Hugo Adam Bedau

Who was Hugo Adam Bedau?

Hugo Adam Bedau was the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Tufts University, and is best known for his work on capital punishment. He has been called a "leading anti-death-penalty scholar" by Stuart Taylor Jr., who has quoted Bedau as saying "I'll let the criminal justice system execute all the McVeighs they can capture, provided they'd sentence to prison all the people who are not like McVeigh."

Bedau gained his PhD from Harvard University in 1961 and subsequently taught at Dartmouth College, Princeton University and Reed College before joining Tufts in 1966. He retired in 1999. Bedau was a founder of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and served many years on its board of directors, including several as chairman. He was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, for whom he has written on the death penalty.

He is author of The Death Penalty in America, The Courts, the Constitution, and Capital Punishment, Death is Different, and Killing as Punishment, and co-author of In Spite of Innocence. On the occasion of Bedau's retirement, Norman Daniels said of The Death Penalty in America: "It is the premier example in this century of the systematic application of academic philosophical skills to a practical issue, and the flood of work in practical ethics that has followed can rightfully cite Hugo's work as its starting point."