Click on the headline to link to the “International Communist League” website.
Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
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Workers Vanguard No. 1009 28 September 2012
Tough on Crime” Anti-Death Penalty Measure
Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!
Vote Yes on California Prop 34!
In a country that leads the world in the number of people behind
bars, disproportionately black, the endurance of the death penalty is rooted in
the foundation of American capitalism, which was built on the scarred backs of
black slaves. Capital punishment is the supreme declaration of state authority
and the monopoly of violence in the hands of this country’s racist capitalist
rulers. The so-called “Golden State” of California leads the nation in death row
inmates, with close to one-quarter of the more than 3,170 men and women
condemned to die. Of the 729 death row prisoners, overwhelmingly concentrated at
San Quentin, 14 have exhausted all appeals. The only thing standing between them
and the death chamber are court-directed negotiations over which combination of
deadly chemicals to inject in their veins to avoid the charge of “cruel and
unusual punishment.”
Proposition 34 (the SAFE California Act), which is on the ballot in
the November elections, calls to repeal the state’s death penalty and replace it
with life without parole. As Marxists, we oppose the death penalty on
principle—for the guilty as well as the innocent. We do not accord the state the
right to determine who lives and who dies, and welcome any measure against the
death penalty or curtailing the reach of the state’s killing machine. While the
measure is couched as a means of making the system of capitalist repression more
effective and efficient, including by redirecting money to police departments,
what is primary for us in calling for a “yes” vote is that the SAFE Act is a
referendum on state-sanctioned murder.
The very name ascribed to this ballot initiative by its sponsors,
the “Savings, Accountability and Full Enforcement for California Act,” expresses
the cruel calculus of capitalist “justice,” weighing the costs of legal murder
against the expense of relegating prisoners to a living death on what class-war
political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal so aptly calls “life row.” Arguing that
“California’s death penalty is an empty promise,” the act appeals for a more
efficient and effective punishment. Whipping up the spectre of depraved
criminals on the loose, the SAFE Act declares: “Killers and rapists walk our
streets free and threaten our safety, while we spend hundreds of millions of
taxpayer dollars on a select few who are already behind bars forever on death
row.... By replacing the death penalty with life in prison without the
possibility of parole, we would save the state $1 billion in five years without
releasing a single prisoner.” One hundred million dollars of these “savings” is
pledged to the cops, courts and prosecutors.
Yet despite all of these sops to the forces of “law and order,” the
California District Attorneys Association, the State Sheriffs’ Association and a
number of other police agencies are literally screaming murder. Their “Vote No
on Prop 34” Web site promotes speeding up the state’s killing machine. It
proposes streamlining the appeals process to get rid of “delay tactics” and
instituting a one-drug protocol of death, pointing to Ohio, where 14 death row
prisoners have been killed by this method since 2009. Declaring that life
without parole “will cost taxpayers more in healthcare costs” for aging inmates,
these opponents of the SAFE Act argue that savings can be made by no longer
housing death row prisoners in single cells. Reveling in barbarism, their “Mend
It, Don’t End It” statement concludes with the bloodthirsty complaint that “cop
killers, baby killers and serial killers who rightfully received the death
penalty do not deserve the benefits they have at San Quentin.”
In our opposition to the death penalty, we are equally committed to
the abolition of life without parole, the prisons and all the barbaric
institutions of the capitalist state. Our purpose is to arm the working class
with the understanding that the cops, courts, prisons and military make up the
apparatus for the violent repression of the working class and the oppressed in
defense of the power and profits of the capitalist rulers. It will take nothing
short of proletarian socialist revolution to sweep this state away.
Voices from Death Row
Some of the condemned men on San Quentin’s death row have also
raised their opposition to the SAFE Act. They have spoken out against being
entombed for life in prison with their appeals cut off and forced to be unpaid
slave laborers as restitution for their alleged crimes. Among these prisoners is
Kevin Cooper, a black man framed up for the killing of a white family in 1983.
