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An essay on crimes and punishments, by cesare beccaria translated from the italian, 1775 (original published in 1764), introduction, chapter i: of the origin of punishments, chapter ii: of the right to punish, chapter vi: of the proportion between crimes and punishments, chapter xii: of the intent of punishments, chapter xix: of the advantage of immediate punishment, chapter xxvii: of the mildness of punishments.

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An essay on crimes and punishments.

APA Citation Beccaria, Cesare, marchese di. (1778). An essay on crimes and punishments. Printed for Alexander Donaldson, and sold at his shops in London and Edinburgh. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.5479/sil.36417.39088001520584

MLA Citation Beccaria, Cesare, marchese di. An essay on crimes and punishments. A new edition corrected., Printed for Alexander Donaldson, and sold at his shops in London and Edinburgh, 1778, https://doi.org/10.5479/sil.36417.39088001520584

Chicago Beccaria, Cesare, marchese di. An essay on crimes and punishments. Printed for Alexander Donaldson, and sold at his shops in London and Edinburgh, 1778. doi: https://doi.org/10.5479/sil.36417.39088001520584

More Like This

An Essay on Crimes and Punishments

By cesare beccaria.

A shy and retiring man prone to unpredictable moods and educated in the law as well as economics, [1] Cesare Beccaria (1738 – 1794) was perhaps an unlikely figure to trigger a veritable revolution in criminology. As a young man, he fell in with brothers Pietro and Alessandro Verri and their “academy of fists,” [2] a Milanese organization referred to variously as an “intellectual circle” [3] and a “literary society,” [4] through which Beccaria was initiated into Enlightenment thought. [5] The Verri brothers supplied the assignment and the insider knowledge of the criminal justice system of the day, and at the behest of this group, Becarria completed his famous essay On Crimes and Punishments in 1764. [6]

In the time of its writing, Beccaria’s propositions that onerous punishments like torture and execution were unnecessarily cruel, disproportionate, and unlikely to serve as effective deterrents were novel. Although they owed a debt to his intellectual forebears, [7] these ideas were both radical and attractive to the European political and intellectual elite. [8] On Crimes and Punishments was rapidly translated into a host of other languages. [9] As well as informing a number of state statutes in the United States, [10] in insisting upon a balance between fidelity to the social contract and the need to ensure that criminal punishment is useful and beneficial to society, the work can be said to prefigure one of today’s two dominant schools of penological thought—utilitarianism—as well as the death penalty abolition movement. [11]

Evidence for Inclusion in Wythe's Library

Dean's Memo [12] includes the 1767 English edition of An Essay on Crimes and Punishments based on a reference in William Clarkin's biography of Wythe. In discussing Thomas Jefferson's education under Wythe, Clarkin states "[w]e do know that Jefferson studied ... Beccaria's Crime and Punishment " but Clarkin provides no source of corroborating evidence. [13] Brown's Bibliography [14] lists Beccaria's work in a choice of three languages (Italian, French, and English) and multiple editions. The Wolf Law Library purchased the first English edition as listed in Dean's memo.

Description of the Wolf Law Library's copy

Marbled boards with leather corners rebacked in period-style calf with blind tooling and red label to spine. Purchased from Meyer Boswell Books, Inc.

Images of the library's copy of this book are available on Flickr. View the record for this book in William & Mary's online catalog .

• An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (7MB PDF)
• George Wythe Room
• Wythe's Library
• ↑ Encyclopædia Britannica Online , s.v. " Cesare Beccaria ," accessed October 10, 2013.
• ↑ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy , s.v. " Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794) ," accessed October 10, 2013.
• ↑ Encyclopædia Britannica Online , s.v. "Cesare Beccaria."
• ↑ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy , s.v. "Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794)."
• ↑ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy , s.v. "Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794)".
• ↑ Memorandum from Barbara C. Dean , Colonial Williamsburg Found., to Mrs. Stiverson, Colonial Williamsburg Found. (June 16, 1975), 9 (on file at Wolf Law Library, College of William & Mary).
• ↑ William Clarkin, Serene Patriot: A Life of George Wythe (Albany, New York: Alan Publications, 1970), 42.
• ↑ Bennie Brown, "The Library of George Wythe of Williamsburg and Richmond," (unpublished manuscript, May, 2012) Microsoft Word file. Earlier edition available at: https://digitalarchive.wm.edu/handle/10288/13433 .

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The first amendment, historic document, on crimes and punishments (1764).

Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria | 1764

Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria, marquis of Gualdasco and Villaregio (1738-94), was the author of On Crimes and Punishments (1764). Inspired by the discussion of criminal law in Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws , this Milanese wrote a systematic treatise on the subject that was almost immediately translated into English and French. In it, he argued that the sole purpose of punishment is deterrence, and he denounced torture, the entertainment of secret accusations, and the death penalty; suggested that pre-trial detention can rarely be justified; and called for promptitude in punishment. The impact of his little book on the post-revolutionary revisal of the laws in the various nascent American states was considerable.

Selected by

Professor of History and Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College

Jeffrey Rosen

President and CEO, National Constitution Center

Colleen A. Sheehan

Professor of Politics at the Arizona State University School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership

Chapter 1: Of the Origin of Punishment

Laws are the conditions under which men, naturally independent, united themselves in society. Weary of living in a continual state of war, and of enjoying a liberty which became of little value, from the uncertainty of its duration, they sacrificed one part of it to enjoy the rest in peace and security. . . .

Chapter 2: Of the Right to Punish

Every punishment which does not arise from absolute necessity, says the great Montesquieu, is tyrannical. A proposition which may be made more general, thus. Every act of authority of one man over another, for which there is not an absolute necessity, is tyrannical. It is upon this, then, that the sovereign’s right to punish crimes is founded; that is, upon the necessity of defending the public liberty, intrusted to his care, from the usurpation of individuals. . . .

No man ever gave up his liberty merely for the good of the public. Such a chimera exists only in romances. Every individual wishes, if possible, to be exempt from the compacts that bind the rest of mankind. . . .

Observe, that by justice I understand nothing more than that bond, which is necessary to keep the interest of individuals united; without which, men would return to the original state of barbarity. All punishments, which exceed the necessity of preserving this bond, are in their nature unjust.

