2023-05-05
20 分钟A warning before we get started.
This episode includes descriptions of violence and mentions rape.
This is in conversation from Apple News.
I'm Shamita Basu.
Today, murder, mercy and the death penalty.
Nearly 30 years ago, James Bernard Belcher, who goes by his middle name Bernard, was found guilty of committing a devastating crime, raping, strangling and drowning 29 year old Jennifer Embry.
The jury took only 16 minutes to agree to sentence him to death.
As is often the case, he's spent years behind bars on death row.
Now, recently, Bernard was given a second chance, a re sentencing.
An opportunity for a judge and jury to decide whether he should serve a life sentence instead, this time with new evidence, not about the murder itself, but evidence about Bernard, who he is as a person and what may have led him to kill.
This is not just a man driven by inexplicable evil who rapes and kills and you know, is a psychopath in training.
Maurice Shama is a reporter for the Marshall Project.
It's a kid who was immersed in violence and in sexual violence eventually for really his entire upbringing and who then got out and did not have the resources to get past that.
Maurice has written about the death sentence and people affected by it for years, and he recently wrote about Bernard's case.
He says it shows how much our conversations around criminal justice and the death penalty have shifted from the 90s until now.
And while Maurice would say we still have a way to go, the fact that we are finally starting to recognize the humanity and trauma of the people who commit violent crimes could be a real turning point in how we think about justice.
So we don't have a solid scientific explanation of how early childhood trauma leads people towards violence later in their lives.
Certainly plenty of people experience trauma at a young age and do not go on to victimize other people.
But what we do know is that ptsd, post traumatic stress can cause some changes in the amygdala, which is a part of the human brain that governs emotion.
And there can be a rewiring through trauma of the fight or flight response.