On this date, June 25, 2012, the United States Supreme
Court held that mandatory sentences of life without the possibility of parole
are unconstitutional for juvenile offenders. How would you feel if your family
member was murdered by a juvenile offender and at least, 15 or 20 years later,
he was released to go free and kill again? Say ‘Thank You’ to the ACLU who are
so happy for it. Yamaji
Yukio, Rogelio
Cannady, Abdullah
T. Hameen and Lee
Andrew Taylor were several perfect examples of juvenile killers who
murdered again when they were released or killed behind bars, now they were all
executed and will never murder again.
At the end of the
General Assembly Public Witness event, protesters arranged themselves into a
giant heart. (© 2019 Christopher L. Walton/UUA)
[PHOTO SOURCE: https://www.uuworld.org/articles/stop-spokane-jail-expansion]
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We, the
comrades of Unit 1012, are truly well aware that once the death penalty is
abolished, the ACLU will want to end LWOP. This article by Shari
Silberstein proves what we mean:
Ending the Death Penalty Is One Step Toward Ending Mass Incarceration
By Shari
Silberstein,
Truthout
Published
May 6, 2019
May 6, 2019
When
historians assess the ultimate demise of the death penalty in the United
States, California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s moratorium will be a key turning point.
His sweeping move halting executions for 737 people — more than a quarter of
the death row population nationwide — reflects just how deeply this practice
has failed.
The significance
of the moratorium was clear from the moment the news leaked. Every major media
outlet covered the story. Elected officials scrambled to announce their
verdicts. Leading thinkers in the criminal legal reform movement praised the
action, offering analysis on what exactly has disappeared and why.
What is
missing to date is a broader conversation around the opportunities we will have
when we finally rid ourselves of the death penalty. No longer will we waste
immense resources to center our system around the notion that killing is
justice. Freed from that polarizing policy that has sucked all the air out of
the room, we can reimagine responses to violence that break cycles of harm,
build safety and healing for all, and put us on the road to ending mass
incarceration.
We know so
much more today about the toxic impacts of our criminal legal system. Mass
incarceration and over-policing have compounded centuries of racism and chronic
poverty in communities of color, fueling a poisonous cycle of trauma, violence
and legal system overreach.
The death
penalty is one of the most visible symbols of that cycle, fostering a national
culture of violence that normalizes the idea of killing our most vulnerable in
the name of justice. This reality lies in plain sight when you look at the
lives of those executed. The Death Penalty Information Center compiled
information on the 25 men executed in 2018, and it’s horrifying. Seventy-two
percent suffered from serious mental illness, some type of brain disability,
substantial childhood trauma, or some combination of the three.
Such
detriments are compounded by the racism that is endemic to the death penalty
and the criminal legal system as a whole. So, when people of color face these
kinds of challenges, they are more likely to fall through the cracks than to
receive the kind of support that might have made the difference. Studies have
found, for example, that doctors are less likely to believe people of color
when they express pain. Children of color are less likely to be perceived as
youthful. People of color who survive violence are less likely to have access
to healing to prevent their getting swept into the cycle, and more likely to be
sentenced to die when they commit it. Nationally, nearly 60 percent of the
people on death row are people of color. And although about half of all
homicide victims are Black, only 15 percent of victims were Black in cases
where someone was executed. In short, communities of color disproportionately
bear both the burden of violence and our harmful responses to it.
Communities of color disproportionately bear both the burden of violence and our harmful responses to it.
Indeed, the
death penalty is a modern-day extension of lynching. It’s no coincidence that
executions began to increase in the U.S. as lynchings started to decline, in
the beginning of the 20th century.
Michelle
Alexander documented the rise and intergenerational effects of mass
incarceration in her book, The New Jim Crow, and has become one of our leading
thinkers on how racial inequity continues to plague the U.S. because of our
failing criminal legal system. Recently, she addressed the issue of violence
and our overly punitive response to it. Drawing from an essential new book,
Until We Reckon by Danielle Sered, Alexander wrote that “if we fail to face
violence in our communities honestly, courageously and with profound compassion
for the survivors — many of whom are also perpetrators of harm — our nation
will never break its addiction to caging human beings.”
This call to
action demands a new vision for addressing violence that begins with prevention
and places healing and equity at the center. The death penalty has no place in
that vision. The choice to pursue a death penalty sentence is a decision to
spend hundreds of millions of dollars nationwide, every year, on a practice
that does not deter crime and drains funds from services that are proven to
prevent it.
The death penalty is the epitome of our misguided approach to justice.
To be clear,
I’m not talking about merely replacing the death penalty with life without
parole sentences, which fail on nearly the same scale. Like executions, they
also target the most vulnerable (a full two-thirds of people currently serving
life without parole are people of color) without delivering public safety
gains. There is mounting evidence that people age out of crime, leaving
life-without-parole sentences without any purpose other than to inflict
suffering until death.
Our charge is
altogether different. We have an opportunity to reimagine the punishment
paradigm altogether. As we dismantle capital punishment state by state, we free
up crucial resources that can be invested in solving the root causes of trauma,
violence and mass incarceration that devastate communities of color, deepen
racial disparities and scar millions. I am talking about proven violence
intervention programs that use public health strategies to interrupt violence
before it happens; trauma-informed healing in communities harmed by violence;
restorative justice programs that allow people to truly own and repair the harm
they cause; and other community-based solutions that emphasize safety and
healing over retribution and more pain. In those instances where safety
necessitates some limited period of separation, that separation should not
inflict more suffering. Rather, it should create the conditions necessary for
people to take responsibility, change, and come out better off.
Think about
what might happen if we diverted hundreds of millions of dollars away from the
punitive justice that has done so much harm and toward strategies that can
replace mass incarceration with thriving neighborhoods.
California’s
achievement cannot be overstated. The death penalty is the epitome of our
misguided approach to justice. Until this vestige of our shameful past is
eliminated, our society cannot truly value Black lives, nor imagine a legal
system that fully embraces the values of equality, fairness and human dignity.
At the end of the
General Assembly Public Witness event, protesters arranged themselves into a
giant heart. (© 2019 Christopher L. Walton/UUA)
[PHOTO SOURCE: https://www.uuworld.org/articles/stop-spokane-jail-expansion]
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HOW'S it "unConstitutional?" Because they found a psychologist who called "life imprisonment 'cruel to a person's emotional & mental well-being?"
ReplyDeleteWhat's it called about OUIR mental health when the MURDERERS commit a murder that you're forced to WATCH (and have that as your last image of your loved one dying in Tower 1) and can never get rid of it, then have to work overtime to "choose Joy every day" when all you feel like doing sometimes is dying to get away from the image?
Eric Bennett
10/17/71-9/11/01