Chapter 6: Of the Proportion between Crimes and Punishments

It is not only the common interest of mankind that crimes should not be committed, but that crimes of every kind should be less frequent, in proportion to the evil they produce to society. Therefore, the means made use of by the legislature to prevent crimes, should be more powerful, in proportion as they are destructive of the public safety and happiness, and as the inducements to commit them are stronger. Therefore there ought to be a fixed proportion between crimes and punishments.

Chapter 12: Of the Intent of Punishments

From the foregoing considerations it is evident, that the intent of punishments is not to torment a sensible being, nor to undo a crime already committed. Is it possible that torments, and useless cruelty, the instruments of furious fanaticism, or of impotency of tyrants, can be authorized by a political body? which, so far from being influenced by passion, should be the cool moderator of the passions of individuals. Can the groans of a tortured wretch recal the time past, or reverse the crime he has committed? The end of punishment, therefore, is no other, than to prevent others from committing the like offence. Such punishments, therefore, and such a mode of inflicting them, ought to be chosen, as will make strongest and most lasting impressions on the minds of others, with the least torment to the body of the criminal.

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America Has Too Many Laws

An excess of restrictions has taken a very real toll on the lives of everyday Americans. Their stories must be told.

Our country has always been a nation of laws, but something has changed dramatically in recent decades. Contrary to the narrative that Congress is racked by an inability to pass bills, the number of laws in our country has simply exploded. Less than 100 years ago, all of the federal government’s statutes fit into a single volume. By 2018, the U.S. Code encompassed 54 volumes and approximately 60,000 pages. Over the past decade, Congress has adopted an average of 344 new pieces of legislation each session. That amounts to 2 million to 3 million words of new federal law each year. Even the length of bills has grown—from an average of about two pages in the 1950s to 18 today.

And that’s just the average. Nowadays, it’s not unusual for new laws to span hundreds of pages. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 ran more than 600 pages, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 almost 1,000 pages, and the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021—which included a COVID-19 relief package—more than 5,000 pages. About the last one, the chair of the House Rules Committee quipped that “if we provide[d] everyone a paper copy we would have to destroy an entire forest.” Buried in the bill were provisions for horse racing, approvals for two new Smithsonian museums, and a section on foreign policy regarding Tibet. By comparison, the landmark protections afforded by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 took just 28 pages to describe.

These figures from Congress only begin to tell the story. Federal agencies have been busy too. They write new rules and regulations implementing or interpreting Congress’s laws. Many bear the force of law. Thanks in part to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, agencies now publish their proposals and final rules in the Federal Register; their final regulations can also be found in the Code of Federal Regulations. When the Federal Register started in 1936, it was 16 pages long. In recent years, that publication has grown by an average of more than 70,000 pages annually.

From the July 1979 issue: Too much law, too little justice

Meanwhile, by 2021 the Code of Federal Regulations spanned about 200 volumes and more than 188,000 pages. How long would it take a person to read all those federal regulations? According to researchers at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, “over three years … And that is just the reading component. Not comprehension … not analysis.”

Even these numbers do not come close to capturing all of the federal government’s activity. Today, agencies don’t just promulgate rules and regulations. They also issue informal “guidance documents” that ostensibly clarify existing regulations but in practice often “carry the implicit threat of enforcement action if the regulated public does not comply.” In a recent 10-year span, federal agencies issued about 13,000 guidance documents. Some of these documents appear in the Federal Register; some don’t. Some are hard to find anywhere. Echoing Justice Brandeis’s efforts, a few years ago the Office of Management and Budget asked agencies to make their guidance available in searchable online databases. But some agencies resisted. Why? By some accounts, they simply had no idea where to find all of their own guidance. Ultimately, officials abandoned the idea.

Judicial decisions contain vital information about how our laws and rules operate. Today, most of these decisions can be found in searchable electronic databases, but some come with high subscription fees. If you can’t afford those, you may have to consult a library. Good luck finding what you need there: Reported federal decisions now fill more than 5,000 volumes. Each volume clocks in at about 1,000 pages, for a total of more than 5 million pages. Back in 1997, Thomas Baker, a law professor, found that “the cumulative output of all the lower federal courts … amounts to a small, but respectable library that, when stacked end-to-end, runs for one-and-one-half football fields.” One can only wonder how many football fields we’re up to now.

As you might imagine, much in this growing mountain of law isn’t exactly intuitive. Did you know that it’s a federal crime to enter a post office while intoxicated? Or to sell a mattress without a warning label? And if you’re a budding pasta entrepreneur, take note: By federal decree, macaroni must have a diameter between 0.11 and 0.27 inches, while vermicelli must not be more than 0.06 inches in diameter. Both may contain egg whites—but those egg whites cannot constitute more than 2 percent of the weight of the finished product.

If officials in the federal government have been busy, it’s not as if their counterparts at the state and local levels have been idle. Virginia prohibits hunting a bear with the assistance of dogs on Sundays. In Massachusetts, be careful not to sing or render “The Star-Spangled Banner” as “a part of a medley of any kind”—that can invite a fine. The New York City Administrative Code spans more than 30 titles and the Rules of the City of New York more than 50. In 2010, The New York Times reported on the regulatory hurdles associated with opening a new restaurant in the city. It found that an individual “may have to contend with as many as 11 city agencies, often with conflicting requirements; secure 30 permits, registrations, licenses and certificates; and pass 23 inspections.” And that’s not even counting what it takes to secure a liquor license.

To appreciate the growth of our law at all levels, count the lawyers. In recent years, the legal profession has proved a booming business. From 1900 to 2021, the number of lawyers in the United States grew by 1,060 percent, while the population grew by about a third that rate. Since 1950, the number of law schools approved by the American Bar Association has nearly doubled.

Our legal institutions have become so complicated and so numerous that even federal agencies cannot agree on how many federal agencies exist. A few years ago, an opinion writer in Forbes pointed out that the Administrative Conference of the United States lists 115 agencies in the appendix of its Sourcebook of United States Executive Agencies . But the Sourcebook also cautions that there is “no authoritative list of government agencies.” Moreover, the United States Government Manual and USA.gov maintain different and competing lists. And both of these lists differ in turn from the list kept by the Federal Register. That last publication appears to peg the number of federal agencies at 436.

