Death Penalty Focus: Student Essay Contest

2nd Annual Essay Contest Sponsored by THE INLAND VALLEY CHAPTER of Death Penalty Focus Execute Justice, Not People Why California Must Find an Alternative to the Death Penalty “In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.” -Thurgood Marshall The Fine Print… 1. You must be a Middle School, High School, Undergraduate or Graduate student in the state of California. 2. All submissions should be sent via e-mail or mail to Sharyn Webb at swebb1937@yahoo.com  or 774 Chatham Court, Claremont CA 91711. 3. E-mailed submissions must be a word or PDF document. Email Subject: “Student Essay Contest.” 4. No essays will be accepted without an accompanying submission form. 5. Format: Typed, font size 12, double spaced 6. Length: College level - three to five pages Middle and High School level - two to three pages Deadlines: Submission Deadline: March 31, 2011 Winners will be notified by: April 15, 2011 Awards will be presented at a special event on: April 30, 2011 Second and third prizes awarded at judges’ discretion. Winning essays will be published. Guidelines: One of the most crucial decisions our state of California must make is whether or not to eliminate the death penalty in favor of life without parole. Most recently, in March 2009, New Mexico joined the fourteen other states which have made that legal change. “In the fall of 2009…The American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost fifty years ago, pronounced it a failure… The institute is made up of 4,000 judges, lawyers and law professors.” New York Times, January 5, 2010 Many of our Supreme Court justices, law enforcement officers and prosecuting attorneys who once supported the death penalty have changed their minds. Polls show that two thirds of Californians now prefer life without parole over the death sentence. Your essay should explore why our state must eliminate the death penalty and what the possible alternatives are. It will be judged for clarity of writing, research, creativity, uniqueness of approach, persuasive arguments and adherence to rules and deadlines. Prizes: Middle $300 - 1st $150 - 2nd $75 - 3rd High $300 - 1st $150 - 2nd $75 - 3rd College $300 - 1st $150 - 2nd $75 - 3rd Graduate $300 - 1st $150 - 2nd $75 - 3rd Any questions? Please call Sharyn at 909-392-0020 Student Essay Contest Winners - 2010 - Inland Valley Chapter Middle School 1st - Melissa Spangler 2nd - Ashwin Balaji 3rd - Roshan Plamthottam High School 1st - Nicholas Morton 2nd - Tran Tsan 3rd - Colin Domonoske College 1st - Sara Eller 2nd - Rachel KottKamp Graduate School 1st - Caycie Bradford Honorary Award Cathy Sarinana

On Rights (and Wrongs)

TSADP has been hosting a series of death penalty essay contests for the last two years. The TSADP Essay Contest is open to all 11^th and 12^th grade Texas high school students. To participate, students had to write an essay explaining why a moratorium on executions is necessary in Texas. Essays were judged on both style and content. This year, we received about 45 great essays from Texas high school students.

Recently our panel of judges selected Morgan A. Childs to receive the 1st place award ($200). Morgan is a 12th grade students at the St. John's School in Houston, Texas. In the following days we will be posting essays from the other awards winners.

I grew up in opposition to the death penalty for the sole reason that mistakes are made. For years, the only way I could convey my concern towards those who disagreed with me was by presenting the facts – mistakes are indeed made, and with some regularity (as of the day I write this, over 123 inmates have been exonerated from death row, their innocence finally proven). I determined that if I grew up in Harris County, the duty was mine to claim some sort of opinion on the matter; ignorance in the thick of things, I realized, was shameful.

David Dow, a death penalty lawyer who lives and works in Houston, writes in his 2005 book Executed on a Technicality: Lethal Injustice on America’s Death Row, “To those with even the most fleeting familiarity with the criminal justice system, any debate that turns on the question of whether innocent people have been or will be executed is truly inane, for the answer is obvious. […] The fact is obvious, yet it is also irrelevant.” I had the invaluable opportunity to hear Mr. Dow speak after reading his book, and what seemed to unsettle the crowd more than figures and statistics was the evidence that the men and women of death row are, without exception, as absolutely human as those of us who sat in the audience. Evidence, indeed, that seems to disappear in the land of capital punishment. “Innocence is not enough,” Mr. Dow reminds us time and time again.

