Aliyya Swaby Photo
Wendy Marte was firmly against the death penalty, but she played devil’s advocate to better understand her classmates’ perspectives.
Marte (pictured) challenged her political stance during “Justice Day” at New Haven Academy, an annual daylong series of several seminars and workshops pushing students to analyze and take action on community issues.
Students chose two of nine discussion seminars revolving around modern ideas of injustice and ended the day with hands-on workshops connecting those issues to ongoing New Haven projects.
New Haven Academy math teacher Jerry Volpe provided students with pages of statistics, to help them form opinions on the death penalty. He showed the cost of the death penalty in appeals and legal fees, the demographic breakdown of death row convicts, the amount of times Connecticut has used it versus other states, and the prevalence of the death penalty in the U.S. compared to other countries.
“The goal is not to be on one side of the other,” but rather to form informed opinions, he said.
Volpe (at right i photo) and his co-instruction Pete Kazienko (left), a world history teacher at the city high school, started with a simple poll: Do you support the death penalty?
Students texted their answers to the “Poll Everywhere” live platform that updated in real-time on the projector. Eight percent said yes and that number slowly rose to 36 percent; 21 percent did not support the death penalty and 43 percent were unsure.
Next, Kazienko asked what the purpose of the death penalty was.
Again the responses went up on the board immediately. “An eye for an eye,” one student wrote.
“To achieve retribution for the crimes someone has committed,” another wrote.
“To rid the world of the people who don’t deserve the privilege of life,” another texted.
That got Marte fired up. “You’re not God,” she said. “You don’t have the right to decide if someone deserves to live.”
Kazienko asked students to seriously respond to one student’s written assertion that “pleasure” was a purpose of the death penalty.
Playing devil’s advocate, Marte said she could see how a victim of a heinous crime could feel good about seeing the perpetrator get the death penalty.
“If I’m the mother of a daughter assaulted by a pedophile. By me seeing a pedophile get the death penalty, I see some sort of justice out of seeing that,” she said. She then clarified: “That’s not really my point of view though.”
Do people deserve to die for their crimes? Most said no, but many were unsure.
Zion Satal, an 11th grader, said he believes in “forgiveness,” since killing one person “doesn’t bring those other people back.”
But Dinesh Mandania qualified his answer. A serial killer who promises to continue murdering people could be a good candidate for the death penalty.
Superintendent Garth Harries said he was impressed by the level of engagement present in the day’s seminars.
“It underscored ways in which the approach to action gets students involved in the problems our city faces,” he said.
New Haven Academy has been working with Greater Schools Partnership to increase interdisciplinary learning in its classrooms. Students were encouraged to take ideas from the day to create their senior Social Action projects.
Meredith Garvin, New Haven Academy’s school director, hired a filmmaker to document last year’s seniors as they went through the process of finishing individual Social Action Projects in different areas of New Haven.