Reflecting on these developments sometimes reminds us of Parkinson’s Law. In 1955, a noted historian, C. Northcote Parkinson, posited that the number of employees in a bureaucracy rises by about 5 percent a year “irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done.” He based his amusing theory on the example of the British Royal Navy, where the number of administrative officers on land grew by 78 percent from 1914 to 1928, during which time the number of navy ships fell by 67 percent and the number of navy officers and seamen dropped by 31 percent. It seemed to Parkinson that in the decades after World War I, Britain had created a “magnificent Navy on land.” (He also quipped that the number of officials would have “multiplied at the same rate had there been no actual seamen at all.”)

Does Parkinson’s Law reflect our own nation’s experience? In the 1930s, the Empire State Building—the tallest in the world at the time—took a little more than 13 months to build. A decade later, the Pentagon took 16 months. In the span of eight years during the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration built some 4,000 schools, 130 hospitals, 29,000 bridges, and 150 airfields; laid 9,000 miles of storm drains and sewer lines; paved or repaired 280,000 miles of roads; and planted 24 million trees.

Compare those feats to more recent ones. In 2022, an op-ed in The Washington Post observed that it had taken Georgia almost $1 billion and 21 years—14 of which were spent overcoming “regulatory hurdles”—to deepen a channel in the Savannah River for container ships. No great engineering challenge was involved; the five-foot deepening project “essentially … required moving muck.” Raising the roadway on a New Jersey bridge took five years, 20,000 pages of paperwork, and 47 permits from 19 agencies—even though the project used existing foundations. The Post reported that in recent years, Congress has required more than 4,000 annual reports from 466 federal agencies and nonprofits. According to the lawyer and author Philip K. Howard, one report on the printing operations of the Social Security Administration took 95 employees more than four months to complete. Among other things, it dutifully informed Congress of the age and serial number of a forklift.

Read: How to fix America’s infrastructure

Not only have our laws grown rapidly in recent years; so have the punishments they carry. You might think that federal criminal laws are reserved for the worst of the worst—individuals who have committed acts so egregious that they merit the attention not just of state authorities but of federal authorities, and not just civil fines but potential prison time. But if that’s your intuition, ask yourself this question: How many federal crimes do you think we have these days?

It turns out no one knows. Yes, every few years some enterprising academic or government official sets out to count them. They devote considerable resources and time (often years) to the task. But in the end, they come up short.

In 1982, the Department of Justice undertook what stands as maybe the most comprehensive count to date. A lawyer spent more than two years reading the U.S. Code—at that time, some 23,000 pages. The best the lawyer could say was that there were about 3,000 federal crimes.

Today, the U.S. Code is roughly twice the length it was in 1982, and contemporary guesses put the number of federal crimes north of 5,000. As the American Bar Association has said, “Whatever the exact number of crimes that comprise today’s ‘federal criminal law,’ it is clear that the amount of individual citizen behavior now potentially subject to federal criminal control has increased in astonishing proportions in the last few decades.”

Part of the reason no one can easily count the number of federal crimes is that our federal criminal code was “not planned; it just grew,” as Ronald Gainer, a retired Justice Department official, puts it. We do not have any single place to which people can turn to discern what our criminal laws prohibit. Sure, there’s Title 18 of the U.S. Code, “Crimes and Criminal Procedure.” But in truth, criminal laws are scattered here and there throughout various federal statutory titles and sections, the product of different pieces of legislation and different Congresses. Really, our federal criminal law is, Gainer writes, “a loose assemblage of … components that were built hastily to respond to perceptions of need and to perceptions of the popular will.”

That’s not the only confounding factor, though. Many federal criminal statutes overlap entirely, are duplicative in part, or, when juxtaposed, raise perplexing questions about what they mean. Take fraud. We have a federal mail-fraud law. We have a federal wire-fraud law. We have federal bribery and illegal-gratuities laws. We also have a federal law forbidding the deprivation of “honest services,” though no one is exactly sure what it does (or does not) add to all those other laws about fraud. On top of all this, more new laws criminalizing fraud are proposed during just about every session of Congress.

Once more, Congress’s output represents just the tip of the iceberg. Our administrative agencies don’t just turn out rules with civil penalties attached to them; every year, they generate more and more rules carrying criminal sanctions as well. How many? Here again, no one seems sure. But estimates suggest that at least 300,000 federal-agency regulations carry criminal sanctions today.

If you were to sit down and read through all of our criminal laws and regulations—or at least flip through them—you would find plenty of surprises. You would learn, for example, that it’s a federal crime to damage a government-owned lamp in Washington, D.C.; consult with a known pirate; or advertise wine by suggesting its intoxicating qualities.

The truth is, we now have so many federal criminal laws covering so many things that the legal scholar John Baker suggests that “there is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime.”

Numbers tell part of the story, but only a part. Today, the law touches our lives in very different ways than it once did.

In the past, the rules that governed what happened in our homes, families, houses of worship, and schools were found less in law than in custom or were left to private agreement and individual judgment. Even in the areas of life where law has long played a larger role, its character has changed. Once, most of our law came from local and state authorities; now federal law often dominates.

Consider just a few examples here. In the past, a seventh grader who traded burps for laughs in class might have been sent to the principal’s office; these days, law-enforcement officers may make an arrest . A 24-year-old who downloads academic articles that don’t belong to him isn’t just reprimanded; now we threaten him with decades in federal prison . On a more systemic scale, consider that for most of our history, responsibility for educating the young and setting public-school policy rested almost completely in the hands of parents and local and state officials. Until 1979, the federal government didn’t even have a Cabinet-level Department of Education. Now that federal agency employs more than 4,000 people and has an annual budget of almost $70 billion. Although it shares much of that money with states and local schools, often it does so on the condition that they comply with an ever-growing list of federal mandates.

What’s responsible for the changing character of our law? No doubt it’s a complicated story, and we live in a complex world. But just consider what America looked like when Alexis de Tocqueville traveled the country in the 1830s. As the historian Niall Ferguson has observed, Tocqueville “marveled” at the way early Americans “preferred voluntary association to government regulation.” As Tocqueville himself recorded, “not only do they have commercial and industrial associations … they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books … [and] create hospitals, prisons, schools.” In short, Tocqueville concluded, “everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.”