In 2004, only hours before he was to be strapped to the death chamber gurney,
Cooper was granted a stay of execution. Despite overwhelming evidence of his
innocence and a more than 100-page opinion by Judge William Fletcher of the
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal arguing that the “State of California may be about
to execute an innocent man,” in 2009 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against
Cooper’s appeal of his sentence.
Cooper argues that the SAFE Act’s repeal of all avenues of appeal
for those now sentenced to death is “a step backwards in our ability to
challenge our convictions,” condemning them to life behind bars in prisons
“worse than death row.” It is a profoundly searing indictment of this country’s
judicial system that some prisoners prefer a death sentence on the grounds that
this provides some means to prove their innocence and avoids the worse
day-to-day violence and torture in the maximum-security prison chambers. The
accused and convicted should get the best representation possible and the
benefit of all legal redress. Nonetheless, as Cooper’s case itself demonstrates,
death penalty appeals provide little more than a facade of “due process.”
In California, the death sentence carries one automatic appeal to
the state Supreme Court. According to a 2011 report by senior U.S. Appeals court
judge Arthur L. Alarcón and Professor Paula M. Mitchell of the Loyola Law School
Los Angeles, the average wait between the original conviction and a decision by
the California Supreme Court is ten years, and the death sentence has been
upheld in more than 90 percent of the cases. In state habeas petitions,
inmates wait eight to ten years simply for appointment of counsel. Since 1978,
new evidentiary hearings have been granted in just 31 of the
689 appeals filed. Only after all state appeals have been exhausted can
death row prisoners file habeas petitions with the federal courts. Of the
970 people condemned to death in California since 1978, only 54 have obtained
new trials from such appeals; 32 other death row prisoners died awaiting a
decision.
A major obstacle in this Kafkaesque maze of appeals is finding a
lawyer with the qualifications and resources to take on a habeas
petition. As San Quentin death row prisoner Darrell Lomax wrote: “There are over
300 people on death row in California who have been here for over 10 years,
myself included, who have not yet received appointment of counsel. I have been
waiting over 15 years to clear my name” (Socialist Worker, 12 April).
We profoundly sympathize with Cooper and other death house inmates
who oppose the SAFE Act. Confined to cages within cages, behind layer after
layer of stone walls, iron gates and beset by sadistic screws, the measure
appears to deprive them of the sole possibility of relief, no matter how remote,
in the racist capitalist courts. They don’t see the possibility of working-class
and other social struggle outside the prison walls that might change their fate.
And little wonder, as there has been precious little struggle, thanks above all
to the endless betrayals by the trade-union misleaders.
But the executed have no appeals. Any fight for their freedom is
forever silenced by death. As another prisoner on San Quentin’s death row,
Donald Ray Young, wrote: “We said ‘I am Troy Davis.’ Many of us said that we
were Stanley Tookie Williams. Cameron Todd Dillingham was another innocent
person on death row; the Texas criminal justice system executed him in our name.
If we had abolished capital punishment, all three of these men would still be
alive, able to prove their innocence to the world. No one enjoys a prison
sentence of life without the possibility of parole (LWOP), but it definitely
keeps Mumia Abu-Jamal speaking truth to power” (San Francisco Bayview, 5
June).
Does any fighter for Mumia’s freedom think that he would be better
off staying on death row because he might have a chance to appeal his frame-up
conviction—repeatedly upheld by court after court—before the U.S. Supreme Court?
Now off death row, for the first time in more than 30 years, Mumia is able to
embrace his wife, family and other visitors, and has access to sunlight and
exercise. But we found no “justice” in the Philadelphia D.A.’s decision last
December to stop seeking a death sentence. As the Partisan Defense Committee
wrote: “While it is welcome that Mumia will no longer be under the threat of
state execution, it is an abomination that this innocent man, who has already
spent 30 years entombed, is condemned to a living death in prison.... Trade
unionists, opponents of the racist death penalty and fighters for black rights
must continue the fight to free Mumia” (see WV No. 993, 6
January).
