Word: jasper
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...public health, like disposing of an incurable case of rabies. If sentenced to life, King would probably kill someone else in jail, the prosecution reasoned--another black, or a Jew perhaps, so lively and irrepressible boils his hate. He displays no shadow of remorse, and even in the Jasper jail, awaiting trial, he managed to get hold of an 8-in. knife. The jury did not find it hard to conclude that, among other reasons to execute him, he is simply too dangerous to go on living...
...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...