Dos Delitos e das Penas, de Cesare Beccaria, tornou-se um clássico ao introduzir ideias inovadoras para sua época, muitas das quais ainda ressoam na sociedade atual. Embora alguns de seus pontos tenham se tornado obsoletos com o tempo, sua essência permanece surpreendentemente relevante. A obra é fundamental para quem deseja compreender não apenas o funcionamento das leis, mas também os princípios que norteiam a justiça e a organização social. Leitura indispensável para estudantes, juristas e qualquer pessoa interessada em refletir sobre direito e sociedade.

I loved this classic treatise that inspired the Founding generation. Here are my notes.

xii The criminal justice systems of Europe in the eighteenth century were open to criticism on a number of counts. There was often cruelty in the investigation and punishment of crime. Judicial torture was frequently used, and the death penalty was common even for relatively minor crimes.

Beccaria seemed equally attracted to the doctrines of natural individual rights propounded by seventeenth-century writers and developed in the eighteenth century by Rousseau... On Crimes and Punishments treated human happiness in this world as the chief goal of society. Beccaria was eager to distinguish sharply between sin and crime, to deny the political necessity of religious uniformity, and to limit the wealth, authority, and influence of the clergy.

xiv Beccaria attacked judicial torture, both because it was not useful in discovering the true facts of a case and because it violated the right of the accused to self-defense-- or, at least, his right not to be a party to his own destruction... Beccaria maintained that mild legal system is both useful, in that it is likely to win widespread approval, and just, in that it is most in accord with basic human rights.

p.1 There are three sources from which the moral and political principles that regulate men are derived: revelation, natural law, and the artificial conventions of society

p.2 Thus, there are three distinct classes of virtue and vice: religious, natural, and political. These three classes should never be in contradiction with one another, but not all the duties and consequences that derive from one derive from the others. Not everything that religion requies is required by natural law, nor is all that natural law requires demanded by purely social law.

p.7 Laws are the conditions by which independent and isolated men, tired of living in a constant state of war and of enjoying a freedom made useless by the uncertainty of keeping it, unite in society.

p.8 Every punishment which does not derive from absolute necessity, says the great Montesquieu, is tyrranical...No man freely gave up a part of his own liberty for the sake of the public good; such an illusion exists only in romances.... It was necessity,then, that constrained men to give up part of their personal liberty; hence, it is certain that each man wanted to put only the least possible portion into the public deposit, only as much as necessary to induce oithers to defend it.

p.9 All punishments that exceed what is necessary to preserve this bond are unjust by their very nature. One must beware of attaching the idea of something real to this word "justice", as though it were a physical force or a being that actually exists.

The first consequence of these principles is that only the law may decree punishments for crimes, and this authority can rest only with the legislator, who represents all of society united by a social contract.

The second consequence is that if every individual member is bound to society, society is likewise bound to every individual member by a contract that, bby its very nature, places both parties under obligation.

p.10 The third consequece is that if extremely cruel punishments are useless, even though they were not directly opposed to the public good and to the very goal of preventing crimes, then such cruelty would nevertheless be contrary to those beneficent virtues that flow from enlightened reason, which prefers to command happy men rater tha herd of slaves who constantly exchange timid cruelties with one another; excessively severe punishments would also be contrary to justice and to the nature of the social contract itself.

p.12 Such tyrannies are all the more cruel when there is a smaller distance between the oppresser and the oppressed.

If the interpretation of laws is an evil, their obscurity, which necessarily entails interpretation, is obviously another evil, one that will be all the greater if the laws are written in a language that is foreign to the common people.

p.15 If there were an exact and universal scale of punishments and crimes, we should have an acceptable and general way to measure the degrees of tyranny and liberty, of the stock of humanity or wickedness, in various nations

p.17 We have seen what the true measure of crimes is-- namely, the harm done to society.

p.18 Some crimes are immediately destructive of society or of the person who represents it; some offend against the personal security of a citizen in his life, his goods, or of his honor; certain others are actions contrary to what the laws oblige everyone to do or not to do for the sakeof the public good.

p.23 Can the cries of a poor wretch turn back time and ndo actions which have already been done? The purpose of punishment, then, is nothing other than to dissuade the criminal from doing fresh harm to his compatriots and to keep other people from doing the same. Therefore, punishments and the method of inflicting them should be chosen that, mindful of the proportion between crime and punishment , will make the most effective and lasting impression on men's minds and inflict the least torment on the body of the criminal.

p.24 The credibility of a witness diminishes significantly as the atrocity of the alleged crime increases or as the circumstances become more improbable; witchcraft and gratuisously cruel acts are cases in point.

p.29 The torture of the accused while his trial is still in progress is a cruel practice sanctioned by the usage of most nations. Its purpose is either to make the accused confess his crime, or to resolve the contradictions into which he has fallen, or to discover his accomplices, or to purge him of infamy for some metaphysical and incomprehensible reason or other, or, finally,to find out other crimes of which he may be guilty but of which he is not accused.

