Word: jaspers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...understanding Jasper may lie in these questions: Can capital punishment possibly be civilizing? Might it be sometimes indispensable? Human nature, without a social contract, leads people to pursue and punish murderers in their own way. The social contract restrains man's impulse toward rough justice. The contract states: Our authorities, acting under law for the community, will find the killers, try them and punish them. Implicit is the promise that the punishment will be sufficient to satisfy the need not only for moral satisfaction and justice but also for some measure of emotional satisfaction, a catharsis by--to admit...
...race skews any discussion of capital punishment in America. Arguments against the death penalty focus on the disproportionate number of blacks on death row. What does Jasper give us? Something astonishing: the spectacle of a vicious white sent to death row--for killing a black man. Hence the high-fives among blacks outside the courthouse. The natural jubilation is philosophically inconsistent, of course. It is difficult to argue that whites should be executed but blacks should not. What celebrating blacks really mean is something simpler: it's about time...
...promising novelty of Jasper is that for a moment, it aligns the black social contract with the white social contract. That is all that racial justice is ultimately about: the equality of the contracts. In the past they have been two different documents, with very different protections under...
...execution itself, the jury's decision declared a happy change in the social organism. One white juror made the argument that King required the death sentence because the community had to show that the murder was "something we cannot accept." If there was encouragement to be taken from Jasper, it lay in her use of the word...
What has changed since Emmett Till? There is a greater civility. In Jasper members of the families of the men accused of killing James Byrd have asked forgiveness of Byrd's relatives. One of the dead man's sisters has spoken of reconciliation. And there is cause for relief that a jury of 11 whites and one black in a small Southern town could come to the same moral conclusion, the same definition of justice. In 1955, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were declared not guilty by an all-white jury in less time than it takes to watch...