Socialist Action /July 2000
Election 2000: A Stink of Death
By CAROLE SELIGMAN
The United States has the highest population of
any country on earth-over 3600-living on death row. In addition to being
the only industrialized country to carry out executions, since re-instating
capital punishment in 1977, the United States is executing more prisoners
each year, including over 30 mentally retarded people.
The United States also has the distinction of having
executed the greatest number of inmates who were children or teenagers at
the time of their crimes of any country in the world. The latest of these
was Shaka Sankofa in Texas.
Despite the wishes of the Democratic and Republican
politicians and candidates, who wholeheartedly support and carry out state
murder, the death penalty has become a major issue in this year's presidential
campaign.
The June 22 execution of Shaka Sankofa (born Gary
Graham), an innocent man in Texas who never had the semblance of a fair
trial, produced a huge outcry and coverage in the media because George W.
Bush is the Republican candidate for president. As governor of Texas, with
the most active death row in the country (though California has more prison
inmates waiting on death row), Bush was heavily scrutinized and publically
pressured to save Sankofa's life.
Opponents of the execution of Mr. Sankofa, who
bravely resisted his own murder until the very end, included a contingent
of recently released former death row inmates found to be innocent of the
capital crimes for which they were convicted. Since 1973 more than 85 U.S.
prisoners have been released from death row after evidence of their innocence
of the crimes for which they were convicted came out.
Sankofa was also supported by a rape victim whose
testimony helped send the wrong man to serve 11 years in prison for the
crime. DNA evidence later established his innocence and the guilt of another
man.
This protest from a mistaken eyewitness was particularly
fitting in that Shaka Sankofa was convicted merely on the testimony of one
eyewitness who claimed to have seen him at night and at a distance.
Because of the recent exposure of innocent people
being released from death row on the basis of DNA evidence, as well as
the statistics of the incredible racial disparity in sentencing, whereby
most inmates on America's death rows are Black and brown, there is widespread
support for a national moratorium on all executions.
A full-page advertisement was published in The
New York Times with 4000 signers calling for an immediate national moratorium
on the death penalty because of the grossly unjust and unequal way that
it is applied.
Recently, as well, a large number of editorials
and nationally syndicated columns from major media have questioned or outright
opposed the death penalty. The New York Times editorialized against it three
times before and after the execution of Shaka Sankofa.
Castro on Shaka Sankofa's execution
The ruling class, represented by the two political
parties they finance, the Democrats and Republicans, is very firmly wedded
to capital punishment. After all, the death penalty is certainly the ultimate,
most terrifying instrument of rule of a class that is such a miniscule percentage
(less than 1 percent) of the population.
Cuban President Fidel Castro, in a June 26 speech
to the people of Holguín, Cuba, said, "Shaka Sankofa has shown
the world the bitter fruits of a social system where the differences between
the richest and the poorest are infinite, and where individualism, selfishness
and consumerism, the widespread use of firearms and violence reign like
a fundamental philosophy."
Castro speaks with knowledge. Of industrialized
countries, the United States has the highest disparity of wealth between
the rich and the poor of any country.
Radical historian Michael Parenti put it this way,
"During the Reagan-Bush-Clinton era, the share of the national income
going to those who work for a living shrank by over 12 percent. The share
pocketed by those who live principally off their investments increased almost
35 percent" (Against the Current, May, June 1998).
This fact cannot be divorced from the use of the
death penalty as a means of cementing the rule of the rich. Its use is not
to deter crime but to terrify forces who would struggle to change the social
order that props up this system of inequality.
Bush and Gore
While Bush, as Texas governor, has carried out
the most state murders under his reign, Gore actively campaigns for expanding
the death penalty as punishment for more categories of crime and brags about
his and the Clinton's administration's expansion of the death penalty.
At a speech in Atlanta on May 2, Al Gore bragged,
"President Clinton and I believed that we needed a tougher ... strategy
to fight crime on every single front: smarter prevention to stop crime before
it even starts. More police on the streets to thicken the thin blue line
between order and disorder. And tougher punishments-including the death
penalty-for those who dared to terrorize the innocent."
Gore's legacy includes the 1996 Anti-terrorism
and Effective Death Penalty Act, which restricts the rights of convicted
persons to appeal their death sentences. In effect, what happened to Shaka
Sankofa in Texas (where his proof of innocence was pointedly ignored by
all appeals courts), now can and does happen in the appeals process nationally.
You can thank both the Democrats and the Republicans for that assault on
basic civil rights.
Ever since candidate Clinton interrupted his first
presidential campaign to return to Arkansas to watch the execution of a
mentally retarded inmate as his way of not only upholding, but applauding
and even reveling in the blood revenge of the death penalty, it has been
crystal clear that the Democrats offer nothing to voters that is morally
superior to the Republicans.
It is really hopeless to look for abolition of
the death penalty from either of the two ruling parties, though the Democrats
are making active overtures to the abolitionists by trying to pose Gore
as less evil than Bush.
The numbers of innocent people the state has been
forced to release from death row, as well as the incredible statistics proving
the racism inherent in the system, has certainly undermined public confidence
in the administration of "justice" in this country. A majority
of the American people say they favor life imprisonment without possibility
of parole as a substitute for the death penalty in capital crimes.
In the face of such widespread opposition to capital
punishment, how can we account for the persistent support of the death penalty
by the leading capitalist politicians, Bush and Gore?
The most plausible explanation I found to this
question comes from a man who has been a death row inmate for 19 years,
Mumia Abu-Jamal: "Prisons serve another function: the inculcation of
terror in the minds of the working class, as a tool of class and racial
discipline" (Monthly Review, October 1999).
In other words, the capitalist candidates for president
are united in putting the class interests of the capitalist system first.
Working people need to break decisively with these parties in order to even
begin to make a change that will benefit and assure justice to ourselves,
the majority.
Socialist Action /July 2000 |