discussion forum and essay

Essay:

This essay should be between 900 and 1000 words, excluding the required annotated bibliography.

The Toulmin essay will help you practice what you have learned so far in this course. First, you will choose a topic of interest. Make sure that you choose a public debate with clear sides and staked. Then, you need to research that debate in order to narrow the topic’s scope, so it can be easily discussed in 1000 word essay. For example, you may be interested in learning more about traffic issues in the United States. However, that topic is too large to cover in a 1000 word essay. After researching peer reviewed articles that discuss US traffic issues in general, you may discover that the metro system in the District of Columbia is underfunded and underutilized.  Through your research, you found that you could make a claim that more funds should be made available in order to upgrade the metro system, which would improve traffic issues in the District of Columbia. This would make for a stronger, specific argument. Attached below is a PDF on sides and stakes that can help with this process. This should be a thesis-driven essay, and it should be in the third person. 

 This essay must include a minimum of five sources. Three should be peer-reviewed sources.  You may use eBooks; however, as discussed in your textbook, books generally are not as current as peer-reviewed articles.  You may also use primary sources (interviews, statistics, etc); however, these primary sources should be obtained from experts within that field.  Note: Consider your audience as laymen in the field with only general knowledge of your topic. 

Make sure to include the following sections in your essay:

an introduction and claim,
background,
body,
and a conclusion.

Within the body of your essay, make sure to include the following in any order:

support for your claim,
opposing or alternate views,
the strengths and weaknesses of your opponents’ claims,
and your rebuttals of their claims. 

*** Point of view:  people who are given life without the possibility of parole should receive the death penalty depending on how gruesome the crime committed.

32 – Writing on the Edge

“In Our Names”:
Rewriting the U.S. Death Penalty

Kimberly K. Gunter

The stench of death is strong. Like the reek that hangs after a day
of hog-killing, the dense, sickly sweet smell thickens the air. It’s almost
as if I could reach out and grab a handful of that odor and slide it into
my pocket. Before either my students or I can ask, the prison guard cum
tour guide, Lt. Bowden, offers, “We’ve tried to do something about the
smell. We’ve cleaned. We’ve painted. But nothing works.”

Jorge has slipped away from Lt. Bowden, who is now talking about
last meals. He has instead ventured inside Cell C, the cell that houses
North Carolina’s condemned for the final 72 hours of their lives. Tattoos
of skulls and flames running between his elbows and wrists, Jorge has
outstretched his arms so that his fingertips touch the opposite walls of
the tiny room. He’s seen documentary footage of inmate Antonio James
performing this same ritual in his own death row cell in Louisiana’s
Angola prison. Bowden catches up to us and, nodding at the flimsy,
stained mattress upon which Jorge now sits, offers, “That’s the bed
where all of North Carolina’s executed prisoners have slept. People like,
say…” Bowden searches his memory and hits upon, “Velma Barfield.”
Samantha nods. All semester she has studied the dialectic created by
gender and the U.S. death penalty, and she recognizes Barfield’s name,
the so-called “Death Row Granny” and the first woman executed after
the United States’ 1976 reinstatement of capital punishment.

My students are a curious bunch, and Bowden’s having some
trouble corralling them all. Erica has spun away and stands peering
into another cell here in the death house. “You’re using this one for
storage?” she asks, incredulous. Staring at the brooms and mops and
buckets and paint cans that tumble on top of one another in a second
death house cell, Erica raises her eyebrows in cynical dismay. “That’s
one expensive janitor’s closet,” I whisper to her.

Bowden hastens us onward and into the death chamber itself.
Until 1998, North Carolina still used lethal gas to kill its condemned
inmates; however, any number of logistical concerns, not the least
among them leakage of the cyanide gas from the chamber and into the
lungs of the innocent observers, convinced the state to swap for lethal
injection. The guards on the prison’s execution team no longer, then,
tousle the inmate’s hair while he remains, dead, strapped into a chair

“In Our Names”: Rewriting the U.S. Death Penalty – 33

below which minutes earlier dropped a pellet of cyanide into sulfuric
acid; the purpose of what might have looked to onlookers like some
gruesome fatherly gesture was in fact to dispel trapped cyanide gas.
Instead, the old gas chamber has been reconfigured to serve as North
Carolina’s current death chamber. Ventilation ducts and gas barometers
remain. Now, however, a hospital gurney dominates the former gas
chamber, and my students and I can squeeze in, only three or four at a
time. Jorge, starting at the gurney, whispers to me, “Dr. Gunter: touch
it,” as if it’s some wild animal or ancient relic. “I don’t wanna touch
it,” I hiss back. But I do run my fingers over the crisp hospital sheets. I
stare at a patch of gauze taped to one of the gurney’s steel rods. And I
try to imagine how it must feel, to lie here, strapped down.

