DEBATE: Race plays a role in death penalty implementation. BAN the DP!

California Prepares to Execute Tookie Williams - Countdown to a Legal Lynching
October 12, 2005
By Phil Gasper

(excerpt)

Williams appeal reached the Supreme Court in May, where it has been sitting ever since. A decision was originally expected last week, but the court delayed, reportedly to allow its new Chief Justice an opportunity to weigh in on the case. Now it has spoken in no uncertain terms.

Welcome to the racist Roberts’ court.

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To get the charges to stick, the prosecutor in the case, Robert Martin, used blatant racism. The trial was moved from Los Angeles to Torrance, a predominantly white, highly conservative area. All the African-Americans in the jury pool were dismissed and Stan’s case was heard by an all-white jury.

In his closing argument, Martin compared Stan in the courtroom to a Bengal tiger in the zoo, and said that “in his environment” (i.e. South Central LA) he would behave like the tiger in its “habitat.”

Despite the fact that Martin was later censured twice by the California Supreme Court for his racist practices, which led to death sentences in two of the cases he prosecuted being overturned, and despite the fact that the ACLU, the NAACP, the Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund and numerous other groups, filed an amicus brief on Stan’s behalf, the Ninth Circuit has twice rejected the claim that his constitutional rights were violated. Now the Supreme Court has upheld these decisions.

PLEASE read all of this important article @ http://traprockpeace.org/phil_gasper_blog/index.php/2005/11/01/california-prepares-to-execute-tookie-williams-countdown-to-a-legal-lynching


Phil Gasper is Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame de Namur University in California and a member of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty. He can be reached at pgasper@ndnu.edu

On October 11th, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the appeal of Stanley "Tookie" Williams,' co-founder of the Crips gang who is on death row in California, to investigate the discrimination at the heart of his case, as well as his innocence. One issue highlighted was the fact that the prosecutor in his original case removed all Black jurors from the jury, leaving an all-white jury to deliberate the case. During Tookie's trial, this prosecutor also made racially-coded remarks during his closing argument, comparing Tookie in South Central Los Angeles to a Bengal tiger in its natural habitat. The California State Supreme Court had twice censured this prosecutor for equally discriminatory behavior.

The Supreme Court's refusal to investigate racism in this case establishes as precedent for the nation the right for prosecutors to exclude jurors on the basis of race and to denigrate minority defendants in front of all-white juries. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals posited in 2002 that Tookie's prison writings, in which he renounces his former life as a gangster, could be grounds for the California governor to grant him clemency. If he is not granted clemency, he will be executed on December 13th of this year.

http://blackbox-radio.blogspot.com/2005_10_16_blackbox-radio_archive.html

The O.J. Simpson Verdict, 10 Years Later: The Impact and The Aftermath

(excerpt)

“This trial really revealed the extent to which black Americans and white Americans saw things through different lenses,” David Sklansky, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Law, told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “There was just an astonished lack of comprehension by many white Americans, and there were things that seemed plausible to black Americans that didn’t seem plausible to whites -- like how blacks were much quicker, in general, to believe that police could have planted evidence.”

The person many believed to have planted evidence was Los Angeles homicide detective Mark Fuhrman, who discovered a bloody glove near the murder scene. While on the witness stand, Fuhrman also denied ever having used a racial slur, although it was eventually discovered that he spewed the N-word in a taped interview 10 years prior to Simpson’s trial.

“That was an important lesson from the trial,” said Sklansky, who was a criminal law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles at the time of the trial. “It was a lesson that, despite all of the progress that has been made, we still live in a universe in which black and white lives can be very different. The fact was that police officers that didn’t utter racial epithets in court might very well use them outside of the courtroom.”

http://www.blackamericaweb.com/site.aspx/bawnews/ojverdict103

The Fight to Save Stan Tookie Williams

(excerpt)

But it's this very spirit that the forces of death and reaction in California want to extinguish. This rabid sector of the population represents the last vestige of support for Schwarzenegger, whose poll numbers are Cheney-esque. Just as the politics of racism haunt every aspect of Williams's case, they also threaten to define Schwarzenegger's final decision.

