A View From The Left-Feds Push Tsarnaev Execution-Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!
Workers Vanguard No. 1070
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12 June 2015
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When a Boston jury handed down a death sentence last month to 21-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a U.S. citizen of Chechen Muslim descent, it was the culmination of the sort of show trial in which the U.S. rulers revel. The Obama Justice Department seized on the case as soon as Tsarnaev was arrested for involvement in the 2013 Boston marathon bombing, a criminal act of indiscriminate terror that left three dead and over 260 wounded. Waving the Boston bombing as a bloody shirt, the federal government pulled out all the stops to pack Tsarnaev off to death row and put a shine back on capital punishment.
The Feds were not about to be frustrated by the fact that Massachusetts abolished the death penalty decades ago. These overseers of the entire machinery of bourgeois state repression simply took the case to federal court, where they repeatedly brushed aside defense offers of a guilty plea in return for life without parole. At trial, prosecutors “death qualified” the jury by striking anyone opposed to capital punishment in a city where the overwhelming majority is opposed to putting Tsarnaev to death.
As Marxists, we oppose the death penalty on principle, for the guilty as well as the innocent, and Tsarnaev is no exception. We do not accord the state the right to decide who lives and who dies. The great majority of those on death row are poor and disproportionately black and Latino, lacking decent legal representation and thus excluded from the justice that only money may buy.
Public support for the death penalty has eroded over the last two decades in the wake of the exonerations of scores of innocent death-row inmates, along with a series of ghoulishly botched executions. Nineteen states, including most recently Nebraska, have banned capital punishment, and another eight states have moratoriums. The last federal execution took place in 2003, with Washington effectively putting a moratorium on executions five years ago.
Nevertheless, both capitalist parties—Democratic as well as Republican—are determined to maintain this ultimate sanction in the arsenal of state repression. Even when, shortly after a horror-show execution in Oklahoma last year, Barack Obama directed then-Attorney General Eric Holder to review the implementation of the death penalty, the president reiterated his support for capital punishment. The White House especially wants to have the option to execute so-called terrorists and those convicted of “crimes against the state” such as treason or killing a federal officer.
The current administration is seeking to remove the cobwebs from the federal apparatus of execution, which was given a major boost by the last Democratic regime. By signing both the 1994 Federal Death Penalty Act and the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, Bill Clinton vastly expanded the federal death penalty and gutted the habeas corpus right of state prisoners to have federal courts review their convictions. Soon after, the assembly line of death kicked into high gear, reaching 98 executions in 1999.
In addition to shining a light on the bloodthirstiness of this country’s capitalist rulers, the Boston case starkly illustrates the all-sided shredding of civil liberties under the rubric of the “war on terror.” Right after the marathon bombing, the Boston metropolitan area was placed under a virtual state of martial law as National Guardsmen and SWAT teams backed by helicopters and armored vehicles sealed off streets and carried out house-to-house searches. The federal dragnet extended to three UMass-Dartmouth students who were sentenced earlier this month to three to six years in prison for removing Tsarnaev’s backpack and laptop from his dorm room after the bombing.
With Republicans initially howling to dispatch Tsarnaev by branding him an “enemy combatant” and locking him away indefinitely, the Obama White House preferred to prove that the federal courts could just as effectively dispatch the accused, while adding a thin veneer of due process. How thin a veneer was evident from the moment of Tsarnaev’s arrest, when government officials boasted that they would not even make a pretense of honoring his basic Constitutional rights. Tsarnaev was interrogated for hours at his hospital bed without a Miranda warning and despite his repeated requests for a lawyer. With the Justice Department out to get rid of Miranda protections altogether for alleged terrorists, the creeping police state now has another precedent for gutting procedural rights for the accused more broadly.
Once in custody, Tsarnaev was gagged with “special administrative measures” isolating him from other inmates and denying him access to the media. His visits, calls and mail were monitored and restricted to family members and legal counsel. Tsarnaev’s lawyers were also prevented from disclosing their communications with their client except for purposes of legal defense.
The U.S. government also asserts its right, both at home and abroad, to simply blow away those whom it views as “terrorists,” as in the case of Ibragim Todashev, a 27-year-old acquaintance of Tsarnaev who was gunned down two years ago in his Florida apartment after a 4-hour interrogation by an FBI agent and two Massachusetts state troopers. After Todashev was killed, one of the troopers texted his fellow officers “well done” and “great work.” Predictably, it was first claimed that Todashev threatened the officers with a knife, but a week later the Feds admitted he was unarmed.
