Summary

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  • Caselist.RoundClass[19]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[19]

Details

Caselist.RoundClass[19]

EntryDate

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1		-2016-11-19 17:54:07.954
	1	+2016-11-19 17:54:07.0

Caselist.CitesClass[19]

Cites

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	1	+CP – Truth and Reconciliation
	2	+The affirmative holds out the hope that monetary judgments can stamp out the stain of systematic violence one racist cop at a time, but they grossly underestimate the magnitude of the problem. Last week 60 million Americans voted for the Presidential candidate endorsed by the KKK and the American Nazi Party. Micro-Retributions are cathartic but ultimately impotent. The affirmative will never solve so long as it fails to undertake a radical reexamination of the deep racism at the heart of our culture and the magnitude of the suffering perpetrated against people of color.
	3	+
	4	+Counter Plan
	5	+Counterplan Text:
	6	+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 Commission.
	7	+
	8	+The model is Post-Apartheid South Africa. Minnow elaborates:
	9	+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.
	10	+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.
	11	+
	12	+Immunity is to key to compelling full and open testimony.
	13	+Jack M. Balkin, “A Body of Inquiries”, The New York Times, Jan 10, 2009.
	14	+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.
	15	+
	16	+Competition
	17	+
	18	+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 color is an individual warrant)
	19	+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.
	20	+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.
	21	+
	22	+Net Benefits
	23	+First is Systemic Reform
	24	+Addressing institutional violence against people of color requires a much broader lens than individual civil trials can provide. Only the CP can solve.
	25	+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.
	26	+The aspiration to develop as full an account as possible requires a process of widening the lens, sifting varieties of evidentiary materials, and drafting syntheses of factual material that usually does not accompany a trial. Yet truth commissions typically undertake to write the history of what happened in precisely these ways. Putting together distinct events and the role of different actors is more likely to happen when people have the chance to look across incidents and to connect the stories of many victims and many offenders. A truth commission can examine the role of entire sectors of a society—such as the medical profession, the media, and business—in enabling and failing to prevent mass violence. The sheer narrative project of a truth commission makes it more likely than trials to yield accounts of entire regimes. Trials in contrast focus on particular individuals and their conduct in particular moments in time, with decisions of guilt or nonguilt, and opinions tailored to these particular questions of individual guilt.
	27	+
	28	+A truth and reconciliation process exposes the magnitude of the atrocity for all to see and allow us to begin to deploy the resources needed to heal the trauma.
	29	+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.
	30	+Bearing in mind its expansive historical context, the Truth and Reconciliation process would set us on a collective search for shared truths about the nature, extent, causes, and consequences of extrajudicial killings of black youth, say, for the last two decades. Through the process, those truths will be told, understood, and made known far and wide. Its task would also include facing and beginning to heal the massive historical harms that threaten us all as a nation but take the lives of black and brown children especially. We would utilize the latest insights and methodologies from the field of trauma healing.
	31	+
	32	+Amnesty results in the revelation of evidence that would never be appear in a court trial. Only TRCs can expose the institutional and systemic nature of police brutality.
	33	+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.
	34	+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.
	35	+
	36	+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.
	37	+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.
	38	+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.
	39	+Restorative Justice spills over to end mass incarceration and construct a more just and peaceful society based on mutual respect.
	40	+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.
	41	+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-ings, 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.
	42	+
	43	+Forgiveness as practiced by TRC does not ignore the past but rather forces us all to confront it.
	44	+Deepa Bhandaru, “Undermining Whiteness: Hannah Arendt's Participatory Freedom and the Political Ethics of Antiracism” PhD diss., University of Washington, 2013.
	45	+Thus, a practice of antiracist forgiveness does not cater to the white fantasy of erasing or forgetting the past. On the contrary, forgiveness requires confronting the past in order to forge a 52 new relationship to it—the hard work that took place through South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). As Tutu writes, “Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what happened seriously and not minimizing it; drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens to poison our entire existence. It involves trying to understand the perpetrators and so have empathy, to try to stand in their shoes and appreciate the sort of pressures and influences that might have conditioned them.”126 Thus, forgiveness is consistent with memory: forgiveness asks us not to erase memory, but to remove from memory its sting, to detach from it enough to move on. As Jill Stauffer suggests, forgiveness “can be a mode of honoring the past without living in it
	46	+
	47	+Second is Victims’ Dignity
	48	+Response to atrocity requires processes that redress the dehumanization of victims rather than punish the perpetrator.
	49	+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.
	50	+Any evaluation of responses to mass atrocity depends upon the goals sought and the distance between the ideal and the real, as implemented. Today, responses to collective violence actually lurch among rhetorics of history (truth), justice (punishment, compensation, and deterrence), theology (forgiveness), art (commemoration), education (learning lessons), politics (building democracy), and therapy (healing). Each goal is desirable, but each also risks failing to attend to those who were victimized. Bearing witness to their deaths, disabilities, and lost hopes; considering what could help those who survived to return to living; and redressing the dehumanization that both presages and endures after mass violence: each of these aspirations calls for a process that focuses on the voices and lives of real individuals. Resisting the destruction of memory and human dignity, responses to atrocity must invigorate remembrance of what happened and prevent any further dehumanization of the victimized.

EntryDate

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	1	+2016-11-19 17:54:26.715

Judge

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	1	+Rodrigo Paramo

Opponent

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	1	+Appleton East JV

ParentRound

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	1	+19

Round

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	1	+1

Team

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	1	+Marlborough Coates Neg

Title

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	1	+Nov-Dec-Truth and Reconciliation CP v2

Tournament

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	1	+Glenbrooks