Just Mercy Quote Analysis and Information on South Carolina Capital Punishment
Table of Contents
- How Does Jury Selection and Duty Work?
- South Carolina and Capital Punishment
- Quote on page 89, said by Herbert Richardson:
“It’s been so strange, Bryan. More people have asked me what they can do to help me in the last fourteen hours of my life than ever asked me in the years when I was coming up” (Stevenson 89).
4. Quote on page 90, the brainchild of Bryan Stevenson:
“We think we can [kill someone for murder] in a manner that doesn’t implicate our own humanity the way raping or abusing someone would [to vindicate henious crimes]” (Stevenson 90).
- How Does Jury Selection and Duty Work?
Jury duty allows regular citizens to act as a singular, amorphous, objective victim — a representative of those affected by the particular crimes in question. As Bryan Stevenson wrote in Just Mercy, indictments, trials, and subsequent executions of people are crimes we choose to allow, just as the only choice communities are given in response to the prior crimes resulting in trial is to mourn. Victims are never isolated, just as condemning a man is not just on behalf of the assailed, but are carried out by courts made to serve the public and community as a whole.
These objective victims mentioned might determine to “execute [a] man in all of our names” just as a community mourns collectively for the victim of a vile crime. But who are these objective victims chosen to vindicate a victim or prosecute the accused, how are they chosen, and are there different kinds of juries?
According to the Sixth Amendment, “The accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.” However, the exact makeup of a jury changes depending on whether the case is civil or criminal, or state or federal. For instance, at typical civil jury is made of six people while a criminal jury seats twelve; in both civil and criminal federal cases, the jury is required to be unanimous, but while most states require a unanimous vote in criminal cases, about a third of states only require a majority for conviction in civil cases; and even as criminal cases require that defendants be proved guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt,” civil cases require only “a preponderance of evidence.” A hung jury can also be declared if the group is deadlocked in decision, where a judge can then declare an additional hearing or a mistrial. Whatever the makeup though, juries in any case are supposed to be selected randomly, should reflect a portion of their community, and should not be predisposed to a verdict prior to hearing evidence in court.
Jury selection, regardless of these factors, generally proceeds in a uniform way. Citizens can not volunteer to serve, but can be chosen randomly from source lists. Once they receive notice that they have been called, they report to a local courthouse and wait for an essential interview of character and possible intention. A first set of twelve people are called from a list to be placed in a jury box before a judge, clerks, and the opposing lawyers where they can claim to be a compromised juror, as in, have a reason why they know they can not be part of the jury. In a process known as voir dire, the potential participants are then asked questions by counsel, where the counsel can ask for certain jurors to be dismissed. Cause for dismissal might be because a juror is a family member of the accused or they work for the company being sued. The lawyers have an unlimited number of dismissal requests, but the judge ultimately decides whether they will grant the action. A lawyer is also allowed a finite number of peremptory challenges (dismissals where the reason for objection is not stated). It is once both parties are pleased with the jury that the chosen participants can serve their function in the case.
While serving as a function of the state, there are few variables, but there are a few important aspects. Jurors are told to not discuss the case with third parties, and rarely get to ask questions unless a written request is granted. Jury sequestration is rare, but it is sometimes used during high-profile cases. If this happens, the jurors do not return to their homes, and are confined to a specific location while the case perpetuates. In federal cases, jurors are also usually compensated with fifty dollars per day, and many employers continue to give some sort of pay while the juror is responding to governmental duty.
Jury duty is an important part of American democracy because it allows for direct participation in a system highly bureaucratic. While the issues demonstrated in Just Mercy, such as lack of diversity in these juries, still continue to infect our trials, it is important to understand how this component is important in our system, and how we can improve a state that is always trying to create a more perfect union.
Sources:
- https://www.uscourts.gov/services-forms/jury-service/learn-about-jury-service
- https://www.findlaw.com/litigation/legal-system/must-all-jury-verdicts-be-unanimous.html
- https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/resources/law_related_education_network/how_courts_work/juryselect/
- https://www.uscourts.gov/services-forms/jury-service/faqs-juror-information
2. South Carolina and Capital Punishment
Twenty-three states in America have abolished the death penalty as of 2022, but South Carolina is part of the twenty-seven states that still condone the sentence.
To address a few of the general arguments regarding the death penalty first, “An analysis by the office of the Tennessee comptroller found that the average cost of death penalty trials cost almost 50 percent more than both trials with life without parole and life with the possibility of parole.” The appeals process has thirteen steps, and the cost of incarceration and trials eventually cost more than applying living sentences. Therefore, the death penalty is not only financially disincentivizing, but the fact that humans regard some of our most vulnerable citizens in dollar form shows readers that we are thinking about what it means to kill someone in remarkably desensitized ways. This is also common in the common argument of prison crowding.
The punishment is also considered in some courts to be “cruel and unusual,” and is often applied disproportionately to offenders, such as in South Carolina. For instance, “S.C. punishments issued for sexual assault, for instance, indicate racism. The first Black man executed in South Carolina after being convicted of rape was killed in 1746. It wasn’t until 1941 — almost 200 years later — that a white man was sentenced to death for the same crime.”
