MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry said she worries “there is a social construction of evil” that influences how people view Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and police officers who kill people that are unarmed on Saturday.
After criminal defense attorney Seema Iyer said that while she is for the death penalty, she isn’t for giving Tsarnaev the death penalty because his brain hasn’t fully developed and he was influenced by his brother, and made several mentions of “evil” while speaking about those on death row, Harris-Perry said, “for me, I guess the problem is, we just spent an hour talking about police officers who have been responsible for the death of people who are unarmed. And the responsibility of the death for those individuals is terrorizing to those communities…it may not happen as an act of terror purposely, which is a very different thing but it is terrifying and terrorizing for those communities. We do not, and should not identify those officers and evil, and we do not think that it is appropriate to begin to — and so I guess for me part of it is, I worry there is a social construction of evil here that presumes that certain kinds of victims and certain kinds of violent crimes are those that we have a right to behave in an act of retribution toward.”
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