These days, many of those old civic bonds are fraying. In his book Bowling Alone , Robert Putnam reports that “both civic engagement and organizational involvement experienced marked declines during the second half of the twentieth century.” In recent years, those declines have “continued uninterrupted.” A few decades ago, more than 70 percent of Americans were members of a church, synagogue, or mosque; today fewer than half are. According to the Elks, a fraternal order that includes six presidents among its past members, the organization has “struggled” in recent years “with [a] massive decline in membership.” The Freemasons have shed 3 million from their ranks since the 1950s—a 75 percent drop.

Accompanying this decline in civic association, we have experienced a profound decline in trust in one another. We are less inclined to respect or even tolerate different ideas about how to live, raise children, and pray. Studies show that we consider those who disagree with our own political views to be “immoral” or “unintelligent.” In one recent survey by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, roughly half of voters expressed the view that individuals who support “the other party” pose “threats to the American way of life”; about 40 percent said the use of violence may be warranted to “prevent” those who hold competing views “from achieving their goals.” Rather than trust individuals to judge what is best for our own happiness, health, and safety, we have become comfortable doing what the “experts” tell us—and comfortable with forcing others to do the same.

It’s hard not to wonder whether the explosion in our laws owes at least something to these developments. After all, when trust in individual judgment, civic institutions, and social norms fades, where else is there to look for answers but the law? Perhaps, too, the law does more, and does more at the national level, because it can. Communication across the continent has become a simple thing; so has the capacity to store and search large amounts of information and monitor the movement of individuals—all of which allows authorities to direct and track compliance with their rules in ways that were unthinkable even a generation ago.

Whatever the combination of causes, one thing seems clear: If in this country law has always been king, its empire has never been so expansive. More than ever, we turn to the law to address any problem we perceive. More than ever, we are inclined to use national authorities to dictate a single answer for the whole country. More than ever, we are willing to criminalize conduct with which we disagree. And more than ever, if elected officials seem slow to act, we look to other sources of authority to fill the void.

The explosion of law has taken a very real toll on the lives of everyday Americans. Their stories must be told.

Early one morning in 2010, Sandra Yates was doing laundry when she noticed something alarming: Seven agents in bulletproof vests, hands primed on holstered guns, were approaching her bungalow on Anna Maria Island, Florida.

It turned out they were looking for her husband.

“He’s out crabbing,” she told them, mystified by what they could want with John, a 58-year-old commercial fisherman who had worked his way up from deckhand to captain of his own small crew. Sandra and John had met as teenagers 36 years earlier in Ohio. John’s father owned a bait shop, and together father and son spent many weekends fishing on Lake Erie. As Sandra put it, John “more or less grew up on the water.” The couple married, had a child, and moved to Florida to follow family and stake out a new life. John got a job doing what he loved most—fishing—while Sandra worked as a paralegal. By the time the agents showed up, the couple had lived in Florida for more than 28 years.

When Sandra called John to let him know that officers were looking for him, he was just as confused as she was. After all, he had a nearly blemish-free record as a fisherman, and he couldn’t remember having done anything that might interest the authorities. John remained just as confused when he returned to shore and agents handcuffed and transported him two hours away to Fort Myers for booking.

There, John finally learned the charges against him. Among other things, he stood accused of violating the federal Sarbanes-Oxley Act and faced a potential term of 20 years in prison.

Now, you might be wondering: Sarbanes-Oxley? Isn’t that some sort of law about financial crimes? If you poke around the internet (as Sandra did late into the night after her husband’s arrest), you will find the law described as being designed “to help protect investors from fraudulent financial reporting by corporations.” You will also learn that Congress adopted the law after a financial scandal brought down the accounting firm Arthur Andersen. Some say the firm engaged in a document-shredding frenzy after being tipped off about an impending federal investigation into work it had performed for its client Enron.

All of that might lead you to ask: What does any of this have to do with a small-time fisherman?

The story starts back in 2007. One day, while John was fishing in the Gulf of Mexico on his boat, The Miss Katie, a state wildlife agent (cross-deputized by federal authorities) came alongside. As John tells it, the agent boarded the boat for a “safety inspection” and then asked John to open up the fish hold. The agent said he wanted to measure the fish—all 2,000 pounds of them.

Read: Why there are too many patents in America

After spending hours rummaging through the pile, the agent declared his verdict. According to his measurements (which John disputed), 72 red grouper were under the 20-inch harvesting minimum set by then-current federal regulations. True, even by the agent’s count only three fish were under 19 inches, and each was at least 18.75 inches. But all the same, 72 undersize fish it was. The agent ordered John to store the undersize fish in separate crates, issued a citation, and left.

After John returned to dock a few days later, the agent measured the fish again. This time, though, the agent found 69 undersize fish, not 72. What’s more, the agent’s individual measurements didn’t quite match those he had taken days earlier while on board. From that and other evidence, the agent grew suspicious that the fish at the dock were not the same fish he had measured at sea. Still, nothing seemed to come of it. John didn’t hear anything more from authorities for almost three years—that is, until the day armed agents showed up at his front door.

At this point, you still might be wondering what any of this has to do with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. As John learned after his arrest, that law was written in broad terms. The act doesn’t just make it unlawful to destroy financial records or documents “with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence” a federal investigation. It also prohibits the destruction of any other “tangible object” for the same purpose.

And, according to the government, John had done just that. The government’s theory ran this way: John or a member of his crew must have thrown overboard the undersize fish the agent had identified while out on the water. Before returning to port, the crew must have then replaced those fish with new (and still undersize?) substitutes from the remaining catch. On the basis of this theory, the government argued, John had destroyed “tangible objects”—fish—with the intent of impeding a federal investigation.

John saw things differently. By his account, it was hardly surprising that the agent’s two sets of measurements didn’t quite align. Fish expand and contract when they are moved into and out of cool storage and onto hot decks or docks. According to John, the agent wasn’t exactly a fish-measuring expert, either; among other things, he didn’t properly account for the lengthy lower jaws of red grouper. To this day, John considers the government’s theory that he threw undersize fish overboard only to replace them with new, still undersize substitutes “about the … stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Stupid or not, it turned John and Sandra’s life upside down. In addition to facing prison time, John lost his job—no one would hire a potential felon. He was “contaminated,” as Sandra put it. The couple lost their principal source of income and, soon, their house. They stopped taking family vacations with the grandchildren they were raising and tried to make ends meet by opening a used-furniture store. John refurbished furniture and Sandra painted it. To prepare for trial, Sandra stayed up late into the night researching the law and corresponding with attorneys and agency officials.

