Summary

• Objects (1 modified, 1 added, 0 removed)
  • Caselist.RoundClass[18]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[18]

Details

Caselist.RoundClass[18]

EntryDate

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1		-2016-11-09 23:41:30.850
	1	+2016-11-09 23:41:30.0

Caselist.CitesClass[18]

Cites

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	1	+NC - Shell
	2	+Counterplan Text:
	3	+The United States Federal Government will authorize a standing Truth and Reconciliation Commission to solicit testimony from victims and perpetrators of police brutality and misconduct and to provide policy recommendations for social and criminal justice reform. No proceedings of the Commission may be used as evidence in a court of law, and nobody may be charged with a crime on the basis of their testimony to the Comission.
	4	+
	5	+The model is Post-Apartheid South Africa. Minnow elaborates:
	6	+Martha Minnow Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence, 1998.
	7	+The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission launches not only an inquiry into what happened, but also a process intended to promote reconciliation. Other truth commissions seek information to support prosecutions. The information unearthed by the TRC may lead to some legal charges and trials, but its central direction, enhanced by its power to grant amnesty to perpetrators on the condition that they cooperate fully, moves away from prosecutions toward an ideal of restorative justice. Unlike punishment, which imposes a penalty or injury for a violation, restorative justice seeks to repair the injustice, to make up for it, and to effect corrective changes in the record, in relationships, and in future behavior. Offenders have responsibility in the resolution. The harmful act, rather than the offender, is to be renounced. Repentance and forgiveness are encouraged.¶ By design, the TRC includes a committee devoted to proposing economic and symbolic acts of reparation for survivors and for devastated communities. Monetary payments to the victimized, health and social services, memorials and other acts of symbolic commemoration would become governmental policies in an effort to restore victims and social relationships breached by violence and atrocity. The range of money, services, and public art suggests the kinds of steps that can be pursued in the search for restorative justice.
	8	+
	9	+Immunity is to key to compelling full and open testimony.
	10	+Jack M. Balkin, “A Body of Inquiries”, The New York Times, Jan 10, 2009.
	11	+The South African model offered witnesses potential amnesty (which was not always given) to coax testimony (which did not always occur). American commissions and hearings should have the power to bestow immunity to compel testimony, either “use” immunity (the testimony cannot be used in any future prosecution) or “transactional” immunity (no prosecution for acts connected to the subject of the testimony). Sensitive evidence that affects national security could be taken in closed proceedings and summarized or published in redacted form.
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	14	+Competition
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	16	+First, Mutual Exclusivity: The aff and the CP are dispositionally opposed. Civil litigation entails an adversarial relationship and a finding of fault coupled with a symbolic act of blaming, whereas Minnow explains that the CP focuses on forgiveness and mutual solidarity. It’s impossible to engage in good-faith reconciliation with someone who you have sued. At absolute worst, the perm fails because either one eviscerates the solvency of the other. Minnow furthers with additional warrants: each independent warrant is a disad to the AC.
	17	+ (each color is an individual warrant)
	18	+Martha Minnow, “The Hope For Healing: What Can Truth Commissions Do?”, Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions, Eds. Robert Rotberg and Dennis Thomas, July 2010.
	19	+Yet arguments for alternatives may be founded not just in search for a substitute when trials are not workable. The trial as a form of response to injustice has its own internal limitations. Litigation is not an ideal form of social action. The financial and emotional costs of litigation may be most apparent when private individuals sue one another, but there are parallel problems when a government or an international tribunal prosecutes. Victims and other witnesses undergo the ordeals of testifying and facing cross-examination. Usually, they are given no simple opportunity to convey directly the narrative of their experience. Evidentiary rules and rulings limit the factual material that can be included. Trial procedure makes for laborious and even boring sessions that risk anesthetizing even the most avid listener and dulling sensibilities even in the face of recounted horrors. The simplistic questions of guilt or innocence framed by the criminal trial can never capture the multiple sources of mass violence. If the social goals include gaining public acknowledgment and producing a complete account of what happened, the trial process is at best an imperfect means. If the goals extend to repairing the dignity of those who did survive and enlarging their chances for rewarding lives, litigation falls even farther short. Trials focus on perpetrators, not victims. They consult victims only to illustrate the fact or scope of the defendants’ guilt. Victims are not there for public acknowledgment or even to tell, fully, their own stories. Trials interrupt and truncate victim testimony with direct and cross examination and conceptions of relevance framed by the elements of the charges. Judges and juries listen to victims with skepticism tied to the presumption of defendants’ innocence. Trials afford no role in their process or content for bystanders or for the complex interactions among ideologies, leaders, mass frustrations, historic and invented lines of hatred, and acts of brutality.
