This paper proposes an argumentative analysis focusing on the 1981 French parliamentary debate concerning the abolition of the death penalty. It provides an analysis of a recurrent argumentative sequence in the abolitionists’discourse. This sequence is complex because members of Parliament initially claim they “understand” the family of the victim’s desire for vengeance, but finally decree justice “cannot be vengeance”. The analysis attempts to detail how – on an argumentative level – members of Parliament move from an initial acknowledgment of an impulse for death to an assertion of “a justice of death is impossible”. The conclusion proposes to gauge the “historicity” of the argumentative sequence described by briefly comparing it to similar sequences that can be found in previous parliamentary debates.