When it comes to terror, blood-soaked U.S. imperialism has no equal. Its history of raining death and destruction across the globe is long and sordid—witness everything from the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and massive napalming in Vietnam to the Obama administration’s drone warfare in Central Asia and the Near East. Within the U.S., fighters for labor’s cause as well as black militants have been targeted for death by the capitalist state over the years—such as anarchist workers Sacco and Vanzetti, executed in Massachusetts in 1927, countless striking workers killed on picket lines by cops and National Guardsmen in the early decades of the 20th century, and the 38 Black Panthers assassinated by the FBI’s COINTELPRO conspiracy in the 1960s and ’70s.
The ruling class is ever eager to bolster its repressive state apparatus, an instrument of organized violence against working people and the oppressed in defense of capitalist profit and rule. Labor has every interest in fighting the federal government’s drive to strip people of rights and sharpen the executioner’s ax. Ultimately, such measures are directed against the ability of working people and the oppressed to struggle in their own interests against their exploiters.
From the Lynch Rope to Lethal Injection
Expressing a widespread but fatuous sentiment, Time magazine declared on its June 8 cover: “The Last Execution: Why the era of capital punishment is ending.” The number of executions is down considerably, especially compared to the late 1990s. But for much of the bourgeoisie the main concern is not the justice system’s proclivity to frame up and kill innocent people nor the unspeakable torture inflicted by the drug cocktails. Rather, it cites dollars and cents, especially in states with cash-strapped budgets. When Nebraska’s Republican legislature overturned the death penalty in late May, one Republican state senator explained: “The taxpayers have not gotten the bang for their buck on this death penalty for almost 20 years.”
On occasion, the American rulers engage in a charade over how to more “humanely” put people to death. In recent years, manufacturers in Europe and the U.S. have, for their own reasons, stopped providing the sedative used in the execution cocktail. States have scrambled to find substitutes, like the one that had Charles Warner writhing in agony while strapped to the gurney in Oklahoma earlier this year, crying out: “My body is on fire!” Now the Supreme Court is considering the case of three other condemned prisoners from that state attempting to block the use of the same drug. In the face of the drug shortage, politicians in some states are now debating gruesome alternatives to lethal injection: firing squads, electric chairs, the gas chamber.
In the states of the former Confederacy, the death penalty is not about to go away. Indeed, while nearly every other advanced industrialized country has abolished capital punishment (with the notable exception of Japan), its persistence in the U.S. is rooted in the legacy of black chattel slavery. Slaves were killed with impunity for “crimes” ranging from insolence toward whites to rebellion against the slave masters. It took a bloody Civil War to smash slavery. But the promise of black freedom was betrayed when the Northern capitalists ended the period of Radical Reconstruction by withdrawing federal troops from the South, leaving black people impoverished and largely defenseless. With the Ku Klux Klan as the spearhead, the white propertied classes subjected blacks to legally enforced racial segregation, stripped them of all democratic rights and held them down through terror, especially lynching. The black population was consolidated anew as a specially oppressed race-color caste.
Capital punishment in America is a direct descendent of and replacement for the lynch rope. In the 1890s, blacks were lynched at a rate of one every other day; four decades later, the state was carrying out executions at the rate of one every other day. A 2015 study by the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative titled “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror” documents nearly 4,000 lynchings in the South, noting: “By 1915, court-ordered executions outpaced lynchings in the former slave states for the first time.” In the period between 1910 and 1950, black people made up 75 percent of those executed in the South.
The racist application of the death penalty was sanctified by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1987 case of Warren McCleskey, a black prisoner executed in Georgia in 1991. McCleskey’s attorneys presented an authoritative study detailing that black people in Georgia convicted of killing whites were sentenced to death 22 times more frequently than those convicted of killing blacks. In rejecting McCleskey’s appeal, the Supreme Court explicitly acknowledged that to accept this premise would throw “into serious question the principles that underlie our entire criminal justice system.” In its callous pronouncement, the court expressed a basic truth: McCleskey was a victim of the racism that pervades the criminal justice system. As guardians of the American bourgeois order, the capitalist state is also committed to enforcing the oppression of black people that is its bedrock. For black liberation through socialist revolution! Finish the Civil War!
