Word: dershowitz
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These familiar issues were on the table at a recent Law School forum. Listening to panelists Paul Cassell, Alan Dershowitz, and Wendy Kaminer, one might have thought that the discussion was a vital one, that capital punishment was still a topic of active political discourse. In response to Dershowitz's claims that the application of the death penalty was systematically racist, Cassell quoted the latest statistics; Kaminer reassuringly asserted that the issues at hand were "empirical," not "political" questions. The terms of the debate, the panelists suggested, were factual, academic: they should be approached by study and analysis and acted...
...parole is offered as an alternative to show that Cassell's argument was naive in the extreme. Politicians' effective use of the death penalty as a symbol for getting tough on crime shows that it, like abortion, is a hotbutton issue, one to which people respond from the gut. Dershowitz's earnest attempts to separate the system of implementation from the death penalty itself is useful for academics but probably irrelevant in the political arena...
...millions of viewers, both national and international, tune in to view the trial of O.J. Simpson. Harvard Law School has become, like it or not, a de facto participant in this affair. Via the laptop computer of Robert Shapiro, Simpson's lead defense attorney, the Constitutional expertise of Alan Dershowitz is made available on a moment-to-moment, blow-by-blow basis...
...Dershowitz, who has borrowed Harvard's prestige to lend weight to a variety of moral and social causes, some meritorious and some not, has no moral basis for claiming exemption. As a paid member of the defense, he has paraded himself through the media as a commentator. It occurs to me that even Harvard may be well-served by a gadfly, if that is what it takes to inform it that its acquiescence in this matter makes it an amicus curiae of the legal team which is helping to dismantle the fundamental dignity of our institutions of law and order...
...humiliate public opinion into acquiescence is not a very lofty standard for the American institution of due process. Rather than wait for a fait accompli and the hand-wringing reserved to the whiners, perhaps the students of Harvard will show some moral leadership in this matter by informing Professor Dershowitz that he is free to sell his wares any way he chooses, so long as he keeps Harvard out of it. Robert Roecklin Graduate School of Rutgers University