It was tough going. The family’s ordeal was not made any easier by the knowledge that federal officials had recently revised their regulations. When the agent boarded John’s boat in 2007, the minimum harvesting size for red grouper was 20 inches. But by the time John was arrested three years later, that had changed. The new rule? Eighteen inches. According to the agent’s measurements, not a single one of John’s fish was that small.

Still, the government pressed ahead with its case. In time, prosecutors offered a plea deal that would allow John to plead guilty to an offense involving the forcible opposition of a federal officer. But John saw no basis for that charge. He wanted to clear his name and insisted on standing trial.

It did not go well. More than a year after his arrest and four years after the agent boarded his boat, a jury found John guilty of the Sarbanes-Oxley offense. At sentencing, the court imposed a term of 30 days behind bars (prosecutors had asked for closer to two years). The court also sentenced John to three years of supervised release, ordered him to submit a DNA sample, and subjected him to other restrictions. The prosecution team issued a press release touting its victory.

By now, it was nearing Christmas 2011. John sought permission to report to prison after the holiday so he could spend time with his grandchildren, 8 and 12 years old at the time. The request was denied. So John sat in prison over Christmas. What’s more, at age 59 he was required to wear an ankle bracelet marking him as an escape risk.

After serving his sentence, John was ready to move on. The case had consumed his family for too long. But Sandra was determined to appeal. She didn’t want government officials to “do to someone else what they did to us.” Even when their appeal failed, Sandra wouldn’t give up. She persuaded John and his attorney (today, a federal judge) to petition the Supreme Court to review John’s Sarbanes-Oxley conviction. It was the longest of long shots—the Supreme Court agrees to hear only about 1 percent of the thousands of petitions it receives every year.

But seven years after that agent boarded The Miss Katie, John and Sandra finally felt a sliver of hope: In 2014, the Court announced that it would hear the case.

Nearly a year later, John was working in the couple’s furniture shop when he learned of the Supreme Court’s decision. By the margin of just a single vote, the Court had ruled in his favor. As the majority saw it, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act may prohibit the destruction of logbooks, spreadsheets, financial records, and other objects designed “to record or preserve information.” But for all its expansiveness, the law does not reach red grouper thrown overboard.

In a sense, it was a huge victory for the Yates family. The highest court in the land had overturned John’s Sarbanes-Oxley conviction. He and Sandra had won all the vindication our legal system can afford.

Still, you might forgive them for seeing things differently. The family’s ordeal had lasted eight years. They had endured proceedings before three courts and 13 different judges. “I feel good,” John said after the Court’s decision. “But you’ve got to look at it from my situation. I’ve already done the time. I’ve already paid the price. I lost a lot of wages because of this”—at least $600,000, he estimates. Really, as Sandra said, “we lost everything we had.” John hasn’t been back on a commercial fishing boat since his conviction. The couple now lives in a triple-wide trailer and depends on Social Security income and the extra jobs Sandra manages to get. Sandra estimates that taxpayers spent as much as $11 million on the prosecution of the case.

What happened to the federal officials who pursued John for all those years? After complaints emerged of “heavy-handed and unfair enforcement” against other fishermen like John, the inspector general of the Department of Commerce launched an internal investigation. His final report dryly concluded that the agency’s enforcement officials had created a “highly-charged regulatory climate and dysfunctional relationship between [the agency] and the fishing industry.” But, he added, the investigation hadn’t been easy. It seems that a key enforcement official had destroyed many of his files during it. (An anonymous whistleblower described a “shredding party.”) We can find no public record of criminal charges being brought against anyone for the destruction of those tangible objects. But when announcing the department’s findings to Congress, the inspector general said the quiet part out loud: How do you think enforcement officials would have reacted “if a fishing company they were investigating had done the same thing”?

In 2012, while John was appealing his case, Sandra pleaded her family’s cause to the government this way:

We are raising two grandchildren. We are simple people. The actions of these agents were damaging. These children have been affected also. Monies that would have been for them are gone. They have not even been afforded even family vacations any more … Our lives are forever changed by this, and I don’t believe these officers give a hoot who they hurt or why. [John] is a sixty-year-old man that has been beat up by these rogue agents. Jobs are tough enough to get when you are in your prime. He has been reduced to odd jobs. I am the primary provider for the family and I am old and tired, but I will not lie down or give up. We are meager people and don’t want much, but fair and professional treatment should be mandatory for all.

Sandra’s words are powerful, maybe even more so when you consider the fact that there was nothing particularly unusual about John’s case, at least from one point of view. Federal-agency officials had adopted a regulation setting the minimum harvesting size at 20 inches, only later changing it to 18 inches. Another agency official concluded that John had 72 undersize fish on board and 69 at the dock. Meanwhile, Congress had adopted a broad law forbidding the intentional destruction of any “tangible object” in the face of a federal investigation. Without a doubt, a good argument could be made that John’s alleged conduct violated this mix of statutory and regulatory rules.

From another perspective, though, Sandra and John’s experience invites us to consider how well we are doing as a nation in our aspiration to live under the rule of law where ordinary people have room to grow, plan, and make their own way. Yes, our Founders desperately wanted a nation of written laws. But from their study of history, they also appreciated the dangers that follow when lawmaking becomes too easy, when it is a task too far removed from the people, and when laws become too hard to find and too difficult to understand. The Roman emperor Caligula used to post his new laws on columns so tall and in a hand so small that the people could not read them. The whole point was to ensure that people lived in fear—the most powerful of a tyrant’s weapons. Our Founders wanted no part of that for us. As much as they revered written laws, they also knew that when we turn to law to solve every problem and answer humanity’s age-old debates about how we should live, raise our children, and pray, we invite a Leviathan into our lives.

This essay was adapted from Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law .

