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Death penalty panel sparks intense debate

By Shannon O’Brien ’15

Last Thursday, November, 6, students, faculty, and staff crowded into the Bradford Auditorium to hear a heated debate about the use of the death penalty in American society. The event, which was sponsored by the Levitt Center, featured Senior Counsel at the Constitution Project Sarah Turberville and New York Law School Professor Robert Blecker. Hamilton Professor of Government and Law Frank Anechiarico moderated the forum.

Anticipating the contentious responses the debate could illicit, Professor Anechiarico reminded audience members to remain civil before the event began. “Attack the idea, not the speaker,” he told the audience.

Turberville presented her position first, arguing that the death penalty should have no future in America. She described capital punishment as “a fraught enterprise for all involved,” explaining, “It’s unpractical, it’s unfair, it’s terribly costly and harmful for the victim’s family.” A better punishment than the death penalty, Turberville argued, would be life without parole.

Turberville explained that she is against the death penalty because of the damaging repercussions it can have on the criminal justice system. As she stated, “Those with the capital don’t get the punishment,” revealing how the death penalty threatens the integrity of due process and is biased towards sentencing poorer citizens who cannot pay to defend themselves with quality lawyers. Likewise, the death penalty perpetuates America’s legacy of violent discrimination against people of color, which Turberville noted should be reason enough to repeal it. As Turberville explained, repealing the death penalty “can take implicit and explicit biases” out of the criminal justice system or at least help eliminate the risk of those biases.

Turberville also argued that the death penalty is extremely costly for states. As an example, she pointed out that California recently spent four billion dollars on just 14 death row cases. To further deter audience members from supporting capital punishment, Turberville revealed that countries such as China, Yemen, Sudan, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq, along with the United States, are among the few countries that have carried out the death penalty in the past five years.

Blecker structured his twenty-minute speech as a series of rebuttals against Turberville’s argument. To Blecker, the idea that the criminal justice system will be fixed by replacing the death penalty with life without parole “is absolutely absurd.” In the beginning of his speech, he mentioned a few times that he had spent many hours in prisons, and he knew the conditions in which the prisoners were living.

Blecker described himself as a retributionist, meaning that he is committed to ending the conviction of innocent people to the death penalty while making sure that “punishment matches the crime” for those who are not innocent.

He continued his speech by trying to refute Turberville’s argument that the death penalty perpetuates racial biases and discrimination in America, claiming instead that racial prejudice is not a factor in death penalty sentences. Although he admitted that it is much more likely that a person would be sentenced to death row if the victim were white rather than black, he maintained that this “does not mean that we devalue black life, or that that should be the only interpretation.”

Blecker concluded his speech with a string of dramatic, devastating anecdotes of especially violent crimes. Many of these anecdotes involved graphic descriptions of violence committed against women. At the conclusion of his speech, Blecker described the comfortable conditions of the prisons he had visited, claiming that prisoners played baseball and even suntanned. He argued that prisoners should not have any access to commissary and should instead be subjected solely to eating “nutri-loaves,” which he claimed held all nutritional requirements needed to sustain human life.

In their short rebuttal speeches, Turberville and Blecker attempted to offer more nuanced views of their positions. Turberville revealed that although she supports life without parole in place of the death penalty, she ultimately thinks that deescalating life sentences is also essential to fixing the broken American prison system. To counter Blecker’s claim about the conditions of prisons, Turberville explained that prisoners do not receive fair treatment while in prison, nor do they enjoy in lavish—or even standard—living conditions. She argued that prison conditions should be as similar to the free world as possible, because the majority of prisoners will one day be returning to the free world.

In his rebuttal, Blecker continued to offer more emotionally jarring anecdotes of what he nebulously described as “the worst of the worst of the worst” criminals, claiming that he has met several of these criminals and believes they deserve to die.

The subsequent question and answer section was perhaps best summarized by Professor of Sociology Yvonne Zylan’s question to Blecker in which she asked him to, “Tell us your principle, not your story.” Although the following questions asked by audience members suggested that the issue of capital punishment remained divisive, it seemed evident that the majority of audience members in the auditorium supported Turberville’s position by the end of the forum.

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