Thomas Jefferson and the Reform of the Virginia Criminal Law

Abstract

. In 1779, Thomas Jefferson drafted “A Bill for Proportioning Crimes and Punishments in Cases Heretofore Capital” (also known as “Bill № 64”). This was part of a large-scale reform of the Virginia legislation, which also included the spread of education, the abolition of the entail, and the separation of church and state. But if Jefferson's mentioned initiatives were covered in detail by his biographies, then the reform of criminal law did not attract much attention from researchers. This article is intended to partially fill the gap in the American studies in Russia. The source base of the research includes the papers of Jefferson himself, both the text of the bill under study and the correspondence accompanying it, rough sketches, a summary in “Notes on the State of Virginia”. The works of contemporaries dealing with similar problems are also used. The main objectives of the article are: to analyze Jefferson's reform of Virginia law; to identify the sources of his penological theory; to compare the main provisions of his bill with the American and European legislation of Modern times. The author concludes that the sources of “Bill № 64” were primarily the works of Cesare Beccaria. Yet, Jeffersonian penological theories were no less influenced by the “Anglo–Saxon myth”, that is, the idealization of the Anglo-Saxon period of English history. Hence the extreme inconsistency of the reform under study. Along with humanistic provisions, such as reducing the use of the death penalty, it contained archaic elements (pillory and maiming, the talion principle). Nevertheless, Jefferson's bill had a certain impact on the humanization of criminal law both in Virginia and beyond.