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Violent Crime Dropping Sharply in Cities

August 12, 2024 at 6:56 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“New preliminary data from major U.S. cities shows a sharp drop in violent crime in the first half of the year — more than 25% in some communities — as the Covid-era crime wave recedes,” Axios reports.

“The drop in violent crime puts a serious dent in one of the most frequently used lines of attack by former President Trump and his allies, who have sought to tie Democrats to the issue since 2020.”

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About Political Wire

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC .

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GCSE Crime and Punishment Review Lessons - Revision Unit and Work Pack

Subject: Religious education

Age range: 14-16

Resource type: Unit of work

Last updated

7 August 2024

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Themes: Crime and Punishment (AQA - though applicable across specifications) unit to include PowerPoint-led learning through an engaging and well-designed Work Pack. This revision unit explores all of the nuanced and specialist learning by adopting socially distant teaching techniques.

The PowerPoints aid a ‘plug in and play’ approach to teaching, benefiting both subject specialists and non-subject specialists alike.

In addition, the Powerpoint and the Work Pack now includes all resources that the students need to access an engaging, high-quality education.

Lessons include: L1 Crime and Punishment, Aims of Punishment, Prisons, Community Service L2 Corporal and Capital Punishment L3 Suffering and Forgiveness; Exam Practise Comprehensive Work Pack also included with a variety of activities.

Scaffolding is included in the Powerpoint itself and also in the Work Pack to ensure maximum engagement and comprehension. Challenges (extension tasks) also exist throughout the unit to further enhance skills and understanding.

There are a variety of knowledge, understanding and evaluation tasks throughout the unit, including video and debate activities that the students always love - year-on-year.

Please give feedback! I am always happy to respond to comments - whether positive or constructive - this will help to improve the quality of my resources in the future and, more importantly, the quality of pupils’ RE/RS education in general - which is what we’re all here for!

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Essay on Crime And Punishment

Students are often asked to write an essay on Crime And Punishment in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Crime And Punishment

Understanding crime.

Crime is an act that breaks the law. It can be small, like stealing candy, or big, like robbing a bank. Some people commit crimes because they are poor, others because they want power or excitement. No matter the reason, crime harms others and disrupts peace in society.

Purpose of Punishment

Punishment is given to people who commit crimes. It serves two main purposes. First, it discourages the person from committing the crime again. Second, it warns others that crime leads to unpleasant consequences.

Types of Punishment

Punishments can be different based on the crime. For small crimes, punishments can be fines or community service. For serious crimes, punishments can be jail time or even the death penalty in some places.

Effectiveness of Punishment

Punishment can stop people from committing crimes, but it’s not always effective. Sometimes, people commit crimes again after being punished. This shows that we need to find better ways to prevent crime, like education and providing opportunities.

250 Words Essay on Crime And Punishment

Understanding crime and punishment.

Crime refers to acts that break the law. These are actions that society and law consider wrong. For example, stealing or hurting someone physically. Punishment, on the other hand, is what happens when someone commits a crime. It could be a fine, jail time, or community service.

Why Crimes Happen

People commit crimes for many reasons. Some do it out of need, like stealing food to eat. Others might do it because they think it’s fun or exciting. Sometimes, people commit crimes because they are angry or upset. Understanding these reasons can help us stop crimes before they happen.

Punishments are given based on the crime. Small crimes, like stealing a candy bar, might result in a small fine. Bigger crimes, like hurting someone, could lead to jail time. Some punishments aim to help the person learn from their mistakes, like community service.

Effect of Punishment

The goal of punishment is to stop people from committing crimes. It makes people think twice before doing something wrong. Yet, sometimes, punishment doesn’t work. Some people continue to commit crimes even after being punished. This shows that we need to find better ways to stop crime.

In conclusion, crime and punishment are important aspects of our society. They help keep order and ensure safety. By understanding the reasons behind crime and the effects of punishment, we can work towards a safer and more peaceful society.

500 Words Essay on Crime And Punishment

What is punishment.

Punishment is what happens when someone is found guilty of a crime. It’s a way for society to show that breaking the law is not okay. Punishments can also be different based on the crime. For example, if someone steals, they might have to give back what they stole and spend some time in jail. If someone hurts another person, they might have to go to jail for a long time.

The Purpose of Punishment

Punishment serves several important roles. First, it helps to teach the person who committed the crime that what they did was wrong. This is called deterrence. The idea is that if the punishment is tough, people will think twice before committing a crime.

Finally, punishment can also help the person who committed the crime to become a better person. This is called rehabilitation. The idea is to help them understand why what they did was wrong and how they can avoid doing it in the future.

The Balance Between Crime and Punishment

It’s important to make sure the punishment fits the crime. This means that the punishment should be just right – not too harsh, not too light. If the punishment is too harsh, it’s not fair to the person who committed the crime. If it’s too light, it might not stop them or others from committing more crimes.

Final Thoughts

Crime and punishment are important parts of our society. They help keep order and teach people the difference between right and wrong. It’s a complex system, but it’s necessary to ensure that we can all live in peace and safety. It’s also a system that is always changing and evolving, as we learn more about what works best to deter crime and rehabilitate those who have committed crimes.

Remember, the goal is not just to punish, but also to prevent future crimes and help those who have committed crimes to become better people. This way, we can all live in a safer and more peaceful society.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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Crime and Public Safety | Nuestra Familia trial reveals secrets of the…

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Crime and public safety | map: crozier fire evacuation zone reduced in sierra nevada, crime and public safety, crime and public safety | ‘power, profits, and punishment’: nuestra familia trial reveals secrets of the brain trust behind a massive criminal network in northern california, former insiders take the witness stand.

Four men, all incarcerated in California’s prison system, face federal charges of racketeering and conspiracy to commit murder. Two of the defendants are in their 70s and have watched the trial from state-issued wheelchairs, one so afflicted he’s the only one left sitting in the courtroom when jurors enter and exit. But despite the pair’s age and ailing health, prosecutors say they are among the most powerful criminals in the state with the ability to control thousands of gang “soldiers” in neighborhood “regiments” and prisons.

The defendants, David “DC” Cervantes, 76, James Perez, 70, Guillermo Solorio, 45, and George Franco, 59, are alleged to be part of the Nuestra Familia’s leadership, which controls affiliate cliques that are part of the Norteño gang. Based in Northern California, the gang is strongest in the Bay Area and in Monterey County, where its “regiments” pay taxes from drug proceeds and other illegal activity, prosecutors said at the start of trial. Some of the gang’s more violent members have ties to the South Bay, authorities say.

