Against Domestic Violence: Public and Private Prosecution of Batterers

In Against Prosecutors, Professor Bennett Capers discusses domestic violence, among other crimes, to propose reforming our current system of public prosecution in favor of a model in which the victim could decide whether to pursue a criminal case and what punishment (if any) her assailant would receive. He invokes the spirit of private prosecution, including the imposition of peace bonds on wife-beaters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not to “idealize or romanticize the past,” but “to show that the public prosecutor, a ‘historical latecomer,’ is not inevitable…