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	21	+Second, Net Benefits, disads to the aff generate competition.
	22	+
	23	+Net Benefits
	24	+
	25	+First is Reform
	26	+Qualified immunity only applies to civil suits against individuals. Since qualified immunity only shields civil suits against individual police officers, limiting the doctrine cannot solve for systemic oppression and toxic police cultures. This is characteristic of the Aff’s flawed legal outlook that values retribution over restorative justice and emphasizes punishment.
	27	+(functions: 1. Da to aff bc aff can’t solve systemic impacts 2. Deterrence fails (solvency takeout to aff) 3. Aff fails under neg fw bc it doesn't actually make people whole)
	28	+Alex Vitale New York State Advisory Committee to the US Civil Right Commission, “ 2 Very Different Ways to Punish Killer Cops”, The Nation, May 5, 2015.
	29	+The role of the state’s attorney is based on a very degraded notion of justice. It relies almost solely on the notion of punishment in the form of incarceration acting as a deterrent on the behavior of the convicted (specific deterrence) and the rest of us (general deterrence). This whole system assumes that people are simplistic engines of rational calculation whose behaviors can be manipulated by a series of escalating threats and punishments. We know that this system rarely provides real justice for victims or communities and often destroys the lives of those being punished. More importantly, it doesn’t work. For generations we’ve been waging a war on drugs that has relied on the ever increasing incarceration of young people, and yet drugs are cheaper, of higher quality, and easier to obtain than ever before. No amount of mass incarceration seems to make any difference. It’s a little like threatening suicide bombers with the death penalty, in that it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of human motivation.
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	32	+Truth and reconciliation best promotes police culture reform, which solves the root cause of the aff impacts at a higher degree of probability than the aff does
	33	+Alex Vitale New York State Advisory Committee to the US Civil Right Commission, “ 2 Very Different Ways to Punish Killer Cops”, The Nation, May 5, 2015.
	34	+Perhaps we would learn more about the nature of police culture and why it so frequently treats young men of color as less than human. Heartfelt accounts from actual police officers about the callousness of their actions and attitudes might lead to some real soul searching on the part of police officers, political leaders, and the public about the caustic nature of much of police culture as well as possible solutions.¶ In return, the officers would be compelled to take actions to try to repair some of the harms they have caused to the victim’s family and community. These offices could be put to work on community projects that would benefit the community such as restoring parks. Perhaps they could be cajoled into living in the community for some length of time to experience firsthand what life is like there. Possibly more importantly, they could be compelled to work with other police officers in Baltimore and elsewhere to try to get to the root of abusive police practices. Police are much more likely to respond to the real-world experiences of fellow officers than to the urgings of the community activists who often appear before them.
	35	+
	36	+Restorative Justice spills over to end mass incarceration and construct a more just and peaceful society based on mutual respect
	37	+Fania Davis civil rights attorney, “This Country Needs a Truth and Reconciliation Process on Violence Against African Americans—Right Now”, Yes Magazine, July 8, 2016.
	38	+It’s impossible to predict whether similar outcomes would emerge from a Truth and Reconciliation process in Ferguson—and the United States. But it’s our best chance. And, if history is any guide, it could result in restitution to those harmed, memorials to the fallen, including films, statues, museums, street renamings, public art, or theatrical re-enactments. It might also engender calls to use restorative and other practices to stop violence and interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline and mass incarceration strategies. New curricula could emerge that teach both about historic injustices and movements resisting those injustices. Teach-ins, police trainings, restorative policing practices, and police review commissions are also among the universe of possibilities.¶ In the face of the immense terrain to be covered on the journey toward a more reconciled America, no single process will be enough. However, a Ferguson Truth and Reconciliation process could be a first step towards reconciliation. It could put us on the path of a new future based on more equitable structures and with relationships founded on mutual recognition and respect. It could also serve as a prototype to guide future truth and reconciliation efforts addressing related epidemics such as domestic violence, poverty, the school-to-prison pipeline, and mass incarceration. A Ferguson Truth and Reconciliation Commission could light the way into a new future.
