from Patricia Lynn Reilly Slavery didnt end. It evolved. Bryan Stevenson invites us to change the narrative. In Germany, Bryan, a public-interest lawyer and the founder of the Montgomery, Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), had just finished giving a presentation on the death penalty when a scholar in the audience stood up and said, “We don’t have the death penalty in Germany. And of course, we can never have the death penalty in Germany.” The room got very quiet before she added, “There’s no way, with our history, we could ever engage in the systematic killing of human beings. It would be unconscionable for us to, in an intentional and deliberate way, set about executing people.” The experience made Stevenson wondered what it would feel like to be living in a world where the nation-state of Germany was executing people, especially if they were disproportionately Jewish. “I couldn’t bear it,” he said. “It would be unconscionable.” “And yet in the states of the Old South…the very states where there are buried in the ground the bodies of people who were lynched,” the death penalty persists, and is irregularly administered. In homicide cases, he says, the death penalty is eleven times more likely to be applied if the victim is white than if the victim is black; it is twenty-two times likelier to be applied if a trial has both a black defendant and a white victim. ****She invites us to watch the videos in the left column at the Smithsonian webstie.
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 19:51:39 +0000
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