Summary: DePaul University's Symposium on Race and the Death Penalty

From the weekly DPIC update, we find more arguments for re-examining current death penalty legislation:

Presentations at DePaul University's symposium on Race and the Death Penalty were recently published in the university’s Law Review. National experts examined statistical evidence and attitudes regarding race discrimination in the capital punishment system. A keynote address was delivered by Bryan Stevenson, Director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama, and former Governor George Ryan gave the closing remarks. DPIC published a summary of the articles.

Bryan Stevenson delivering the keynote address at the Symposium regarding the United States Supreme Court’s decision in McCleskey:

[I]t was the second thing the Court said that broke my heart, that did something to me that I’m still trying to recover from. The second thing the Court said was, a certain amount of bias, a certain quantum of discrimination, if you will, is in the court’s opinion, inevitable; and they used that word to characterize the things that were going on. And so we are gathered in this room talking about race and the death penalty while the United States Supreme Court has already said it’s pointless for you to be here. These problems are inevitable. And it is in that context that we have to begin thinking about the identity we need to take. Because I believe it is an identity that not only has to say what must be said to make these issues sensible and intelligible, but it’s also an identity that has to be willing to confront decisionmakers, policy makers, judges, sometimes lawyers who believe and accept that racially-biased administration of the death penalty is something that we’re supposed to just get used to.

Former Governor George Ryan of Illinois delivering the closing remarks:

I also found that thirty-five African Americans…had been tried by all-white juries [in Illinois]. So I tried to imagine myself or somebody else that’s white being in a courtroom with an all-black jury and how [it] would feel. You’d be probably pretty uncomfortable. So I thought about that. How would you like to be a person of color and have nobody in that jury box to even resemble you, look like had maybe a little sympathy for you in some fashion just based on what your race is? I don’t know how they’d call that a jury of your peers, but evidently they don’t or they do and get away with it.

Posted by katherine at 01:15 PM