On Friday April 25th and Saturday April 26th, the University of California at Santa Barbara will host a conference exploring the issue of capital punishment in the United States. The conference is being co-sponsored by the Law & Society Program and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UCSB, and is being held in conjunction with a series of coordinated events and new teaching initiatives taking place at UCSB in winter and spring of 2003, made possible by the generous support of a Critical Issues in America grant.

Featuring presentations by prominent scholars, lawyers, and activists who share a commitment to moving public consideration of the death penalty beyond the familiar debates between abolitionists and retentionists, the EXECUTING JUSTICE conference seeks to shed light not just on the nature and significance of the practice of the death penalty itself, but on the social, political, and moral context in which capital punishment is deployed. Topics to be considered include:

- media responses to and political ramifications of the mass commutation of capital sentences by Gov. George Ryan in January 2003
- the role played by forensic science in cases involving wrongful convictions and exonerations
- the significance of the shift to lethal injection as the primary method of execution in the United States
- international perspectives on America's continued reliance on the death
penalty
- racism and sexism as factors in criminal sentencing
- the role played by mandatory sentencing, 'zero tolerance' policies and
moral panics on the definition and prosecution of capital crimes
- media representations of crime and punishment and popular fascination with "extreme" criminals such as serial killers.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

THOMAS P. SULLIVAN, former US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois and co-chair of the Illinois Commission on the Death Penalty set up in May 2000 by Governor George Ryan. Mr. Sullivan will describe the work of the Commission and the recommendations it made in January 2003 both on capital sentencing policies and reform of the criminal justice system.

RUBIN 'HURRICANE' CARTER, former professional boxer, author of "From Number 1 Contender to #45472", member of the Board of Directors of th Southern Center for Human Rights, the Alliance for Prison Justice, and the Association of the Wrongfully Convicted. Mr. Carter will discuss his personal experiences and issues related to the death penalty in America. He will also introduce a screening of the recent Hollywood movie "Hurricane", based on his life, starring Denzel Washington.

PRESENTERS:

SIMON COLE, Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at UC-Irvine, author of "Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification" (Harvard University Press, 2001).

PHYLLIS CROCKER, Professor, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, and former staff attorney at the Texas Resource Center representing Texas death row inmates in state and federal post-conviction litigation, author of several scholarly articles exploring the role of race and sex in capital sentencing.

SUSAN HIRSCH, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies, Wesleyan College, author of "Pronouncing and Preserving: Gender and the Discourses of Disputing in an African Islamic Court" (University of Chicago Press, 1998).

TIMOTHY KAUFMAN-OSBORN, Baker Ferguson Professor of Politics and Leadership, Whitman College, president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, author of "From Noose to Needle: Capital Punishment and the Late Liberal State" (University of Michigan Press, 2002).

AUSTIN SARAT, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College, and author/editor of more than 40 books, including "When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition" (Princeton University Press, 2001).

JAMES KINCAID, Aerol Arnold Professor of English at the University of Southern California, author of Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Duke University Press, 1998).

RAY HILL, host of The Prison Show, broadcast on Houston Pacifica Radio Station KPFT, 90.1FM weekly since 1980.

ADDITIONAL SPEAKERS TO BE ANNOUNCE

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