South Carolina is a specific example of the struggles our nation faces when addressing the issue. Since 1976, when a national ban on the death penalty was lifted, South Carolina has executed forty-three people. When prosecution seeks this punishment, a jury will unanimously have to vote for this sentence, and if a hung jury occurs, a life sentence is given. Only the governor has the power of clemency.
South Carolina’s main controversy centers around methods of execution: lethal injection, electrocution, and death by firing squad. A prisoner will likely have the choice between electrocution and a firing squad because the drugs for lethal injection are in short supply for the reason Bryan Stevenson gives in Just Mercy: “Many states were using drugs that had been banned for animal euthanasia because they caused a painful and torurous death. The drugs weren’t readily available in the United States, and so states had started importing them from European manufacturers. When the news spread that the drugs were being used in executions, European producers stopped making them available.” As explored in this link, lethal injection seems to be only more humane than other possible methods of execution, but the debate of the most painless execution is not yet proven.
Prisoners are given a choice in South Carolina between electrocution and the firing squad, but the first death row prisoner to choose the firing squad since it became a codified method has not been killed yet on the grounds that there is still debate over whether the punishment is “cruel and unusual.”
Whether the ability to apply state-sponsored suicide is necessary, ethical, monetarily apt, or even legal is debated by proponents and opponents of capital punishment throughout South Carolina. While I have not experienced the trauma of watching someone die in the arms of the state, knowing the executed, or knowing the victim of the accused, I do know that there is pain in losing humanity no matter how subtly two lives touch and the loss we all face by choosing to pronounce a man unredeemable — to condemn ourselves in pursuit of condemning others.
Sources:
- https://www.wbir.com/article/news/local/death-penalty-vs-life-in-prison-the-costs/51-581820292
- https://www.thestate.com/news/local/crime/article254563167.html#storylink=cpy
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErpyIrieRa4
- https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/executions-halted-in-south-carolina-amid-challenges-to-constitutionality-of-firing-squad-and-electric-chair
- https://www.thestate.com/news/local/crime/article254563167.html
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dprfHZ7gYvw
- https://www.npr.org/2022/04/20/1093812483/firing-squad-execution-blocked-south-carolina
3. Quote on page 89, said by Herbert Richardson:
“It’s been so strange, Bryan. More people have asked me what they can do to help me in the last fourteen hours of my life than ever asked me in the years when I was coming up” (Stevenson 89).
We are all implicated in a crime born because of past cruelty. We are all responsible for letting the batton of bad fortune pass. We are all responsible for withholding judgment when the unprotected face hardship. Because I believe we would rather not witness something horrible than proactively intervene. It is only when we can see our passivity and our involvement, like the guards who performed Herbert Richardson’s execution, that we ask how we have managed to transform one heinous act into another with our own bare hands and a gavel that resembles a instrument of justice than it looks like a hammer, an instrument of death.
Herbert Richardson was abused by the government in two ways. First, he was sent to a war with the main reason, seventy-percent as it turns out, to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat. This was revealed in the Pentagon Papers only after the government tried in a futile case of New York Times V. United States to stop the newspaper from publishing their findings on the Vietnam war. The second abuse Mr. Richardson faced was the lack of care he was given upon returning home from war, severely injured and traumatized, which caused him to lose yet another part of humanity when he ultimately killed a little girl and hurt another. He returned from a government mission a state-sponsored instrument of death, and the government killed him for the malfunctions they caused in their own creation.
“It’s been so strange, Bryan. More people have asked me what they can do to help me in the last fourteen hours of my life than ever asked me in the years when I was coming up” (Stevenson 89). Yes, it was not only the government that was responsible, but Mr. Richardson’s community allowed him to remain alone when his mother died, when he suffered from physical abuse, when drugs and alcohol consumed his money and life. Mr. Richardson struggled alone because dozens of people decided to watch this man struggle rather than help this man survive.
4. Quote on page 90, the brainchild of Bryan Stevenson:
“We think we can [kill someone for murder] in a manner that doesn’t implicate our own humanity the way raping or abusing someone would [to vindicate henious crimes]” (Stevenson 90).
How do we gain justice for victims, sympathize with the criminally impaired, act according to the law, and retain our own beliefs? How does the intention and legality of a murder validate the very act? As in, do the pardons of the most powerful citizens of society (lawmakers and leaders) and the legal murders of the government (capital murder) mean that a socially constructed, humanly flawed system has more of a right to execute someone than a boy abused by his father (like many children in Just Mercy) or a woman raped by her neighbor? Through the death penalty, the government continues to perpetuate the great tragedy that all humans face: death, and most sorrowfully, death at the hands of man rather than god.
“We think we can [kill someone for murder] in a manner that doesn’t implicate our own humanity the way raping or abusing someone would [to vindicate heinous crimes]” (Stevenson 90). Yes, we think we can, and we do. But that does not justify the action.
Humans have the potential to save people, or to kill them. It is a choice not many have to face in such direct ways, such as pushing someone in front of a moving car, or pulling them further from the road, but in subtle ways, such as paying for a homeless man’s meal, or by talking to a lonely elderly. By showing that goodness is embedded in humanity, and that there are ripe spots among the rotten, we can save people, we can save ourselves, and justify that even after all the pain we’ve caused, human life still has the worth the government is unable to recognize in the weakest members of society.
