In Ultimate Penalties, Sheleff takes a broad look at the practice and purpose of extreme punishments. Looking first at capital punishment, it at once becomes clear that for Sheleff, the debate as usually understood is myopic and comprehends neither the range of capital punishment in current use (e.g., he includes felons killed fleeing arrest), nor typically does it include the true meaning of the proposed alternatives. Instead, ready reference is made to the humane solution, a glib assumption with which Sheleff takes issue: "[S]o many of the arguments used by abolitionists against capital punishment are applicable in one form or another to life imprisonment."

Life imprisonment, as much as torture and capital punishment, is an extreme response to society's transgressors, and it is precisely how we deal with these life and death issues that tells all about how a society perceives itself and what values it places on human rights and social decency.

Sheleff is not the first to observe that "capital punishment may indeed be the cutting edge of the measure of a person's commitments to a comprehensive political ideology," and it is certainly ideological differences, not just differences in individual conscience, which become critical in the capital punishment debate. The capital punishment issue becomes an ideological reference point. It is a peninsula, at which the separate tides of the need for control over the citizenry and economy, on the one hand, and the desire for social justice, on the other, clash in a maelstrom of rhetoric and invective.

That extreme punishment in the form of capital punishment finds favor at either end of the political continuum is a paradox which is more seeming than real. Capital punishment becomes seen for what it is—a representation of state power in which even ideological alter egos find fraternity.

However, it is not capital punishment, but a concept of universal human rights, which lies at the heart of this book, and it is this central theme to which Sheleff returns and returns.

Pivotal in this human rights crusade is the United States, to whose citizens so much is constitutionally guaranteed. Yet, ironically, it is the U.S.—alone among Western democracies—which resorts to the death penalty with embarrassing frequency: against its Blacks, its Hispanics, its poor and its disadvantaged. What claim for moral leadership, what right of judgment [towards] other regimes?

Sheleff looks at the vagaries, contradictions and convolutions of the U.S. judiciary up to the highest level and concludes that, despite procedural and constitutional safeguards, "there may be no stronger argument against the death penalty than the blatantly arbitrary pattern of executions currently being performed in the United States."

In his pursuit of the logic and illogic of authoritatively imposed death, Sheleff centers on the United States, but ranges also to the extra-judicial deaths of Steve Biko in South Africa, the "People's Bureau" assassinations [in] Libya, and the death squads of South America.

In a sea of ideological inconsistencies and philosophical contradictions, the ironies are nowhere more apparent than in Northern Ireland. After a century of debate, a predominantly Conservative British Parliament, with a retentionist prime minister, voted against the restoration of the death penalty—even for acts of terrorism.

In pointing out that this may have had much to do with British membership of the E.E.C., primarily an economic, but also a political and even a cultural partnership, Sheleff is quite possibly mistaken. However, that he should see it in this way is consistent with his broad and [universalistic] perspective. What is suggested is that, as sovereign states become ever more "subject to the surveillance of the world community" over these life and death issues, so, perhaps, we are seeing a re-definition of the concept of sovereign state.

The book is well researched and, with approximately 100 pages of detailed notes, well documented. In developing his thesis, Sheleff writes interestingly and ranges far wider than is suggested in these few lines. In journeying with Sheleff through the past and present practices of ultimate penalties, one is drawn inevitably to the central question in all such discussion.

How, it is asked (in looking at the dilemma posed by Eichmann, although the question could be addressed more broadly), "is an enlightened people to treat those of their fellow beings whose bestiality and cruelty, persistently practiced and loudly proclaimed, seem to put them beyond the pale of civilized behavior?" What is appropriate where no comparisons can be made? What is the role and meaning and hope of justice in such a circumstance?

In an imperfect world of imperfect people, we will continue for the foreseeable future to live with ultimate crimes and meet them with ultimate penalties. For abolitionists and retentionists, the choices, the measures to be taken, are clear. Both would use ultimate penalties of one sort or another.

For the rest of us, like Sheleff, there are no clear alternatives. There is only the guarantee that in the absence of involvement and commitment to the still embryonic notion of universal human rights, the right of the unfettered might well prevail. Worse yet, among Western-style democracies, it may prevail cloaked in "false legalism", a tyranny under which we will all be condemned.