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CHRISTOPHER DEMUTH: Where would Minnie's motives and circumstances of her life, the circumstances
surrounding the *** of her husband, where would...does this have no role? Is it just,
she did it, and that's the end of it? Do we take no account of this in deciding what is
to become of Minnie?
AMY KASS: No, I think that the investigation, like all criminal investigation, should really
be fact driven. And the evidence should be turned in. But all the other aspects of the
jury at the trial, the prosecution, the jury's hearing, the judgment...I think those other
things could be taken into consideration.
LEON KASS: I too am inclined to say that the place for these considerations really is in
the domain of sentencing and so on. And I think one should probably be more rigorous
in the prosecution of murders than, let's say, certain petty crimes. Look, wouldn't
you think that if you had a man on trial for robbing food from a grocery store that, as
part of the consideration of guilt or innocence it would matter and be appropriate to ask
whether or not he did this to feed a house full of children who had no food, like Jean
Valjean?
DIANA SCHAUB: Well, no. I would stick with this only comes in at the sentencing...or
it comes in at the phase of the prosecution; in other words, the prosecutor decides what
charges he's going to bring, is he even going to pursue this? But that at the phase of the
jury trial, the jury is charged with a determination of the facts, and it seems to me that all
of this talk of empathy is really disintegrative of our system. I mean, it's very hard in an
age of compassion to speak about empathy, to speak against empathy, because it makes
you seem antipathetic, but I'd like to make the case against empathy. A special quality
of judges and jurors is impartiality: Lady Justice is always pictured as blind-folded.
Why is she blind-folded? Because she doesn't see persons. If she sees persons, she might
empathize with some rather than others, and that leads to a skewing of...So God's justice
is omniscient, he takes the blindfold off, but none of these human beings are capable
of that.