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Robert Blecker
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To say it has to be painless is to lose sight of what it is...which punishment…in its very meaning is. The word punishment comes from the same root as pain. It is and is essential conception…painful. If it is not painful, it is not punishment. When killers intentionally over depraved indifference inflict intense pain and suffering on their victims. In my view, they should die a quick but painful death. Not torture, not drawn out but quick and painful.[The story of Capital Punishment BBC Documentary 2011]
AUTHOR:
Robert Blecker teaches criminal law and
constitutional history at New York Law School. Tufts, B.A. 1969 Harvard, J.D.
1974 cum laude Harvard Fellow in Law and Humanities, 1976-77. Served as Special
Assistant Attorney General, New York State Office of Special Anti-Corruption
Prosecutor. A leading U.S. authority on death penalty and frequent commentator
for national media, including CNN, Court TV, and PBS.
http://www.nyls.edu/faculty/faculty_profiles/robert_blecker With a gleam in his
eye, Robert Blecker, a nationally known retributivist advocate of the death penalty,
has managed to alienate both sides of the debate on the politically divisive
and morally complex issue of capital punishment. But his position as designated
outcast is nothing new, nor is his strongly held conviction that the most
vicious and callous offenders deserve to die and that society is morally
obliged to execute those “worst of the worst” criminals. A radical at heart,
like many who grew up in the 1960s, Professor Blecker railed against prevailing
academic assumptions about the evils of capital punishment during his
undergraduate years at Tufts, where he refused to major and nevertheless in
1969 earned a B.A. with honors in three fields, while vehemently protesting
against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. At Harvard Law School, where he won
the Oberman Prize for the best graduating thesis, Professor Blecker was one of
only two students to publicly defend the death penalty. He went on to prosecute
corrupt lawyers, cops, and judges and saw up close how the rich and powerful
were given breaks denied to poor and powerless offenders. Later a Harvard
University Fellow in Law and Humanities and also a playwright, Professor
Blecker’s production “Vote NO!”, an anti-federalist case against adopting the
Constitution, premiered in 1987 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and
traveled to 16 states, convincing even staunchly patriotic audiences to vote
against the Constitution. Still rebellious, Professor Blecker espouses his
carefully considered, yet almost universally unpalatable position in the academic
community. Based on 13 years of interviewing convicted killers, and hundreds of
hours inside maximum security prisons and on death rows, he makes a powerful
case for the death penalty as retribution, but only for the “worst of the
worst” offenders. The sole keynote speaker supporting the death penalty at
major conferences and at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, he
was also the lone American advocate at an international conference in Geneva on
the death penalty sponsored by Duke University Law School. Professor Blecker
encourages emotional debate in his teaching and has cotaught his death penalty
course with leading abolitionists—most recently Kevin Doyle, Director of New
York’s Capital Defender’s Office—in order to give students both viewpoints. He
also teaches Criminal Law, Constitutional History, and Criminals and Our Urge
to Punish Them. Frequently appearing in The New York Times, on PBS, CourtTV,
CNN, BBC World News, and other major media outlets, and with privileged access
to death rows across the country, Professor Blecker is making a documentary
chronicling life on death rows and contrasting them with maximum security
general population: Are they "living hell" as commonly portrayed? He,
himself will be the subject of a feature documentary to be released to theatres
Spring '08, which chronicles his odd relationship with Daryl Holton, recently
executed by Tennessee.
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