Mar. 23, 2012

The Center for Restorative Justice at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles hosted its second annual conference, “Another Way: Imagining a Justice that Restores,” on Feb. 24. The conference began with a conversation between California Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye and LMU President David W. Burcham. Their discourse focused on the future of the death penalty. “We should open the debate on the effectiveness of the death penalty and whether or not it is still the will of the people,” said Cantil-Sakauye during the question-and-answer session. In response to Burcham’s question about whether California has given up on rehabilitation, Cantil-Sakaue said, “The paradigm shifts only because of progam’s like Loyola’s Center for Restorative Justice.” The daylong conference also featured a panel entitled ‘Adult Prison Reform and Re-Thinking the Death Penalty,’ which took a hard look at capital punishment in California. Arthur L. Alarcón, senior circuit judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, described his evolving relationship with capital punishment as former Gov. Pat Brown’s clemency secretary and then later as a judge on the 9th Circuit presiding over habeas corpus petitions filed by death-row prisoners.