The death penalty was thrust back into the spotlight yesterday as a number of events were held… The death penalty was thrust back into the spotlight yesterday as a number of events were held on campus to call attention to the factors of class and race in capital punishment.

Mike Farrell, star of the TV series “M*A*S*H,” spoke at a press conference yesterday sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union supporting a moratorium on the death penalty.

“We know there is racism, we know there is a disproportionate application of the death penalty,” Farrell said. He prodded the crowd to “take another look at what we as Americans stand for and believe in.”

Farrell gave the keynote address at the ACLU Pittsburgh chapter’s annual meeting last evening.

Harold Wilson, who was released from prison in 2005 after 17 years on death row, also spoke at the press conference about his experience and the failings of the justice system.

Wilson was found guilty of a triple murder in South Philadelphia in 1988. During his trial, he was represented by a court-appointed lawyer who had never tried a capital crime.

“Witnesses lied on the witness stand, and the judge would not let my lawyer object,” said Wilson. He was found guilty on all charges and was given three death sentences. “I thought, how are they going to kill me three times?” he said.

In 2003, Wilson was granted a new trial.

He was acquitted based on DNA evidence that had not been available in his first trial.

Wilson is the 122nd person in the United States and the sixth person in Pennsylvania to be freed from death row.

In 1997 a training video surfaced that showed Philadelphia Assistant District Attorney Jack McMahon, who originally prosecuted Wilson, instructing other prosecutors how to use race to their benefit when selecting jury members in death penalty cases.

“We need a moratorium now,” Wilson said.

At a separate event, Bryan Stevenson, a law professor at New York University and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama, gave a lecture titled “Race, Death and Psychic Harm: The Continuing History of No Truth and No Reconciliation.” The lecture was part of the Pitt Law School’s annual Lawyering for Social Change series.

In his discussion, Stevenson talked about the problems that racial minorities and the poor face when dealing with the justice system.

“I believe that our society has changed in very disturbing ways over the last 30 years,” he said. Stevenson pointed to statistics that show the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Stevenson also said that many problems in the justice system, specifically those related to the application of the death penalty, are the result of what he calls “psychic harm,” a condition of denying the costs and consequences of intolerance and discrimination.

He said that injustice based on race and class and treating juveniles as adult offenders are all serious problems in the justice system. He called the death penalty “arbitrary, capricious and racially biased.”

Stevenson himself witnessed discrimination as a young child growing up in Alabama, where segregation took many forms.

He attended a segregated school and was once forced to wait in long lines in the back of a health clinic to get vaccinations, where the black children were forced to wait until all the white children had received their shots and were then treated aggressively by the nurses and doctors.

Stevenson talked about a number of cases that he had personally worked on.

In 1988, Stevenson represented Walter McMillian, a black man who had been randomly arrested in Alabama and charged with the murder of a white woman. Stevenson said that he believed McMillian was arrested because pressure was growing on police to solve the crime after eight months without progress.

Despite having more than two dozen witnesses to support his alibi, the case went to trial, where Stevenson said that metal detectors and police dogs were used to intimidate supporters of McMillian.

He was convicted of the murder, and although the jury recommended a sentence of life in prison, the judge presiding over the case overturned that sentence and handed McMillian the death penalty.

After four rounds of appeals, McMillian’s sentence was overturned when evidence surfaced showing that prosecutors had coerced witnesses to testify against him.

Stevenson said that the justice system “places finality over fairness.”

Stevenson also spoke about the difficulties faced by the poor in America. “Thirty-eight million people in American live in poverty,” he said. “The opposite of poverty is not wealth, the opposite of poverty is justice.”

“We have to say something,” Stevenson said. “We can’t obtain justice with ideas alone. We need conviction in our heart.”