Journal article
Towards an Abolition Democracy: The Death Penalty, Circa 2015
Widener law journal, Vol.25, p83
2016
Abstract
Every spring for the past ten years, I spend the first two weeks of my criminal law course teaching my students about punishment. Departing, however, from the standard approach of teaching the theories of punishment (as if they actually matter), I instead make my students learn about innocence.' We watch the documentary "After Innocence," and then we have a discussion. In that discussion, I explain to them that our criminal justice system is not perfect-a fact they well understand. And then I explain to them the problem of sentencing people to death, and its concomitant legal and social politics, while we are still exonerating innocent men and women previously sentenced to die-also a fact they well understand. Then we talk about race, and I remind them that many of the people who are facing capital punishment, at the same time that they are being exonerated, are poor, undereducated, and black. And there is a sobering silence. I understand the silence to be multi-part: an uncomfortable acknowledgment of my point, and uncomfortable politics around the death penalty, and a real desire to respond to my point by claiming that some people, given the heinous nature of their crime, deserve to die.
From that two-week lesson, I am reminded that few legal issues involving the intersection of race, criminal law, and punishment have had the reach and impact of the death penalty. And, because of its divisive nature and the commingling of race and politics, compounded with a troubling social consciousness, the death penalty, in my opinion, is one of the top two difficult subjects to discuss in criminal law." In this essay, I wish to share the problems associated with talking with my students about the death penalty in general and the socio-racial politics of death in particular. I suggest that these challenges are in many ways indicative of the general need for legal educators to do more in reevaluating how we teach and learn about power. Further, we need to extend that teaching to include the deep coverage of institutional power against black people as a historical vestige of American slavery.'
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Details
- Title
- Towards an Abolition Democracy: The Death Penalty, Circa 2015
- Creators
- Donald F Tibbs - Drexel University, Thomas R. Kline School of Law
- Publication Details
- Widener law journal, Vol.25, p83
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Thomas R. Kline School of Law
- Identifiers
- 991021902912304721