“You’ll hear one Nuestra Familia insider describe a Nuestra Familia account with $250,000 in it,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Leif Dautch said in his opening statement to the jury. The trial and the gang’s purpose, he said, could be summed as “power, profits and punishment.”

The four men are accused of not only running the gang, but of plotting to murder California prisoners. None of the murder plots were successful, prosecutors say. The victims were either stabbed and survived, or moved off of general population yards before they could be harmed.

The main witnesses include men who rose the ranks of the Nuestra Familia, like Matthew Rocha, a former gang leader who testified he was second-in-command before a power struggle with Perez placed his status in jeopardy. Rocha was eventually stabbed in Pleasant Valley State Prison in 2019 , setting off a riot as those loyal to him rushed to protect him. After the stabbing, he left the gang and began cooperating with authorities, culminating with him taking the witness stand this week.

“After the incident on the (prison) yard and how everything transpired, I was unable to go back to the yard,” Rocha testified, explaining how he came to leave the gang.

Rocha’s testimony was an autobiography of sorts. He talked about his upbringing in Salinas, joining a gang as a young teen and spending most of his teen years incarcerated in the California Youth Authority. When he made it to adult prison, he was quickly recruited by the Nuestra Familia and learned the basics — how to make weapons out of loose metal and plastic, how to write coded messages and how to smuggle contraband. Anatomy charts were used to teach prisoners the most effective ways to mortally wound a person, according to trial testimony.

In 1995, prison became Rocha’s life. He was sentenced to 26 years to life for murder and manslaughter convictions, and eventually became a leader in the Nuestra Familia.

Perez’s lawyer, Shawn Halbert, told jurors in opening statements that Rocha’s testimony is his latest act in an ongoing attempt to get back at Perez over their feud. She described Rocha as an unrepentant killer who was “actively trying to kill Mr. Perez” in 2019. The defense attorneys also said Perez and Franco were leaders of a hunger strike and peace agreement between previously warring gangs that sought to reduce prison violence.

The alleged murder victims were all given due process by the Nuestra Familia and found “guilty” of violating gang tenants, prosecutors said. The infractions ranged from being suspected police informants to murdering a Norteño member without authorization. One of the prosecution witnesses, a former Nuestra Familia member named Donald Moran, who went by “Donald Duck,” testified he was involved in plots to kill a man whose wife had testified in a criminal case.

Eventually, like Rocha, Moran said he grew disenfranchised with the gang and agreed to testify against his former cohorts.

“The violence, having members you know, killed, trying to kill them, hurting innocent people, involving innocent people, what we would call civilians…Things of that nature,” he said when asked to explain his decision. He later added, “I have no obligation to these people anymore. I’m no longer that person. I don’t want to be that person and be a part of what they’re a part of. I want to close that chapter in my life.”

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Opinion | the big lie of genocide & gaza: seven experts on nazi genocide expose the canard of israeli ‘crimes’.

Last month, protesters in our nation’s capital burned American flags and defaced memorials, including with pro-Hamas slogans, while asserting that Israel is committing genocide — and that it is doing so with American complicity. 

These accusations have spread on America’s campuses and elsewhere since Israeli forces commenced their defensive response last year to the murderous, indeed genocidal, rampage committed in Israel on Oct. 7 by Hamas. Hamas’ invasion of Israel took the lives of some 1,200 people in a single day and perpetrated the largest mass murder of Jews since the Nazi Holocaust. Once again, the victims included men, women, and children.

The six colleagues who join me in writing this essay — Bruce J. Einhorn, Kathleen N. Coleman, Clarice R. Feldman, Joel K. Greenberg, Jeffrey N. Mausner, and Philip L. Sunshine — worked as U.S. federal prosecutors of perpetrators of Nazi genocide who fled to this country after the war. In combined service exceeding 60 years, we prosecuted Nazi criminals who shot civilian men, women and children in death pits and others who killed victims in Nazi concentration and death camps.

In our work at the U.S. Department of Justice as prosecutors of Hitler’s henchmen, we meticulously investigated acts of genocide — and then we proved them in court. We feel impelled to declare that any fair review of the verifiable, publicly available facts shows that the accusation of genocide against Israel is false and indeed outrageous.

Simply put, we have seen no evidence of Israeli commission of genocide, and there is much evidence that disproves that charge — including the recent report that, since October, Israel has facilitated the entry of more than 870 metric tons of food and other humanitarian aid to Gaza’s two million inhabitants. Meanwhile, Hamas attacks or plunders food shipments, and it has denied Gazan civilians access to vast storehouses of food and medicines that it secreted in its tunnels before Oct. 7.

Genocide is defined in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) as killing and other specified acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Israel has targeted only Hamas and its terrorist group partners, not the civilian population of Gaza. Hamas is not a national, ethnical, racial or religious group; it is a designated terrorist organization that itself engages in genocidal acts.

Israel has, in fact, done more than any other military has ever done to minimize civilian casualties during large-scale urban warfare, even sacrificing the lives of many of its own soldiers in the process. For example, Israeli forces drop warning leaflets, distribute maps, and place automated phone calls to civilians in Gaza to identify areas in which combat is planned, in order to enable civilians to evacuate in advance.

Yet Hamas intentionally impedes efforts of Palestinian civilians to flee to safer areas, and then it uses the military plans provided by Israel to attack its troops, employing Palestinian civilians and hostages seized in Israel as human shields — undeniably a war crime.

Retired U.S. Army major and combat veteran John Spencer, currently the chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, has concluded that Israel “has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history  — above and beyond what international law requires.” He continues: “[A]ll available evidence shows that Israel has followed the laws of war, legal obligations, best practices in civilian harm mitigation and still found a way to reduce civilian casualties to historically low levels . ” 

We are not alone in rejecting the false genocide accusation. For example, the German government, which is well familiar, of course, with the genocide committed by a prior German government in murdering millions of Jews and Roma, has declared that the accusation of Israeli genocide “has no basis in fact” and that Berlin “decisively and expressly rejects” it. The United States government too has rejected the claim.