We welcome the recent repeal of the death penalty in Nebraska and any other measure that would curtail capital punishment. But even if the death penalty were eliminated, it would not fundamentally change the violently racist and oppressive nature of capitalist class rule. The slowdown on death row has not slowed the executioners in blue uniforms from gunning down black people and Latinos in the streets.
Moreover, under capitalism all reforms are reversible. In 1972, at a time marked by the tumultuous social struggles of the civil rights and Vietnam antiwar movements, the Supreme Court declared the death penalty as practiced unconstitutional, ordering states to rewrite their laws. A mere four years later, the Court gave the green light for the killing machines to resume their grisly work. The next year, Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad in Utah.
The International Socialist Organization (ISO) has posted an April 29 article by the national director of their Campaign to End the Death Penalty that recycles the liberal prognosis that “the death penalty, it seems, is dying” and summons activists to “continue to chip away at the death penalty system” (socialistworker.org), without a word of criticism of the Democrats. Here is yet another expression of the reformist illusion that the cruelties and “excesses” of the capitalist state can be chipped away, leaving behind institutions that act humanely and justly from the standpoint of workers and black people. In contrast, we Marxists aim to imbue those protesting the depredations of U.S. capitalism with the understanding that putting a final halt to the rulers’ machinery of death—the killer cops, the swollen prisons, the imperialist military—requires sweeping away the whole capitalist system through proletarian socialist revolution.
Marxism on Crime and Punishment
Death sentences, the “living death” of life without parole, and the whole concept of punishment under capitalism are relics of ancient religious codes of retributive justice. As we wrote when the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976: “The Marxist attitude toward crime and punishment is that we are against it.... Socialists do not proceed from the standpoint of punishing the offender. Such a vindictive penal attitude is fundamentally a religious rather than a materialist conception of social relations” (WV No. 117, 9 July 1976). Of course, a humane and rational society, which capitalism decidedly is not, may find a need to separate out certain dangerous individuals—for the protection of others as well as the offenders themselves. But this would be done without stigma or deprivation and with education, medical care, rehabilitation and the goal of reintegration as productive members of society.
When the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky led the workers to power in the October 1917 Revolution, they carried out this program and banned the death penalty in Russia. The determination not to base the penal code of a workers state on retribution found its fullest expression in the 1919 party program, which advocated “a fundamental alteration in the character of punishment, introducing conditional sentences on an extensive scale, applying public censure as a means of punishment, replacing imprisonment by compulsory labour with retention of freedom, and prisons by institutions for training, and establishing the principle of comradely courts.”
At the same time, the Bolsheviks did not flinch from the necessary and extraordinary measures of Red Terror required by the 1918-20 Civil War against imperialist-backed counterrevolutionary forces. But the penal code was a more permanent feature of the proletarian state, embodying the Bolsheviks’ expectations that the securing of Soviet power and the extension of the revolution internationally would open the path to the gradual withering away of the state. It was only after the parasitic bureaucracy around J.V. Stalin usurped political power from the proletariat that the old “tortures and torments” denounced by the early Soviet government, including the death penalty, were resurrected as permanent features. Despite this bureaucratic degeneration, the Soviet Union remained a workers state based on collectivized property forms. The Trotskyists continued to defend the Soviet Union unconditionally against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution, while calling for proletarian political revolution to oust the bureaucrats.
Our perspective is that of Lenin and Trotsky—for socialist revolutions to overturn capitalism worldwide and the repressive state machinery that defends it. There can be no fair or “humane” system of justice for the working class and oppressed in a society based on exploitation. With its central position in production, the working class has both the social power and the material interest to shatter the capitalist order. To bring that consciousness to the proletariat requires forging a revolutionary workers party of the Bolshevik type.
Down With The Death Penalty-For The
Innocent-And The Guilty-Where Was The Ma. Committee Against The Death Penalty
and Amnesty International On Judgment Day!
Ralph Morris comment:
You know when I was a kid I had all
the traditional working-class attitudes toward crime and criminals. At least in
the sense that those who committed grievous crimes should pay the full penalty
that society can deliver to such conduct. In short in the interest of
retribution the state should be able to put to death those who go far off the
norms of society. Now it wasn’t that I had such a sophisticated view of the
matter or had it all worked out. You know picking the retribution argument out
of the several reasons that the death penalty should be an option as against
say its deterrent effect, the cost to society of keeping the prisoner alive
through the arduous appeals process, or to bring closure to the victims of the
heinous crimes committed.