Innocence is no longer enough for me, either. Last March, I went to my first of many execution vigils with the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. To my surprise, the men and women I stood with that day – there were seven others, I think, a number that seemed and still seems awfully small for what is well-known to be the death penalty capital of the Western World – weren’t quite the hard-as-nails protestors I’d imagined. In fact, they were quite the opposite; ten months later, I know them as the most kind-hearted, hopeful people I have had the good fortune to know. They are advocates of a more virtuous system of justice, one in which retribution does not come at the cost of dehumanization. And I want to see them win their battle.

If I’ve learned anything in my brief career as an activist, it’s that the most concrete evidence remains in my favor: the death penalty is not a proven deterrent; it is more expensive to put an man or woman to death than to keep him or her in a maximum-security prison; defendants cannot be ensured competent representation (and often suffer from their lawyers’ incompetence). It did not take long to learn the facts. What has come with my hours holding a “STOP EXECUTIONS” banner is the realization that on any side of a court sits the potential for individual wrongdoing, and that it is our job as advocates of human rights to shed light on the atrocities of both criminal behavior and punishment. My fellow abolitionists are as aware of the personal lives of their contacts on Texas’ death row as they are of the crimes those inmates committed. They, like Mr. Dow, have learned that decency is as vital an aspect of law enforcement as justice.

My own belief is simple. Because universally we are a flawed race, we have an obligation to call into question the very method by which we correct and apprehend the faults – major and minor – of our own kind. Innocence may not be enough, but the whole truth, the facts, the figures, the statistics, are enough to inspire the pause for which we are so overdue. I believe I know what is just, and I believe the next step is learning dignity. My experience with the persevering people of the Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty has renewed my faith in the value of hope, as well as my faith in the good judgment of people – despite all opposition.

Bibliography

Dow, David. Executed on a Technicality: Lethal Injustice on America’s Death Row. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005.

Personal knowledge.

TSADP essay Contest

Nathan Hays of the Mansfield Timberview High School was winner of the Texas Students Against the Death Penalty's 2006 essay contest. He was ranked 1st place by our judges.

Deadline for entries is Feb 1st, 2007. The TSADP Essay Contest is open to all 11^th and 12^th grade Texas high school students. To participate, you must write an essay explaining why a moratorium on executions is necessary in Texas. Essays are judged on both style and content. The winning essay must demonstrate an outstanding grasp of the death penalty system in Texas. Complete contest guidelines are available on the Web site.

Texas Death Penalty Moratorium: The Time for Action is now

Early in the morning of December 2, 2005, Kenneth Boyd marched from his dimly lit cell in Raleigh, North Carolina, toward a small room dominated by a reclining table and an apparatus for delivering a lethal combination of various poisons. After lying down, a doctor inserted a tube into his arm and stepped back. His last words were to his wife, Kathy Smith, “Look after my son and my grandchildren. God bless everybody in here.” Shortly after that, at 2:15 a.m., he was dead. As the fatal dose of chemicals entered his bloodstream, Kenneth Boyd became the 1,000^th person to be executed in the United States since the death penalty’s reinstatement in 1976. With so many deaths over so many years, America has joined the company of China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam.[i] Even worse, the death penalty itself has multiple problems, including the ingraining of socially counterproductive values, its unfair application, and the risk of executing innocent people.

By far, the most common argument for the death penalty is that executing criminals deters future aggression. However, the overwhelming amount of evidence suggests just the opposite.[ii] For instance, California experienced a drastic drop in the murder rate while the death penalty was not carried out. From 1907 to 1963, New York encountered more homicides in the month immediately following an execution than before. In addition, the FBI Uniform Crime Report shows that police officers are most in danger in regions where executions are most common.[iii] Why do people commit more crimes in response to executions? The answer to that question lies in what the government communicates through executions. First, it sends the message that the most acceptable answer to offenses is by using violence. Second, the government communicates that vengeance is just. Finally, executions convince people that the government decides who lives and who dies. Inevitably, these three signals induce people to commit more crimes and detest authority. Therefore, not only does the death penalty fail to deter crime, but it actually brutalizes the population into acquiring socially counterproductive values.

