The “Law of Necessity”

Abstract

In June 1835, the Brazilian parliament promulgated a stringent law which punished enslaved persons convicted of assassinating their masters with capital punishment. Called the “law of necessity,” the regulation targeted the leaders of slave rebellions and established the death penalty as punishment against slave resistance. Research on the enforcement of the law demonstrated that while the regulation increased public hangings of the enslaved, overall fewer convict slaves were executed because of the law than had their sentences commuted to galé perpétua or a lifetime of penal servitude in public works. Analyzing slave petitions to commute death penalty sentences to penal servitude, this article intervenes in the debates on punishing the enslaved which connects labor history with the history of punishment. The research probes convicts’ understanding of the construction of Brazilian legal culture while analyzing the tensions between slave-owners and imperial authorities on punishing the enslaved.

Murder in a quarry: violent encounters and distant intimacy on a Cape convict station

“…This was a continuation rather than an abrupt rupture from carceral practices and laws that served racial capitalism. Liberal and humanitarian reforms existed alongside and were entangled with labour coercion and the persistence of bodily punishment as a method to maintain and extend the racial order (Lopes 2022;Jean 2022;Olsavsky 2021;Paton 2004).…”