Race and the Death Penalty: Is Justice Color Blind?

Widener Law is teaming up with area civic groups to present an evening forum that showcases legal academics and practitioners in a conversation on capital punishment, led by the woman who co-founded the Cornell Death Penalty Project 15 years ago.

“Race and the death penalty: Is justice color blind?” is free and open to the public. It will be held Tuesday, April 15 at 7 p.m. in the Ruby R. Vale Moot Courtroom on the Delaware campus of Widener Law at 4601 Concord Pike, Wilmington. The program will be preceded by a reception in the Barristers’ Club at 6 p.m.

Professor Sheri Lynn Johnson of Cornell University Law School, an expert on the interface of race and issues in criminal procedure, will speak first. Johnson is assistant director of the Cornell Death Penalty Project, an initiative to foster empirical scholarship on the death penalty. She helps students work with lawyers on death penalty cases.

Johnson graduated from Yale Law School in 1979 and went to work in the criminal appeals bureau of the New York Legal Aid Society. She joined the Cornell faculty in 1981 and teaches constitutional and criminal law. She supervises the school’s post-conviction litigation and capital trial clinics. After Johnson speaks, the program will move to a panel discussion featuring:

• Widener Professor Robert L. Hayman Jr., who co-teaches a seminar on constitutional law with adjunct professor and U.S. Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del.
• Widener Professor Judith L. Ritter, who directs the law school’s criminal defense clinic.
• Keisha N. Hudson, an assistant public defender in the Philadelphia capital habeas unit.

[Mark Godsey]