Should our culture be more proactive in stopping violent crime before it happens?
This question and the issue of the execution of death row inmates was the focus of last week’s TED Talks presentation in the Night Owl Café on Tuesday, September 24.
The TED Talks video featured David R. Dow, a law professor at the University of Houston Law Center.
Through his position at University of Houston, Dow and his students have aided over one hundred inmates facing the death penalty.
He founded a program called the Texas Innocence Project that allows inmates claiming innocence to work with university students on substantiating their claims.
Dow has authored several books regarding law, and has articles published in a number of well-known publications.
The video, which has been viewed over half a million times, begins with a short anecdote by Dow about how an experience with his son at breakfast prompted him to recollect on a client who faced execution in Texas.
The client was facing the death penalty for a tragic murder he had committed, and had experienced a life of terrible and violent domestic conditions that started when he was approximately Dow’s son’s age.
He continues on to say that the best way to achieve this version is to take a proactive stance on the issue, and work early on to keep people off of the path that will lead them to murder much earlier.
Senior Damian Vacca, who was suggested to this event in a class (Other Ways of Knowing), called the presentation “informative,” despite already knowing quite a bit about the issue.
When asked about the importance of events like this on campus, Vacca said that the TED Talks are “a great way of introducing subjects that students may not necessarily get exposure to” and that presentations such as this one should be more frequent.
One of the faculty members running the event was Ockle Johnson, a member of the Monadnock Citizens Concerned about the death penalty, a local group aiming to abolish the death penalty here in New Hampshire.
Johnson also found the video to be very informative and explained what the relevance of bringing up this particular issue is.
“Currently, the state of New Hampshire allows for the death penalty, and we currently have an inmate on death row going through the appeals process,” Johnson said.
“This year in the state legislature there will be a bill introduced abolishing the death penalty, and that will be debated in the spring. If it passes, the governor has indicated that she will sign it,” he continued.
Johnson said he hoped the presentation would “encourage people to think about it, to decide where they stand on the issue, and then as engaged citizens to engage in the political process and inform their representatives of where they stand.”
Johnson went on to say that his own stance on the death penalty is that it does not work to deter murder, as states with the death penalty enforced often have to highest murder rates, and that the morality of the matter is the greatest issue.
“When the state executes someone, they’re executing someone who has been rendered defenseless by imprisonment” and so “we are killing a defenseless person,” he said.
“And when the state acts, it is acting in my name, and I do not want the state to act in my name to kill people when other alternatives are available,’ he continued.
Kim Schmidl-Gagne, a KSCfaculty member on the discussion board and a member of the American Democracy Project, explained that the presentation on Tuesday was part of a “bigger picture.”
Schmidl-Gagne said “I think that people either believe that it’s death penalty or no death penalty, and that’s certainly a piece of it but it’s a lot more complex than that.
In New Hampshire, this is the first time since 1939 that we’ve had anyone on death row so you also have [the] issue that even if this person does make it all the way through the system to get executed, we don’t have the facilities to do that.”
She then went on to explain that “there are economic pieces of it obviously, not just in the cost of putting someone in jail for the rest of their life versus death row, there are all of the other economic costs that go along with this.”
The ADP has noticed a drop-off in the activeness of citizens in government and is looking to prepare the next generation of Americans to be more hands on in political issues.
Schmidl-Gagne hoped that presentations such as this one will cause people to feel less distance between themselves and this issue, and that in turn citizens will become more actively involved in government.
“Part of it is we have gotten distanced from our government. People have seen their role as maybe going out and voting,” she explained.
Schmidl-Gagne said that the proactive nature of Dow’s presentation emanates what she and the ADP are hoping that those who attended the event will take away from it.
“We are pretty good at being in the trenches, but we should ask more about why? Why do these conditions exist?” she asked.
Brendan Keenan cant be contacted at brendan.keenan@keene.edu