Probably a lot of my attitude came
from listening at the family dinner table to my father spewing forth about how
criminals, demented and crazed criminals like rapist Caryl Chessman who a bunch
of do-gooders in California were trying to save, should face their maker rather
quickly, maybe something like summary execution according to his view. My
father for days was happy when they put that “rat” Chessman (his word)
down. A little probably had to do too
with the guys who I hung around with at Van Patten’s Drugstore in my old
working-class neighborhood in the Tappan Street section of Troy, New York where
I grew up. Those guys driven by what they saw at the movies or learned from
their own family dinner tables would also go out of the way to say those “dirty
rats” should sizzle. I know when the film adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood came out when we watched the
end we said “yes!” when that trap-door sent the pair to their maker.
Here is the funny thing though,
funny since I grew up a Catholic on both sides of the family and the Catholic
position on the death penalty has always been in the interest of the sanctity
of life to oppose that measure. Frankly, I did not really know that was the
position of our church (my then church since seriously lapsed for many reasons,
not all of them religious differences) until I was about fourteen and my
maternal grandmother, Anna Kelly, who had been influenced by the Dorothy
Day-led Catholic Worker movement of the 1930s told me so one time when I asked
about the church’s attitude while staying at her house during a school
vacation. That knowledge made me think, not then so much because I was still
under the influence of my father and my high school corner boys but later when
I had a serious sea-change in a lot of my attitudes. Then it kind of naturally
followed.
Of course for me, a child of the
1960s and thus of lots of sea-changes brought about in lots of different ways,
it had been my tour of duty in the United States Army in the Central Highlands
in Vietnam where I, and a lot of my Army buddies, did things that it is hard to
speak of even now to people who never bothered mine or theirs. More importantly
during my eighteen months of duty (the normal tour was twelve months but I had
extended my tour not so much because I was gung-ho as I wanted to finish my
three year enlistment early which they offered to do for the extension and get
the hell out) I became more and more disgusted with what was going on, going on
in what even then seemed a senseless war. Truth though some of that sense was
developed later once I got out and could think through things a little, take
stock of what was going on in the world then.
A couple of key events that pushed
me around, make me think a little differently about life. One day in early 1970
I was delivering a special motor from my father’s high-precision electrical
shop where I worked for a while after I got out of the service to a customer on
Vanderbilt Street near Russell Sage College in Albany and saw a ragtag group of
ex-veterans in consciously mismatched uniforms walking almost silently down the
street carrying individual signs and a big banner in the lead calling for “Immediate,
Unconditional Withdrawal from Vietnam” and signed by the Vietnam Veterans
Against the War (VVAW). It was impressive as the passers-by stood in, I think,
stunned into silence since here were guys who knew what it was all about saying
get the hell out, pronto. One of the lead ex-soldiers shouted out for any
veterans to join them. Like a lemming to the sea I did so, did march that day
with my new-found “band of brothers.”
I would do more marches, rallies,
sit-ins with the VVAW in Albany and down in New York City when they needed
bodies but the big turnaround event was May Day 1971 when we planned to
symbolically shut down the Pentagon, our former bosses, as part of a larger
action of thousands of people working under the slogan-“if the government does
not shut down the war, we will shut down the government.” For our efforts that
day all we got was tear-gassed, billy-clubbed and sent to the bastinado holding
area at the RFK football stadium. That is where I met my longtime friend and
political associate Sam Eaton who had come down from Boston with a group of red
and radicals from Cambridge whose task was to “capture” the White House. Like I
said we met at RFK stadium as a result of our collective efforts.
The most important result from that
disastrous episode was that we both spent the next several years until we both
saw the 1960s high promise alternate vision ebbing joining various study groups
(and studying on our own) run by various kinds of socialists, un-joined some as
well and wound up generally working with whatever ad hoc groups had need of
bodies for whatever they were protesting. It was during this period, which was
also a period in which there was turmoil around the use of the death penalty
and its uneven application by each state which caused a moratorium to be called
on executions for several years, that I readjusted my views on the death
penalty to jibe with the changes in my other views (and this is also the period
where I changed my view on abortion from anti to pro-choice, that position partially
induced by a personal situation at the time). My father was furious but
Grandmother Kelly just smiled a knowing smile.
