QUOTE 1: To say it has to be painless is to lose
sight of what it is...which punishment…in its very meaning is. The word
punishment comes from the same root as pain. It is and is essential
conception…painful. If it is not painful, it is not punishment. When killers
intentionally over depraved indifference inflict intense pain and suffering on
their victims. In my view, they should die a quick but painful death. Not
torture, not drawn out but quick and painful. [The story of Capital Punishment BBC Documentary 2011]
QUOTE 2: Not that criminals' eyes should be our only
guiding lights, but by understanding their attitudes, I believe we can better
punish their acts proportionately to their evil. [Among Killers, Searching For the Worst of the Worst December 3, 2000 Sunday, Final Edition Posted in The Washington Post]
AUTHOR: Robert Blecker teaches criminal law
and constitutional history at New York Law School.
Tufts, B.A. 1969
Harvard, J.D. 1974 cum laude Harvard
Fellow in Law and
Humanities, 1976-77.
Served as Special
Assistant Attorney General, New York State Office of Special Anti-Corruption
Prosecutor. A leading U.S. authority on death penalty and frequent commentator
for national media, including CNN, Court TV, and PBS.
With
a gleam in his eye, Robert Blecker, a nationally known retributivist advocate
of the death penalty, has managed to alienate both sides of the debate on
the politically divisive and morally complex issue of capital punishment.
But his position as designated outcast is nothing new, nor is his strongly held
conviction that the most vicious and callous offenders deserve to die and that
society is morally obliged to execute those “worst of the worst” criminals. A
radical at heart, like many who grew up in the 1960s, Professor Blecker railed
against prevailing academic assumptions about the evils of capital punishment
during his undergraduate years at Tufts, where he refused to major and
nevertheless in 1969 earned a B.A. with honors in three fields, while
vehemently protesting against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. At Harvard
Law School, where he won the Oberman Prize for the best graduating thesis,
Professor Blecker was one of only two students to publicly defend the death
penalty. He went on to prosecute corrupt lawyers, cops, and judges and saw up
close how the rich and powerful were given breaks denied to poor and powerless
offenders. Later a Harvard University Fellow in Law and
Humanities and also a playwright, Professor Blecker’s production “Vote
NO!”, an anti-federalist case against adopting the Constitution, premiered in
1987 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and traveled to 16 states,
convincing even staunchly patriotic audiences to vote against the Constitution.
Still rebellious, Professor Blecker espouses his carefully considered, yet
almost universally unpalatable position in the academic community. Based on 13
years of interviewing convicted killers, and hundreds of hours inside
maximum security prisons and on death rows, he makes a powerful case
for the death penalty as retribution, but only for the “worst of the worst”
offenders. The sole keynote speaker supporting the death penalty
at major conferences and at the Association of the Bar of
the City of New York, he was also the lone American advocate at
an international conference in Geneva on the death penalty sponsored by Duke
University Law School. Professor Blecker encourages emotional debate in his
teaching and has cotaught his death penalty course with leading
abolitionists—most recently Kevin Doyle, Director of New York’s Capital
Defender’s Office—in order to give students both viewpoints. He also teaches
Criminal Law, Constitutional History, and Criminals and Our Urge to Punish
Them. Frequently appearing in The New York Times, on PBS, CourtTV, CNN,
BBC World News, and other major media outlets, and with privileged access to
death rows across the country, Professor Blecker is making a documentary
chronicling life on death rows and contrasting them with maximum security
general population: Are they "living hell" as commonly portrayed? He,
himself will be the subject of a feature documentary to be released to theatres
Spring '08, which chronicles his odd relationship with Daryl Holton, recently
executed by Tennessee.
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