And this is exactly the kind of fight Jim Brown craves. "If you think because I'm famous or tough or outspoken that I am not affected by racism, then you don't understand. I am affected by it any time I see a black person who is not receiving an even shake," Brown wrote in his book, Out of Bounds. "I don't have to go hungry to feel for the man with an empty belly.... I will fight for my right to be free. I will die for that right. People say, 'Yes the white man has his foot up your ass. Be patient. He must adjust to not having his foot up your ass. Give him another two hundred years. Let him ease it out.' I say no. Take it out. Now."

This approach has earned Brown his share of enemies. "In the eyes of the police I am more than just famous. I'm big, black and arrogant," Brown wrote. "There are cops in Los Angeles who would love to be the guy who sent me to San Quentin for 49,000 years."

But Brown isn't in San Quentin. He is on the outside, ready to rumble for the sake of justice, redemption and the children who will be hurt because Williams was not there to propose an alternative to gang life. As Jim Brown told conservative talk show host John Ziegler on KFI radio in Los Angeles last week, "When someone like Tookie says, 'This is not the way to do it. I made a mistake in my life,' yes, literally, lives are saved."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20051129/cm_thenation/20051212zirin

The death penalty is racist.

The 1972 Furman V. Georgia case abolished the death penalty for four years on the grounds that capital punishment was rife with racial disparities. Over twenty five years later, those disparities are as glaring as ever.

African Americans are 12% of the U.S. population, but are 43% of prisoners on death row. Although Blacks constitute 50% of all murder victims, 83% of the victims in death penalty cases are white.

Since 1976 only ten executions involved a white defendant who had killed a Black victim.

In all, only 37 of the over 18,000 executions in this country's history involved a white person being punished for killing a Black person.

A comprehensive Georgia study found that killers of whites are 4.3 times more likely to receive a death sentence than killers of Blacks.

More than 75% of those on federal death row are non-white. Of the 156 federal death penalty prosecutions approved by the Attorney General since 1988, 74% of the defendants were non-white.

The crime of being poor and Black

Girvies Davis spent 16 years on death row. He was sentenced to death in 1978, accused of being an accomplice in a robbery in which someone else shot and killed the victim. There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime. He was convicted purely on the basis of a signed "confession" -- a confession in which he also confessed to 9 other murders known to have been committed by others. He was illiterate at the time he supposedly penned the confession. Girvies said that police took him out for a ride and threatened to shoot him "while trying to escape" if he didn't sign the confession. The police admitted that they took him for a drive, claiming it was to search for evidence! Despite this information, Illinois gov. Jim Edgar refused to commute Girvies Davis sentence or allow a retrial, and he was executed on May 17, 1995. He died because he was poor and Black.

http://nodeathpenalty.org/fiveRs1.html

Challenging the racist death penalty
By Eugene Puryear

(excerpt)

The death penalty’s real purpose

Those who compare the death penalty to legalized lynching are doing more than making a dramatic analogy. Lynching—including the torture, killing and mutilation of Black people—was common especially in the post-Reconstruction South following the Civil War and right up through the mass civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s as a method of terrorizing the population and quelling any agitation for equal rights.

A clear presentation of the issue of racism and the death penalty was seen in a February 2002 American Sociological Review article, “The Political Sociology of the Death Penalty.” That article presents data showing the same states that historically had the most lynchings are also the states where the most people are executed. David Jacobs, co-author of the study, said in a 2002 press statement, “Our results suggest that the death penalty has become a sort of legal replacement for the lynchings in the past. … The results show a clear connection.” The study also shows that in these same states an increase in death sentences corresponded directly to an increase in the Black population.

Some point out that death sentences for whites also increased. Jacobs addressed this argument: “If there was clear discrimination against Blacks in death penalty sentencing, then the Supreme Court might again rule that the death penalty is unconstitutional, so there may be an effort to not discriminate when imposing the death penalty. While the connection between lynchings and death sentences is strongest when only Black death sentences are considered, the connection between lynchings in the past and contemporary death sentences is present for both Blacks and whites.” In summation, Jacobs concludes, “the main point is that our findings do not support the claims that the death penalty is administered in a color-blind fashion.”

African Americans are portrayed by the ruling class as a race of criminals, and the racist legal system leads to Blacks being incarcerated at alarming rates. African Americans’ fear of the legal process is due in no small part to the racist application of the death penalty. The intolerance and ruthlessness of the state has a chilling effect.

http://socialismandliberation.org/mag/index.php?aid=516