Summary

• Objects (1 modified, 1 added, 0 removed)
  • Caselist.RoundClass[12]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[11]

Details

Caselist.RoundClass[12]

EntryDate

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1		-2016-11-19 16:04:40.686
	1	+2016-11-19 16:04:40.0

Caselist.CitesClass[11]

Cites

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	1	+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.
	2	+
	3	+Counterplan Text:
	4	+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.
	5	+
	6	+The model is Post-Apartheid South Africa. Minnow elaborates:
	7	+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.
	8	+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.
	9	+
	10	+Immunity is to key to compelling full and open testimony.
	11	+Jack M. Balkin, “A Body of Inquiries”, The New York Times, Jan 10, 2009.
	12	+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.
	13	+
	14	+Competition
	15	+
	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 color is an individual warrant)
	17	+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.
	18	+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.
	19	+
	20	+Net Benefits
	21	+First is Systemic Reform
	22	+Addressing institutional violence against people of color requires a much broader lens than individual civil trials can provide. Only the CP can solve.
	23	+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.
	24	+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.
	25	+
	26	+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.
	27	+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.
	28	+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.
	29	+
	30	+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.
	31	+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.
	32	+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.
	33	+
	34	+
	35	+Second is Liberalism
	36	+Adversarial legal processes fail to honor the degree to which violence distorts the basic fabric of human society.
	37	+Peter Gabel, "From Individual Rights to the Beloved Community: A New Vision of Justice", Tikkun, Winter 2012.
	38	+As you read this from within your own private space, as you float through the solitude of your day, consider how the institutions of American law condition and envelop you in the spiritual prison of your separation. You are a citizen in a democracy, but the most fundamental right that defines that democracy is the “secret ballot” rather than a process expressive of any communal bond that unites us. You are legally bound to all others through a “constitution” that protects you against, and therefore affirms the constant threat of, infringement on your right to freedom of speech, of religion, of association, and your right to be protected against others searching your house or making you quarter soldiers or taking away your guns … but that binding constitution affirms nothing about our connection to one another and therefore offers no commitment to making End Page 18 sure that our social connection will be realized through our legal process. The substantive law of property guarantees that we can own separate land parcels and exclude others from those parcels, but affirms no binding obligation to share the land, or the food that it produces, or the shelters that we construct upon it. The law of contracts guarantees our freedom to enter binding agreements with others, but in a social context that assumes we are competitors in a marketplace whose goal is to get the benefit of our bargains, rather than “cooperators” whose intention is to realize ourselves through mutual fulfillment and shared objectives. Tort law assures we are protected against others who might pull a chair out from under us as we sit down to the dinner table, or intentionally or negligently harm us on highways or in the operating room or through the consumer goods we buy in their stores, but it does not affirm that we have any duty to care for each other, to rescue each other if we are in distress, or to otherwise act in accordance with a bond emanating from our common humanity. Under the law of corporations, shareholders are assumed to be anonymous investors seeking as discrete individuals to maximize their short-term profits and to be bound to each other solely by that goal, rather than to be socially responsible beings united by a corporate aspiration that will further the well-being of the community or the planet. And finally there is the criminal law, which understands social violence of all kinds as freely chosen individual acts against the state calling for punishment of the individual actor rather than as social acts expressive of distortions within an inherently social fabric that call for repair of the social fabric itself.

EntryDate

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	1	+2016-11-19 16:04:42.558

Judge

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	1	+Scoggin

Opponent

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	1	+West

ParentRound

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	1	+12

Round

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	1	+1

Team

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	1	+Marlborough Kim Neg

Title

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	1	+NOV DEC TRC Updated

Tournament

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	1	+Glenbrooks