Deranged

I'm late to the game on this but I'll hope to make up for it with the substance of the posts that follow. For now, if you haven't seen it yet, I'd call your attention to Eugene Volokh's proposal for inflicting unnecessarily cruel punishment as vengeance in certain kinds of criminal cases, e.g. allowing a the relatives of a murder victim to torture the murderer.

Before you get too excited---bit of a spoiler---Volokh has (sort-of) recanted. Before you don't get excited enough, bear in mind that in writing the original post, he was "being perfectly serious." What interests me isn't Volokh's final position on the issue, though I have some thoughts about that too, but rather the philosophical questions of criminal justice that he raises and which quite a few other competent voices in the blogosphere have addressed. More in a bit.