2 the Inter-American Court has stated in the present Judgment, 3 violates the American Convention in its mere existence; this is aggravated by that fact that the Act has been effectively applied (through the imposition of death sentences) in the present case of Hilaire, Constantine and Benjamin et al. Indeed, the very law that applies the death penalty results in the extreme violence that it purports to prevent; 4 by applying the age-old law of an eye for an eye, the government itself resorts to violence, disposing of – under a judicially totalitarian vision 5 – a person’s life, 6 just as the individual deprived another of his life – and all in spite of the historic evolution of the idea, also age-old, that justice should prevail over revenge (public and private). 5. Justice that requires killing presumes that certain people have no possibility of redemption, and that the respective society has reached a degree of perfection that requires the elimination of such people, — something that to me cannot be substantiated. In effect, a legal system that requires killing, employing the same methods that it condemns in acts of murder, lacks credibility. In my opinion, the fact that such means are validated by positive law, when used by the government, does not justify it in the least; positivism has always been a slave to established power, independently of its orientation. One cannot lose sight of the fact that legal norms inevitably reflect the underlying value systems, 7 a fact which no true legal scholar can ignore. 6. It is important to recall that, even in the eighteenth century, in his classic work Dei Diritti e delle Pene (1764), Cesar Beccaria stated: “what right can they claim for themselves [men] in order to tear apart their fellow men? (…) What kind of person has wanted to leave the decision whether to make him die to the whim of other men? (…) The death penalty is not useful because it gives men an example of atrocity. (…) The rules governing the conduct of these men [who commit murder], 3 Cf. paras. 103-104, 106, and 108 of the present Judgment. 4 In his book Dernier jour d’un condamne (1829), one of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century, Victor Hugo, referred to judicially-mandated executions and indicated that they were recognized as “public crimes,” which affect “all members of the social community.” Also in the realm of Law, in his classic monograph La Lucha por el Derecho (1872), Rudolph von Ihering, upon referring to capital punishment, stated that “judicial murder, as it is appropriately called in our German language, is law’s true mortal sin;” R. von Ihering, La Lucha por el Derecho, Madrid, Ed. Civitas, 1989 (reprint), p. 110. (Translation by the Secretariat of the Court). 5 Even in the nineteenth century, another universal writer, Fyodor Dostoievski, in his Souvenirs de la maison des morts (1862) eloquently took a stance against the “unlimited power” of certain individuals over others, which generates brutality or perversion, thereby infecting society as a whole; in the opinion of the great Russian writer, such is the case with corporal punishment, applied with the plain indifference of the “already infected” society and in a state of decomposition. In the book Recuerdos de la Casa de los Muertos, Dostoievski warns that the degree of civilization that any society can reach could be determined upon evaluating its prisons; F. Dostoievski, Souvenirs de la maison des morts, Paris, Gallimard, 1997 (reprint), pp. 35-416. Based on this type of evaluation, few countries, even nowadays in the beginning of the twenty-first century would be classified as “civilized.” 6 It does not cease to be a paradox that, in our times, a universal consensus has already reached with regards to the absolute prohibition against torture, forced disappearance of persons and summary, extra-judicial or arbitrary executions, but not with respect to the uninfringeable, unconditional human life; C.K. Boyle, “the Concept of Arbitrary Deprivation of Life” in The Right to Life in International Law (ed. B.G. Ramcharan). Dordrecht, Nijhoff, 1985, p. 233, and cf. 241; N.S. Rodley, The Treatment of Prisoners under International Law, 2a. ed., Oxford, University Press, 2000 (reprint) p. 206. 7 Punishments also reflect the range of values that prevail in a given society. R. von Ihering, El Fin en el Derecho, Buenos Aires, Omeba Ed., 1960, p. 236.