The death chamber itself is pierced by two Plexiglas windows
set high into its cinderblock walls. The gurney is jacked up so that
the inmate’s prone body lies flush with the window sills. The larger
of the two windows, maybe three feet high by four feet long, allows
the inmate to glance to his right and into the witness room. Or, more
precisely, the window allows the witnesses to stare in at the inmate.
Up to sixteen people can pack into the witness’ antechamber. Therein,
the victim’s family sit shoulder to shoulder with the inmate’s family.
Journalists, prison staff, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and “four
respectable citizens…[who] serve as official witnesses” (“Selection of
Execution Witnesses”) fill the rest of the seats. Directly in front of the
condemned hangs the death chamber’s second window. Much smaller
than the other and intentionally angled so as to remain hidden from
the witnesses, this window is a peephole into the next-door nook that
houses the executioner. Two IV lines snake through a hole bored in a
shared wall, lines through which flow the three-drug cocktail that will
kill this woman or, more often, this man, now pronounced a monster.
Bowden teases Kimberly, probably because, cherubic, she looks the
youngest of my students: “Jump up here and we’ll show you what it
feels like to be strapped in,” he offers, laughing and patting the gurney’s
mattress. “Wouldn’t that be special?” he asks, uttering a phrase that will
pepper his talk all afternoon.

Our sojourn in Central Prison’s, and North Carolina’s only, death
house and execution chamber comes early in our tour of this maximum-
security penitentiary. My composition students and I spend another
three hours walking the prison grounds. We stand in the paved, razor
wire-encrusted prison yard and peer skyward at the watchtowers. In-
mates play basketball around us as Bowden points up to the guards and
explains that they are trained to fire no warning shots. Filing through
the gymnasium, on all sides the clanks of inmates lifting weights, I

34 – Writing on the Edge

notice that lift records are carefully recorded on the walls in letters cut
from construction paper. We slip into the auditorium to listen to a visit-
ing Christian evangelist. The auditorium is full, the prisoners, racially
segregated, listening to calls to Jesus, the preacher singing promises of
a spiritual life that supersedes prison walls, backed by a tinny cassette
of piped-in karaoke music. We walk through the non-air-conditioned
infirmary, and I hear a nurse respond to one of my students, “There
ain’t nobody innocent here.” We sit in the holding cells where groups of
prisoners remain on first arrival at Central Prison. Bowden, chuckling,
notes how uncomfortable it would be to linger in one of these crowded
holding tanks for the five or six hours necessary, especially if one of the
inmates defecated in the public toilet in the cell’s corner. “Schew!” he
exclaims, waving his hand underneath his nose. We meet the impos-
ing prison guard who oversees the “prison within the prison” where
the worst offenders end up, those who couldn’t get along in general
population or those who are on suicide watches. We stand not simply
peering into cellblocks of death row inmates but walking within arms
reach of them, no bars or steel doors between us. They are color-coded
in their red jumpsuits, or in green shorts and t-shirts for those who are
allowed outside to do landscaping, Ashley, my five foot dynamo of a
student, whose e-mail handle is “callmetatertot,” murmurs in my ear,
“If these guys are the worst of the worst and so dangerous that we must
execute them, then why are we allowed to stand right beside them with
nothing between us for protection?” We walk through the no-contact
visitation center and through the prison chapel. We learn that there are
no on-site educational programs and that the prison employs only a
Christian chaplain but no religious advisors of other faiths. We listen
to the mental health unit supervisor explain that prison guards are
empowered by physicians and the state to forcibly medicate inmates
against their will, all the while a lone inmate moaning and screaming
in the background. A line of slack-jawed and wall-eyed men slugs past
us, and one of my students reports later that the mental health guards
had mocked, “Time to feed the bugs.”

Late in the day’s tour, I fall back so that I can talk with Bailey, the
guard who assists Bowden, bringing up the rear. A guard at Central
Prison for only three months, it is a good job for Bailey, one with health-
care benefits and a state retirement plan, but she’s come to the prison
because she thinks she can do some good, too. “Any one of us could
have ended up here,” she says quietly.

