itertools.islice triggers UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character error

itertools.islice triggers UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode
character error

I have the following code to read columns in a csv:
#
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# READS CSV, RETURNS LIST OF COLUMN DATA, FROM ROW rowStart TO rowFinish
#
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
def csvColumnAsList(csvFileName, column, rowStart, rowFinish):
column_list = [] # defines it as a list
with codecs.open(csvFileName, 'r', 'utf-8') as csvfile:
spamreader = csv.reader(csvfile, delimiter=',')
for row in itertools.islice(spamreader, rowStart, rowFinish+1):
column_list.append(row[column].decode('utf8'))
return column_list
but this triggers an error:
File "algo-8.py", line 51, in csvColumnAsList for row in
itertools.islice(spamreader, rowStart, rowFinish+1): UnicodeEncodeError:
'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u201c' in position 215: ordinal
not in range(128)
Can someone help me. I tried a few things with encode, decode, but can't
figure it out yet.