Over the next few decades although
we would not put the frenzied 24/7 energy into political activism that we did
in the early 1970s as we pursued our careers and began raising families we
would response to any calls from social activist groups who needed bodies. Then
the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2002 made us both abandon our “armed truce”
(Sam’s term) with the American government and have continued to be active,
although with a greater sense now that we had to hope younger activists would
show up to take over the main struggles. So we have done our fair share of anti-war
vigils, rallies, marches, especially after I joined Veterans for Peace (VFP),
progeny of the old VVAW (and Sam who was military exempt during Vietnam as the
sole support of his mother and four younger sisters after his father had died
suddenly of a massive heart attack in 1965 became an non-veteran associate
member). Did some work around the Occupy movement in 2011 too.
Around the death penalty though over
the years we probably had not done much except donate to various anti-death
penalty organizations in New York and Massachusetts when the pro-death penalty
forces reared their heads after some particularly egregious crime stirred up
the issue again. That is until we got involved in the last stages of trying to
save the life of Troy Davis down in Georgia in 2011. We failed there after the
United States Supreme Court turned down a last minute appeal. And until now in
Massachusetts where Sam had commandeered me to stand with him around the Boston
Marathon bomber case, the case of the surviving Tsarnaev, in Federal District
Court.
Sam and I both recognized this as a
tough one given the horrendous actions of the brother bombers consciously
killing and gravely maiming many people who were among the crowd at the finish
line on the afternoon of Patriot’s Day 2013. Sam admitted, since he knew a few
people in the running community who had been affected that day, that he had
taken something of a “dive” on showing up at the Moakley Courthouse in Boston
to oppose the death penalty the federal prosecutors were asking for without
question, and without any plea deal for life without parole. In Troy the matter
riled up many people for a while but it did not have the same intensity that it
still had for Boston where the wounds ran deep.
Nobody would be on the side of the
angels on this one. But here is where little quirky things done by individuals
kind of make you stand up and take notice. One VFP-er, Joe K., whom I knew
vaguely from his coming down to New York City for a solidarity action, had
taken it upon himself to show up at the courthouse every day the trial was in
session from jury selection until the forgone guilty verdict conclusion. He had
received a certain amount of attention for carrying a simple homemade sign each
day stating “Down with the Death Penalty.” Sam who works with the Boston VFP
chapter, the Smedley Butler Brigade, received a message on their website sent
by Joe that bodies were needed at courthouse for the critical sentencing stage
since the guilt issue had been essentially conceded by the defense team. In
federal court the jury makes the recommendation on sentence in capital cases
(murder, one) and thus had options of execution by lethal injection, the preferred
federal method, or life without parole. The “hook” was that if one jury voted
against the death penalty on every count the sentence would automatically be life
without parole. The problem though was that the jury had been “death-qualified”
meaning, in practice that no anti-death penalty advocate could have served on the
jury. Joe’s idea, the right one, was to have a presence each day of anti-death
penalty people show up and to show the world that death was not the answer. And
if nothing else to get that message across to the milling around press corps in
front of the building.
Sam and I worked to get the word out,
worked all the lists we had accumulated over the years of social and progressive
groups to come stand with us. Not many did most days, a few to a couple of
dozen or so but we got the word out, got the word that people were willing to
stand-up and say no to death by the state. One guy had a sign saying- “we do
not grant the state the right to kill the innocent-or the guilty.” Those who wrote the accompanying article from
a left-wing newspaper that was handed out one day at an anti-war Iraq and Syria
war rally would appreciate such sentiments.
Of course as the headlines have screamed
out the young bomber, Tsarnaev, has been formally sentenced to death by the
judge in the case and our efforts thus far have gone for nought. Here is what I
want to know though, a question which formed the “hook” headline to this
piece. Why were the natural organizations (beside VFP which has a long history
of opposition to the death penalty as well) to lead the public vigil against the
death penalty in Massachusetts-the Committee Against The Death Penalty (who
have the martyred Sacco and Vanzetti as their logo) and the local branch of
Amnesty International absent from the front of the Moakley Federal Courthouse. They
were repeatedly asked to join the vigil and their answers were not forthcoming.
Rumor, which you can contact them to verify or not, has it that the case “was
too hot to handle.” Yeah, do ask them about that one.
Remembering the Vietnam antiwar movement on the 40th anniversary of
the end of the war