In addition, the death penalty is applied unfairly. For instance, 202 African American defendants have been executed for the murders of white victims while only twelve white defendants have received a death sentence for the murder of African Americans.[iv] The logical conclusion from this is that the government values a white life over a black life. Furthermore, there is a significant economic bias. For example, almost all defendants facing the death penalty cannot afford their own legal fees. State-provided attorneys are often inexperienced, unpaid, and have absolutely no motivation to fight hard. As a result, the current death row population is comprised of a disproportionate number of economically disadvantaged people.[v] In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled that the system of executions was “arbitrary and capricious” in Furman v. Georgia.[vi] Although the court later reversed that view, the death penalty in America remains an enemy to unity and equality because it condemns humans to death based on economic status and race.

Finally, the risk of executing an innocent person far outweighs any benefits. Almost 125 people have been released from death row since 1976.[vii] This means that one inmate has been taken off death row for roughly every eight people executed. In addition, the government is often unwilling to review capital cases in order to save time and money, leaving the burden of proving innocence to those outside the system. For instance, journalism students in Illinois were recently assigned to investigate a person on death row. After doing some detective work, they discovered that one of the witnesses had lied at the trial and they uncovered the true killer, who confessed on videotape.[viii] The media has also convinced states to exonerate people on death row in several instances, such as the case of Walter McMillian, who was slated to be executed in Alabama.[ix] However, neither the media nor the informal efforts of concerned citizens can possibly review all of the death row cases. This means that the American public must simply have faith in the criminal justice system, which has already proven itself to be ineffective and prejudiced.

As Kenneth Boyd, closed his eyes for the final time, justice breathed its last breath alongside him. It died because the government sent a message of violence and hypocrisy to its citizens. It died because of the unfair, prejudiced judicial system. It died because the government risked killing an innocent person. Even more, it was all so unavoidable. It is time for our government, which claims to be “of the people, for the people, and by the people” to safeguard the lives of all its citizens and resurrect justice once and for all.

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[i] See “US Carries Out 1000^th Execution,” British Broadcasting Channel Website, 2 Dec. 2005

[ii] See the Michigan State University Comm Tech Lab’s Death Penalty Information Center for the High School Curriculum, “Deterrence,” 2004 http://deathpenaltyinfo.msu.edu/c/about/arguments/argument1b.htm. Note: Like the rest of the endnotes here, this is the specific source information. For the general reference to the source, see Works Cited.

[iii] For more general information, see “Facts about Deterrence and the Death Penalty,” Death Penalty Information Center, 2006, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid=12&did=167. The two sources are cited on that page.

[iv] See the Michigan State University Comm Tech Lab’s Death Penalty Information Center for the High School Curriculum, “Arbitrariness and Discrimination,” 2004 http://deathpenaltyinfo.msu.edu/c/about/arguments/argument1b.htm

[v] See “The Death Penalty in Texas: Lethal Injustice,” Online Documentation Archive. 1 Mar. 1998. Amnesty International, http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/ENGAMR510101998. Note: See pages’ endnotes for original references.

[vi] See “ACLU Briefing Paper Number 8: Death Penalty.” Department of Public Education Archives, American Civil Liberties Union, http://www.eff.org/Censorship/Academic_edu/CAF/civil-liberty/death-penalty.aclu

[vii] For more general information, see “Innocence and the Death Penalty,” Death Penalty Information Center, 2006, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?did=412&scid=6. The source is cited on the page.

[viii] See the Michigan State University Comm Tech Lab’s Death Penalty Information Center for the High School Curriculum, “Innocence (In Opposition),” 2004

[ix] See “News and Developments,” Death Penalty Information Center, 2006, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/newsanddev.php?scid=6. Article originally appeared in National Geographic Magazine, January 2006 Edition.

TSADP Death Penalty Essay contest

Deadline for entries is Feb 1st, 2007

The TSADP Essay Contest is open to all 11^th and 12^th grade Texas high school students. To participate, you must write an essay explaining why a moratorium on executions is necessary in Texas. Essays are judged on both style and content. The winning essay must demonstrate an outstanding grasp of the death penalty system in Texas.

Awards: 12^th Grade Winner $200
12^th grade runner-up $50
11^th grade Winner $200
11^th grade runner-up $50


Complete contest guidelines are available on the Web site.