| Panel debates death penalty and racism BY SALLY ACHARYA Is the death penalty a just and appropriate punishment for heinous crimes, or is it so inherently flawed and skewed by racial bias that it should be abolished? A panel including an antideath penalty activist, AU’s Methodist pastor, and a School of Public Affairs senior who served on his local City Council addressed those issues and fielded questions last week. “If you give the state the power to kill, ultimately it’s going to be abused,” said Jane Henderson, executive director of Maryland Citizens Against State Executions. Enforcement of the death penalty is intrinsically capricious, she said, since “it’s a lottery of where it happens [and] who’s the prosecutor,” with race an inescapable part of the equation. Some prosecutors and jurisdictions simply seek the penalty more zealously than others, while juries that are “death qualified”—with anyone opposing the death penalty excluded—are also more likely to have convictions. “That skews the system,” she said. Prosecutors are not only more likely to seek the death penalty for African Americans, they are also far less likely to seek it when victims are African American, she said. Nobody on Maryland’s death row is there for killing African Americans, who make up about 50 percent of the state’s murder victims. J.C. Hendrickson, who was elected at 19 to the City Council of Middletown, N.Y., outside New York City, said the system is in need of “serious reform” to ensure the death penalty is justly applied without racial bias. He supports the death penalty for first and second degree murder—killing that is intentional—or for cases of rape; and only when scientific evidence, rather than the vagaries of eyewitness testimony, permits a clear and irrefutable conviction. But Henderson argued that “CSI is not the real world,” and that in most cases, there is no evidence to test. The system is flawed in such varied and complex ways that its abolition makes more sense and would make it possible to take a look at ways to serve the real needs of victims. Several African American students in the audience said that while they disagreed with capital punishment, the overriding concern should be justice, and that “affirmative action for capital punishment”—with flaws in the system fixed so that whites would be more proportionately represented—was not the issue. One student argued that “the individual who took a life had no respect for life at all. To let them live out the rest of their life as a ward of the state does not show respect for the life they took . . . A better punishment would be, like, putting them out there to work on the roads, rather than having me pay for their sitting there.” Henderson said that she would support a move to restorative justice, which emphasizes repairing harm to victims, rather than punishment—which, she said, results in criminals sitting in prison without making even a symbolic reparation to victims and society. Mark Schaefer, AU’s Methodist minister, said that while the death penalty is indeed an approved punishment in the Old Testament, it is advised in cases that “we would not be quick to approve,” including cursing one’s father and mother, blaspheming, or working on a Sabbath. While “individual Christians will come to different conclusions,” the church has always, he said, had “an overwhelming witness to speak against the death penalty.” Christians should look at the words of Jesus, he said, which did not prescribe laws but set “a higher standard” of mercy. In its earliest days, the church was pacifist, and while that changed when it became a state religion, “that core was always there,” he said. Hendrickson said that Christians have a variety of views. He agreed that racial bias has been an issue, but said that it was too simplistic to attribute convictions to bias without looking at the host of contributing factors, including socio-economic conditions. A student in the audience—who said she came to AU from a school where even many “A” students could barely read, many teachers did not teach, and having babies early was the norm—stressed that “racism” does not have to mean bigotry, but refers to an overall system that disadvantages a disproportionate number of African Americans at the starting gate. Schaefer described it as an “ism” in line with “capitalism” or “socialism,” adding that “to say it’s a racist system is not to say people in it have any particular racial animus . . . racism can be full of people who are not bigots.” But is the death penalty ever appropriate? Hendrickson said it’s a “wedge issue” on which agreement is unlikely. “It depends on your personal concept of justice. If you don’t believe death as a punishment ever fits the crime, obviously you’re not going to support the death penalty.” The panel discussion was sponsored by the historically black fraternity Phi Beta Sigma and the National Organization to Abolish the Death Penalty. It was moderated by Jason Nichols, a senior at the School of Communication. |
