RALEIGH — Life or death? Currently in North Carolina, judges and juries are at times required to determine whether a convicted murderer deserves the harshest punishment of all: death. But recently, many state residents have begun to question the legitimacy of this system—and demand that the government do so as well.
Lobbyists at the Museum of History in Raleigh Wednesday showed their support with speeches, seminars and press conferences for a moratorium—a bill that would suspend capital punishment in North Carolina for two years.
“There is nothing else like [the moratorium bill] anywhere in the country,” said Jeremy Collins, a consultant for the moratorium campaign.
Alan Gell and Darryl Hunt, two men who were wrongly convicted of murder, spoke to audience members in the afternoon about the moratorium and their experiences in jail. Gell spent nine years on death row and Hunt was incarcerated for 18 and a half years before both men were exonerated. The two men strongly emphasized to listeners how much it meant to current inmates that people were actively supporting the moratorium bill.
With growing bipartisan support, the moratorium has gradually attracted the notice of the general public and the state government.
Last year, the North Carolina Senate passed the moratorium legislation, but before the bill could come up for a vote in the House of Representatives, the year’s session reached its end. Now that the legislature has reconvened for this year’s session, lobbyists are putting all their support behind the bill.
Many of the bill’s supporters are against the death penalty in general and see the legislation as a means of questioning the entire system.
“A moratorium will at least allow us to find ways of meditating on this barbarous practice and looking at the ways in which the death penalty all too often is inflicted primarily on the poor,” said Ariel Dorfman, distinguished professor of literature and Latin American studies at Duke.
Although an anti-death penalty view is prevalent among supporters, the bill itself does not necessarily promote capital punishment’s abolishment. During the two-year suspension period, death penalty trials and appeals would continue—only the executions would cease.
In The Chronicle March 29, junior Adam Yoffie strongly encouraged readers to consider the moratorium and contact their state legislators to express their support.
Many of Duke’s faculty and students, like Dorfman and Yoffie, support a moratorium, but a broader opinion on the death penalty is less clear.
“I’m not [for the death penalty] in theory,” said freshman Anne Knox Morton, who supports a moratorium. “But then you have people like Scott Peterson who I look at and I think, you don’t deserve to be alive after the things you have done.”
Senior Daniel Kennedy, executive director of Duke College Republicans, also felt conflicted about his stance on the death penalty.
“On the one hand, if one of my loved ones were murdered by someone, I would probably want them to be murdered in return,” he said. “At the same time, I believe there are so many complications and so many contingencies.”
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