Back on the bus, I’m counting heads, and the students are fired
up. We pass Germ-X hand sanitizer back and forth, and exclamations
about the day echo off the bus’s riveted walls: “Dr. Gunter, did you

“In Our Names”: Rewriting the U.S. Death Penalty – 35

hear it when the dispatcher came over the Lieutenant’s radio and an-
nounced there’d been a stabbing?” Grey asks, wide-eyed. “I couldn’t
believe they didn’t even make us walk through the metal detector,”
Samantha marvels. I respond that I don’t think the metal detector has
been installed yet, that the prison hadn’t even had a metal detector on
my first two tours. “Were your tours with other students the same as
this one?” Tiffany asks. No. I tell them how tour guides make all the
difference—how Bowden’s authority to take us anywhere in the prison
was diluted by what seemed to be a transparently standard PR script.
“For instance, he out and out said that rape isn’t much of a problem in
that prison, but last year, another guard, a big barrel-chested sergeant
who kept saying, ‘I like to fight,’ told me that, while guards ruled the
prison during the day, the prisoners ruled the prison at night, and that
prisoner rape was widespread and unchecked while the cell blocks were
on nightly lockdown.” “Well,” Erica chimes up, aping Bowden, “isn’t that
special?” We laugh in what is as much nervous relief as anything else.

This fieldtrip has come in April. These composition students entered
this class in January, and most of them were adamantly in favor of the
U.S. death penalty, too. Now, near the end of our fifteen-week study of
America’s system of capital punishment, fully 90% of these students
oppose the practice. But how did we get here? To the prison? Sure, on
a 60-seat luxury bus normally used by the university’s athletic teams.
But how did we get to abolition?

First, via a course structure intent on empowering students to
become rhetorical power-players. In American first-year composition
programs, we largely teach a single genre: academic writing. Moreover,
if academic writing is our destination, process pedagogies are often the
vehicle for getting there. Too often, though, “academic writing” remains
arbitrary, oppressive, exclusionary, or, perhaps worse, , and
processes remain prescriptive. Bucking, for instance, a regulatory
textbook industry and restrictive estimations of students, the best way
to teach students to write as academics is to regard them as academics,
all the while rending apart exactly what “academic writing” means.
Single-themed composition courses, especially when they also employ
writing groups, provide one viable means for doing so. Students write
more complex, intricate essays and take up more complex, critically in-
formed arguments because they have had the time to conduct expanded
research, to assimilate what they’ve learned, to position themselves in
the discourse, to hear dissensus in the classroom, to be challenged by
knowledgeable readers during workshops, and to write multiple drafts
and also various essays on the same subject matter.

Second, the notion of the student as author was fundamental to
this course, and not simply as authors of essays but as (collaborative)

36 – Writing on the Edge

authors of selves and of this class. If we remind ourselves that literacy
isn’t just a storehouse of knowledge but a kind of action and that dis-
course isn’t printed text alone but also a way of being in the world, the
ideological nature of all discourse is apparent; moreover, if we look at
literacy (here, academic literacy specifically) as what we do, not only is
literacy a social action, but it is a social call to action. Thus, discourse’s
creative power (that is, discourse as our means of being in the world,
the enactment of the story we tell ourselves about ourselves), less it
become hegemonic, must really be shared with students. Therefore, in
this class, students compiled our course textbook by researching and
selecting class readings. Students led all discussions and moderated all
classroom debates. Student groups wrote their own essay assignments
in group conferences with me. Students chose the subtopics on which
they wrote all semester. Students co-wrote portions of the syllabus. This
course demanded, then, not just a student-centered classroom but a
student-propelled classroom. And if students’ early choices (sometimes)
emerged from a performative impulse (for example, if they designed
essay assignments that seemed to represent the types of papers that
students “ought” to write), they were at worst learning to use academic
language, eventually learning to insert themselves into and change it,
exploiting the language but not being subsumed by it.

Third, my students and I dismantled the walls of the insular class-
room. We abandoned the insinuation of academia as an ivory tower,
unsullied by material conditions. Instead, we took to the streets and
invited the streets into our classroom, and doing so was vital to our
scrutiny of America’s death penalty. Yes, we left the campus to inspect
North Carolina’s Central Prison, but into our classroom came attorneys
on both sides of the capital punishment debate: the words of Bruce
Cunningham, an abolitionist attorney who cautioned my students,
“If you’re gonna kill somebody in this country, don’t be poor,” were
contested by Assistant District Attorney Joe Osman who described
for my students the atrocities committed by the men whose deaths he
seeks as a routine part of his job. Asked to coordinate a lecture series,
I invited to campus and into our classroom Scott Langley, Amnesty
International’s Death Penalty Abolition Coordinator for the state of
North Carolina and a photojournalist who has amassed an enormous
collection of photographs documenting America’s capital system. My
students, in search of real-world sources for their essays and for the
themed magazines they were producing, spread across the campus
and into local communities. For instance, one group surveyed over 250
of their fellow college students in an opinion poll that sought to trace
students’ opinions on the death penalty and correlations between those
opinions and students’ race and religion. Students interviewed parole

