The panel on ethics on Wednesday at The Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics, students and faculty attended a panel discussion on the ethics of the death penalty. The panel was part of a three-day event on the death penalty sponsored by Prindle, Men for Justice and the conflict studies department.

Sharon Crary, faculty coordinator for Prindle, facilitated the panel which featured crimanl defense attorney Laura Paul, homicide coordinator for Marian County Denise Robinson and Tracey Salisbury, assistant professor of history at Wabash College.

“From what I could understand, it was a good representation of different fields of practice,” junior Jordan Ragasa said. “It was nice to hear how all three of them interacted with each other.”

Jorden Giger, junior and member of Men for Justice and Prindle intern sophomore Margarita Nikonova were responsible for planning the events that took place during the week.

The inspiration for the events was the Troy Davis case, which sparked interest among many students and organizations last semester.

Troy Davis was executed on September 21, 2011 for the shooting death of an off-duty police officer in Savannah, Ga., despite reasonable doubt of his guilt. Seven of the witnesses who testified during Davis’s trial later recanted their testimonies. His execution was delayed more than four hours on the night of, before the U.S. Supreme Court decided to deny his stay.

“After the Troy Davis case happened, I got the idea for this event,” Nikonova said. “Things happen and people have a huge response to it and then it just all dies down. So I was hoping to continue the whole topic going and get people thinking about it.”

Giger also stressed the importance of recapturing a response from students and faculty alike.

“We were just really trying to capture that feeling, capture that emotion and passion that people had for this case and create a scholarly discussion about it,” he said. “A lot of people wanted to weight in about how they felt about the case, but they didn’t really know how to understand it, so we felt that having these series of events to give people a more balanced way of looking at it.”

While Giger and Nikonova did not have any long-term goals while planning the events, they have been pleased with the response from students. They also stressed that this three-day event on capital punishment is a continuation of the conversations that were started by a number of identity and affinity groups on campus after word spread about Troy Davis’s case.

“I think it’s important to sometimes remind people, that happened, we can maybe prevent something similar in the future from happening again,” Nikonova said. “If you don’t think about it, it may be too late when something actually happens and then you’ll all get outraged again, but we can’t really take action.”