President
James Madison, was born on this day, 16 March 1751, he would have been 262
years old if he was alive today! To celebrate his birthday, I will post the
death penalty article of the week where there are quotes from him.
James Madison
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NOTICE: The following
article is written by the author itself and not by me, I am not trying to
violate their copyright. I will give some information on them.
PAGE TITLE: http://robertbleckerblog.com/
ARTICLE TITLE: Policing The Police
DATE: 1989
AUTHOR: Robert Blecker
AUTHOR
INFORMATION: 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.
To
view the article on the death penalty of the week, please go to this link.
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