	39	+
	40	+Second is Restorative Justice
	41	+A shift to restorative justice acknowledges our relationships and common humanity and is critical to ending the cycle of division and oppression
	42	+Martha Minnow Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence, 1998.
	43	+Leading statements of the restorative justice vision focus on responses to ordinary crime. 8 Restorative justice emphasizes the humanity of both offenders and victims. It seeks repair of social connections and peace rather than retribution against the offenders. 9 Building connections and enhancing communication between perpetrators and those they victimized and forging ties across the community, takes precedence over punishment or law enforcement.¶ These aims of restorative justice reflect a practical view about human psychology. Unlike retributive approaches, which may reinforce anger and a sense of victimhood, reparative approaches instead aim to help victims move beyond anger and a sense of powerlessness. They also attempt to reintegrate offenders into the community: South Africa's TRC emphasizes truth-telling, public acknowledgment, and actual reparations as crucial elements for restoration of justice and community. The TRC proceeds on the hope that getting as full an account of what happened as possible, and according it public acknowledgment, will lay the foundations for a new, reconciling nation instead of fomenting waves of renewed revenge and divisiveness. Archbishop Desmond Tutu explained the TRC's goals in these terms: “Our nation needs healing. Victims and survivors who bore the brunt of the apartheid system need healing Perpetrators are, in their own way, victims of the apartheid system and they, too, need healing“ 11
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	46	+Amnesty results in the revelation of evidence that would never be appear in a court trial, strengthening the relative solvency of the CP
	47	+Martha Minnow, “The Hope For Healing: What Can Truth Commissions Do?”, Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions, Eds. Robert Rotberg and Dennis Thomas, July 2010.
	48	+The trade of amnesty for testimony allowed the TRC to use the participation by some to gain the participation of others. Five mid-level political officers sought amnesty and in so doing implicated General Johan van der Merwe as the one who gave the order to fire on demonstrators in 1992.13 The general then himself applied for amnesty before the commission and confessed that he had indeed given the order to fire. He in turn implicated two cabinet-level officials who gave him orders.14 Evidence of this kind, tracing violence to decisions at the highest governmental levels, is likely to be held only by those who themselves participated in secret conversations, and the adversarial processes of trials are not likely to unearth it. Combining information from amnesty petitions and hearings with victim testimony and independent investigations, the TRC had the chance to develop a much richer array of evidence than the courts would have had in expensive and lengthy criminal prosecutions.
	49	+
	50	+
	51	+The aff’s us-vs-them approach to racism is hopelessly flawed and will only reproduce resentment and more police brutality. Only foregiveness through policies like TRC can make broken communities whole again while solving the harms of racism.
	52	+Deepa Bhandaru, “Undermining Whiteness: Hannah Arendt's Participatory Freedom and the Political Ethics of Antiracism” PhD diss., University of Washington, 2013. Brackets in original
	53	+Tutu is particularly sensitive to the white resentment that accompanies the institution of a new, more egalitarian racial order. The Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa installed new racial orders in deeply racist societies, orders committed to the principle of racial equality. But while non-whites made important strides during these struggles, Tutu worries about the imposition of victor’s justice, which is how he characterizes the Nuremberg trials that followed World War II and the Nazi Holocaust. He states that “while the Allies could pack up and go home after Nuremberg, we in South Africa had to live with one another.”123 Thus, the will (or injunction) to live together, black and white, inspired an alternative ethic, that of forgiveness. According to Tutu, foregrounding forgiveness as a political practice invites both blacks and whites into the public world. While punishment constitutes the world as partial to one party over another, forgiveness seeks to transform parties, to redraw lines of identification. Rendering punishment the modus operandi of the public world propagates fear and mistrust, the very ills that were the currency of apartheid. Forgiveness, on the other hand, dissipates fear and builds trust,

EntryDate

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	1	+2016-11-09 23:41:32.528

Judge

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	1	+Panel

Opponent

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	1	+Peninsula IG

ParentRound

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	1	+18

Round

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	1	+Quarters

Team

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	1	+Marlborough Coates Neg

Title

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	1	+Nov-Dec-Truth and Reconcilliation CP

Tournament

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	1	+Harvard Westlake