supposed right to be punished, and I say something about the sense we can make of this, and its relation to a right to be rehabilitated—a right to punitive rehabilitation. But I will also discuss the further rights that flow from an offender’s responsibilities, in particular the responsibility to answer for their crimes to their fellow citizens: these are rights to be enabled or assisted to discharge those responsibilities. This will require an account of what those responsibilities are, which will be part of a larger account of the essentially active role that offenders can be expected to play in a decent system of criminal law.