What is the political goal of punishment? It is to intimidate others. But what justification can we give, then, for the secret and private carnage that the tyranny of custom wreaks on the guilty and the innocent?

p.30 Another ridiculous reason for torture is the ourgation of infamy; that is, a man judged infamous by law must confirm his deposition with the dislocation of his bones.

The third pretext is that suspects should be tortured when they have contradicted themselves during their examination-- as though the fear of punishment , the uncertainty of the verdict, the pomp and majesty of the tribunal, the ignorance common to almost all scoundrels and innocent persons, did not make self-contradiction likely, both for the innocent party in fear and for the criminal trying to dissimulate; as though contradictions, which are common enough among calm men, would not be multiplied in the turbulent mind of someone completely absorbed in the thought of saving himself from immediate danger.

p.31 The examination of someone accused of a crime is undertaken in order to learn the truth, but, if truth is difficult to discover in the bearing, the gestures, and the expression of a calm man, all the less will one find it in a man in whom the convulsions of pain have distorted all the signs by which the truth reveals itself on the faces of most men in spite of themselves. Every violent action confounds and annihilates the tiny differences in objects by which one may sometimes distinguish truth from falsehood.

p.32 A strage consequece that necessarily follows from the use of torture is that the innocent person is placed in a worse situation than the criminal, since if both of them are tortured , all circumstances are against the former: for he either confesses to the crime and is condemned, or else he is found innocent after having suffered a punishment that he did not deserve

p.38 There is no liberty , whenever the law in some cases permits a man to cease to be a person and to become a thing.

p.39 A theft that is not accompanied by violence oughtto be punished with a fine.

p.41 [Infamy] Painful corporal punishments should not be assigned to such crimes; they are founded on pride, and they draw glory and nourishment from pain itself. Ridicule and shame are appropriate for such crimes, punishments which check the vanity of fanatics with the vanity of the spectators, punishments over whose tenacity truth itself can scarcely triumph with slow and obstinate efforts.

Anyone who disturbs the public peace, who does not obey the laws-- that is, the conditions by which men support one another and defend themselves-- must be excluded from society; in other words, he must be banished.

p.43 Confiscation will be total when the banishment decreed by law is such that it completely destroys the relations between society and a delinquent citizen; in such an instance, the citizen dies even though the man remains alive, and as far as the body politic is concerned, this should produce the same effect as natural death.

p.45 As the population of a society grows, each member becomes a smaller part of the whole, and republican sentiment diminishes accordingly if the laws do not take care to reinforce it. Societies, like human bodies, have their circumscribed limits, and, if they grow beyond these limits, their structure is necessarily disturbed.

p.48 The death penalty, hen, is not a right-- for I have shown that it cannot be so-- but rather a war of the nation against a citizen, a campaign waged on the ground that the nation has judged the destruction of his being to be useful or necessary.

p.49 In order to be just, a penalty should have only the degree of intensity needed to deter other men from crime.

p.54 A man accused of a crime, imprisoned, and acquitted, should not bear any trace of infamy

p.58 There are some crimes that are both frequent in society and difficult to prove, and, in such cases, the difficulty of establishing guilt takes te place of the probability of innocence

p.64 The good faith of contracts and the security of commerce oblige the legislator to take custody of the persons of insolvent debtors on behalf of their creditors. I believe it is imporant, hoeever, to distinguish the fraudulent from the innocent bankrupt.

p.74 It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them

p.75 Do you want to prevent crimes? See to it that the laws are clear and simple, that the entire strength of the nation is concentrated in their defense, and that no portion of that strength is employed in their destructionSee to it that the law favors classes of men less than it favors men themselves. See to it that men fear laws and only the laws.

p.76 Do you want to prevent crimes? See to it that enlightenment accompanies liberty.

abstract discussion of society, the things it should encourage and those it should discourage.
Many good sections relating to princes and sovereigns and, beyond that, ways to deal with good citizens and miscreants.
Would go far in convincing an ignorant peasant of his place in society, the implications of actions good and bad.