“In Our Names”: Rewriting the U.S. Death Penalty – 37

officers and prison psychologists, theology scholars and small-town
preachers. They even began to correspond with death row inmates. In
what was perhaps the course’s pinnacle moment, after attending her
lecture in Raleigh, students descended on Sister Helen Prejean with
such animation and enthusiasm that it felt more like I was backstage
at a Jay-Z show in Madison Square Garden instead of in the chapel of
St. Francis of Assissi. This course became a borderland where sorority
girls and honors students talked to convicted murderers and Catholic
nuns—it was sometimes surreal but always exhilarating.

Finally, this class was shaped by a willing surrender, surrender
of space, surrender of power, and, in some ways, surrender of course
outcomes. The class was not unlike a giant trust fall, with me falling
backwards and into the arms of my students, hoping we wouldn’t all
end up on our asses. Sometimes frustratingly so, social justice cannot
be decreed. It was my unabashed yet unspoken hope that encounters
with the facts that surround and indict America’s death penalty would
convince students of its catastrophic legal, practical, diplomatic, and
ethical failings. However, I didn’t want to mimic a warden, with my
students playing prisoners to my epistemology. Instead, I relinquished
my stake in students’ final positions on the death penalty. What’s more,
I refused to posit myself as the classroom’s font of knowledge. Only
the students could truly say what it was they wanted to accomplish
in a given piece of writing, so why not ask them to write their own as-
signments? Students really did know more about their semester-long
topics that I did by semester’s end, and why shouldn’t they? Instead, my
students and I (to the extent possible in a culture where course grades
are the currency and the GPA is the bottom line) operated as colleagues
in a fifteen-week research project. This course embodied the unfolding
of individual research agendas; writing to learn; and, ultimately, the
composing of academic selves within a vigorous, critical community.
Education came to mean, in the words of Victor Villanueva, “a way of
attempting to make sense out of the senseless, to become more, rather
than to become other” (53). By course’s end, I’m not sure who had
learned more—my students or me—but I can’t help but wonder if the
respect they were shown, irrespective of, for example, their stance on
the death penalty or their institutional position as first-year students
in a general education course, didn’t foster the very compassion and
thoughtfulness that most of these students would demonstrate toward
the worst among us.

On the last day of class, Erica confided the difficulty that she and
her group-mates had had in naming their semester magazine. She told
us, “I called my mom for suggestions. She’s heard me talk about this

38 – Writing on the Edge

class so much this semester, I thought she might have an idea. You
know what she said?” Erica dismayed, continued: “She said, ‘Call it
Fry ‘Em All.’” Through class laughter, Erica moaned and said, “I told
her, ‘Mom, we’re against the death penalty.’ So then she says, ‘Okay.
Then call it The Bleeding Heart.’” Half laughing, half jeering, my stu-
dents and I were familiar with these ready caricatures of death penalty
proponents and opponents and also with the easy answers to violent
crime so often suggested by our fellow Americans. But these students,
through fifteen weeks of research and composing, had learned the
impossibility of easy answers. They knew too much for those now, too
much about the racism, the classism, the sexism, the homophobia, the
capriciousness, the corruption, the politics, the costs, the hyperbolic
media coverage, too much about the mistakes. Moreover, they knew
they themselves were culpable, that the state was committing execu-
tions, in Samantha’s words, “in our names.” My students, though, had
recast the state’s actions, had recast the terms of the entire debate, away
from the punishment of monsters and to the punishment of monstrous
deeds, away from whether killers deserve to die to whether we deserve
to kill them, and in so doing, they didn’t just imitate them but instead
they became academic writers.

Kimberly K. Gunter teaches at Appalachian State University.

Works Cited
“Selection of Execution Witnesses.” Central Prison. North Carolina Depart-
ment of Corrections, n.d. http://www .state.nc.us/DOP/deathpen-
alty/witness.htm. 14 Apr. 2010.

Villanueva, Victor. Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. Urbana,
IL: NCTE, 1993.

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