Unfortunately, many voices nonetheless remain arrayed against Israel, and they have frequently overwhelmed, in the public sphere, the analyses of qualified experts who have subjected the allegation to careful analysis and have found it wanting.

Hamas is thereby winning an enormous propaganda victory, continuing to mislead many who are legitimately horrified by the undeniable horrors of war. This, in turn, encourages Hamas to continue its war of aggression, hiding behind and under Palestinian civilians and the hostages, pursuing its perverse goal of prolonging the suffering and death in Gaza in order to generate international condemnation of Israel and advance its stated goal of destroying the country. 

When Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 and then publicly promised to repeat that atrocity again and again until Israel is annihilated , it was acting on the genocidal command of its 1988 founding charter, which declared that it is a religious duty to kill all Jews . This commitment was unabashedly renewed in 2019, when the Hamas Gaza television station broadcast a speech by a senior Hamas official in which he openly exhorted Palestinians the world over, “There are Jews everywhere! We must attack every Jew on planet Earth — we must slaughter and kill them, with Allah’s help .”

Hamas’ announcement last week that it has selected Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the Oct. 7 genocidal attack on Israel, to be its new political leader makes clear that Hamas is doubling down on its intention to target Jews for mass murder.

Israel and other signatories of the Genocide Convention have a legal obligation to stop Hamas’s genocidal actions; Article I of the Convention obligates all nations not just to refrain from committing genocide, but also “to prevent and to punish” that crime. That is exactly what Israel is doing, with U.S. support, along with fulfilling its legitimate obligation to rescue the hostages and protect its populace, among them seven million Jews and two million Arab Israelis. Notably, of the 153 nations that have signed onto the Convention, Israel was among the first 10 to do so, in 1950.

Even if one accepts the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry mortality numbers and the percentage breakdowns it has disseminated of women and children victims (which credible experts say are greatly exaggerated and which do not distinguish between armed fighters and civilians), the deaths of thousands of people during a war is not alone indicative of genocidal intent.

Genocide is a crime based on intent, not one that is based specifically on numbers. If it were based on numbers, then the World War II Allies would have perpetrated genocide in Germany, where their forces killed 300,000 to 400,000 civilians in air operations alone, even apart from loss of life that occurred during ground offensives. No serious observer would contend that the Allies committed genocide against Germans during World War II.

German fatalities instead occurred as a result of the Allied waging of a manifestly defensive war to bring an end to aggression, war crimes, and genocide perpetrated by Germany. And those German civilian fatalities continued to mount until Nazi Germany at last surrendered — just as Hamas can and should do, at once, to end the war and the associated suffering in Gaza and Israel.

Israel too is waging a defensive war against ongoing aggression, war crimes and genocide, but it is taking far greater steps to protect civilian lives than Allied forces did. Ultimately, Allied military operations were successful in bringing Germany’s ghastly crimes to an end. It can only be hoped that Israel too will succeed, so that Hamas will never again be able to commit such crimes. 

The core truth is that the genocidal frenzy of killing, rape, torture, kidnapping, and mutilation that Hamas launched in Israel on Oct. 7 were crimes of monstrous evil that every American should stand against.

Israel is fighting to ensure that it will never happen again. People of goodwill here and abroad should reject propaganda that conflates genocide with the heartbreak of casualties in defensive war and that dishonestly portrays Israel — which is combatting genocide no less heroically and necessarily than did our fighting forces in Europe in the 1940s — as a perpetrator of that infamous crime.

Rosenbaum, Einhorn, Coleman, Feldman, Greenberg, Mausner and Sunshine previously served as prosecutors in the United States Justice Department, Criminal Division, Office of Special Investigations (OSI). Rosenbaum also served as OSI’s director from 1995 to 2010; later as director of Human Rights Enforcement Strategy and Policy in OSI’s successor Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section ; and finally, until his retirement this year, as the Justice Department’s counselor for War Crimes Accountability and founding head of its War Crimes Accountability Team .

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Guest Essay

50 Years Ago, the World Trade Center Was Home to the Art Crime of the Century

By Colum McCann

Mr. McCann is the author of “Let the Great World Spin,” which takes a fictional look at Philippe Petit’s walk, and the forthcoming “Twist.”

Fifty years ago on Wednesday, the French high-wire artist Philippe Petit carried his life a quarter of a mile through the New York City sky on a tightrope. When asked why, he said it was simply because the World Trade Center towers were there.

“If I see two towers, I have to walk,” he told The New York Times. Later he added, “Anything that is giant and man-made strikes me in an awesome way and calls me.”

The human need that Mr. Petit met with his walk is still with us. We are living in high-wire times, with anxiety and fracture all around us, and it is the job of the artist to show that we can, in fact, get from one side to the other.

When I think of the Frenchman, he remains high in the air, a distant flyman walking across a three-quarter-inch steel wire in an act so outrageous that it still shakes my soul out. His imaginative act catches in my throat and reveals a truth that is often obscured or degraded: that we can confront, and even triumph over, the seemingly impossible. His walk provides a pulse of relief as an antidote to despair. He didn’t defy gravity; he aligned himself with it, and in so doing he allowed us to defy our own possible falling down.

Mr. Petit’s walk was a long-planned act of subterfuge. He had seen sketches of the towers in a magazine while sitting in a dentist’s office in Paris at age 18. Six years later he did several reconnaissance missions to check out the towers as they were under construction. He honed his tightrope skills at home in a French meadow, asking friends to shake the wire to see if they could knock him off. The night before his self-described coup, he and his team smuggled the wire in and rigged it from one tower to the other, using a bow and arrow to shoot a fishing line across the distance, followed eventually by the cable, which was winched and tightened. It was an audacious act of nighttime engineering, half jury-rigged, half daring genius.

He began at the south tower at about 7:20 in the morning. He stood 1,350 feet above the ground. The city had only just begun waking beneath him, a gorgeous catastrophe of sight and sound. He stepped out in his buffalo-hide shoes, carrying a 42-pound balancing bar. He lay down on the wire. He saluted the birds. At least six times, he negotiated the 131 feet between the two towers. The city was stunned. The early morning radio D.J.s were in awe. The cops were apoplectic and tried to coax him in from either side.

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