John Blume, Cornell professor of law and director of the Cornell Death Penalty Project, expressed optimism that capital punishment ultimately will be abolished in the United States, while speaking about his seventh death-row case argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on March 21.

Blume spoke in Saperston Student Lounge in Myron Taylor Hall March 28, as part of a series of events organized by Cornell students who oppose the death penalty.

In 1988 death row inmate William Weaver was convicted of murdering a prospective witness in a drug trial and sentenced to death. In his trial, however, the prosecutor "made a series of arguments in which he told the jury, 'look, it's not really about William Weaver, it's not about what he deserves. … We need to give him the death penalty in order to send the message to every drug dealer and scum bag in the world that if they come to St. Louis County, we're going to kill them,'" Blume said.

After invalidating the death penalty in 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, with the case of Gregg v. Georgia. This case, Blume said, put forward the idea that "there are two legitimate penalogical justifications for capital punishment -- retribution and deterrence."

The Missouri attorney general's position in the Weaver case was that the prosecutor was simply using a deterrence argument. But Blume argued that "this isn't really about deterrence. When you say this case is not about Mr. Weaver, it's much bigger than William Weaver, what you are effectively saying is 'look, regardless of whether you think this person deserves it or not you should give him the death penalty.'"

Blume pointed to two problems prevalent in the capital justice system -- bad lawyering and "playing the lottery." One case he cited involved a man named Butler who was accused of raping and murdering a hitchhiker. Butler's inexperienced trial lawyer's defense was that the victim had no vaginal tearing and that Butler was a "big black buck." He lost the case, but Butler was granted a retrial and given a life sentence due to bad lawyering.

Blume also referred to a case in which the conviction of a man accused of double homicide was overturned because one of the jurors was found to be biased. The defendant later pleaded guilty to the crime in exchange for a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, thereby escaping the death sentence due simply to luck, an example of how the current capital punishment system is just a lottery, said Blume.

Nothing is more illustrative of the problems with the death penalty, Blume said, than the fact that "since 1976, 114 people sentenced to death have been found to be innocent."

"There is no way to work out a rational system for who lives and who dies," Blume said. "It's about whether you have a good lawyer or by the color of your skin." A lot of these reasons help explain the steady decline in the number of death sentences actually imposed and why "support for capital punishment is at its lowest point in 45 years," he said.

The fact that the number of people sentenced to death has decreased by 40 percent since 1998 is a sign, Blume observed, that public opinion is changing. "Public opinion is like an ocean liner. You can only move it a degree at a time." He is confident, however, that "soon the United States will join every other democratic country in the world" and work toward abolishing the death penalty.

Chandni Navalkha '10 is a writer intern at the Cornell Chronicle.