The “Death Penalty Matters” series put on by the Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility began Thursday, with speaker Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, and a full house.
Stevenson said that the reason he is opposed to the death penalty is because the United States criminal justice system is not fair enough to justify the death penalty.
“Even if you believe that it can be justified morally to take another human being’s life, that doesn’t answer the question about whether or not we should have the death penalty,” Stevenson said. “The question is have we constructed a system of justice so fair and so reliable that we can feel certain we have made the right decision.”
Stevenson gave personal and historical accounts of instances in which the United States system of justice had failed, including the 1987 Supreme Court case of McCleskey v. Kemp,.
Prosecutors proved that the single largest predictor for who would receive the death penalty in Georgia was race, but the Court decided in a 5-4 decision that the death penalty was still constitutional in the state because “if they allowed this case to be decided because of race, then it would open doors to allow other things to be turned over because of race,” Stevenson said.
“It was the first time, probably the only time, that I read a Supreme Court decision that made me cry,” Stevenson said.
But race is not the only vexing issue in the world of criminal justice, Stevenson said. The United States is still bogged down by issues of whether juveniles and the mentally ill should be put to death.
In the United States, one in 100 people are in prison and one in 31 people are in jail, prison or on parole, Stevenson said. He says this is because the “tough on crime” policy that the United States has adopted has led to people serving life sentences for non-violent crimes.
“They ask, ‘How can we prevent more violence?’ and we say we are going to be really tough. But that’s not a policy, that’s a politic that rises because of our fear,” Stevenson said.
Stevenson said that “the United States is very out of step with most modern democracies.” He said that, since the 70s, all other democracies have been getting rid of the death penalty, while it is just increasing in the United States.
And this endless amount of capital punishment is not distributed equally among violent perpetrators. “Our system treats you better if you are rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent,” said Stevenson. “Wealth, not culpability shapes outcomes. Its sad, its regrettable, but it is our system.”
He said that the death penalty does not help victims. “We don’t really try to make them whole,” Stevenson said. “What we promise them is another body, and it’s a cynical thing to do.”
Stevenson ended his lecture by adding that the reason that he continues to fight the hard battles that he fights everyday is because he realizes that he is also “broken.”
“I realize that when you are in a community with people who are broken you realize that brokenness is not unique to the condemned,” Stevenson said. “We can do more for broken people than execute them.”