Our fight for Mumia and to abolish the racist death penalty is
rooted in the program of the class struggle, looking to mobilize the social
power of the workers both in the U.S. and internationally. This faces many
obstacles, not least the pro-capitalist labor bureaucrats who overwhelmingly
refuse to call their members into action to defend their economic interests,
much less in defense of a black political prisoner.
The Warden, the D.A. and “Law and Order” Liberals
In 1972, the California Supreme Court struck down the death penalty
as a violation of the state’s constitution. Later that year, the U.S. Supreme
Court ruled that the death penalty was “wanton” and “freakish,” leading to a
moratorium on its application. Those decisions reflected the tumultuous social
struggles of the time, from the civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s to the
mass protests against U.S. imperialism’s dirty war against the Vietnamese
workers and peasants. The struggles on the streets and campuses reached into the
prisons and even among U.S. troops in Vietnam, intersecting growing discontent
in sections of the working class. After these struggles had subsided or were
co-opted or smashed, the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in
1976.
Today, opposition among sections of the bourgeoisie to the death
penalty and prison overcrowding is at bottom driven by considerations of
expediency, as seen in arguments that the current system of mass incarceration
and death costs too much money and is “broken.” On the other side are those who
believe that only the most monstrous measures of repression can keep the working
class and oppressed cowed in the face of intensifying exploitation and mounting
misery.
The main spokesman for the SAFE Act is Jeanne Woodford, a former
San Quentin warden who oversaw four executions and was appointed Director of the
Department of Corrections under Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Another prominent supporter is former L.A. County District Attorney Gil
Garcetti, a Democrat who was a key actor in the 27-year campaign of frame-up,
cover-up and imprisonment of renowned Black Panther Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt).
Now, Garcetti ghoulishly complains that California’s death penalty is “totally
ineffective” because “most inmates are going to die of natural causes, not
executions” (AP, 24 April).
Other endorsers include the two right-wing Republicans, Don Heller
and Ron Briggs, who authored the 1978 California proposition called the “Death
Penalty Act,” which expanded the categories and circumstances of crimes
punishable by death or life without parole. For them, the state’s kill rate
hasn’t been high enough. Briggs wrote in a Los Angeles Times
(12 February) op-ed piece: “Never did we envision a multibillion-dollar
industry that packs murderers onto death row for decades of extremely expensive
incarceration. We thought we would empty death row, not triple its
population.”
Joining this chorus are the liberal anti-death penalty advocates of
the American Civil Liberties Union, whose Northern California chapter wrote:
“The facts prove that life in prison without the possibility of
parole (LWOP) is swift, severe, and certain punishment. The reality is that
people sentenced to LWOP have been condemned to die in prison and that’s what
happens: They die in prison of natural causes, just like the majority of people
sentenced to death. The differences: Sentencing people to death by execution is
three times more expensive than sentencing them to die in prison.”
—“The Hidden Death Tax,” www.aclunc.org
Given the notorious overcrowding and denial of medical care that
forced California prisons into federal court receivership, death by disease,
aging and (not mentioned) suicide would clearly be a “bargain” by the calculus
of these law-and-order liberals! Similarly, the “big savings” of $100-plus
million a year that might be accrued from overturning the death penalty is a
drop in the bucket compared to the $8.9 billion the state
government spends to maintain its prison hellholes. But such doesn’t feature in
the account books of those promoting life without parole as a thrifty
alternative to death.
In its article “A Closer Look at SAFE California” (Socialist
Worker, 24 May), the International Socialist Organization (ISO) points to
the case of Stanley Tookie Williams, who was legally lynched at San Quentin in
2005 with the executioners digging into his arms for 20 minutes to inject their
cocktail of death. Accepting the sick bourgeois lie that the prisons are meant
for “rehabilitation,” the ISO points to Williams’ work behind bars for gang
prevention as having “illustrated how people can change, undermining the claim
that the death penalty is reserved for those beyond redemption”! They continue
by complaining that “SAFE Act proponents unfortunately have chosen a strategy
that negates this potential, instead highlighting life without the possibility
of parole.” To promote the notion of “redemption” in prison is to buy into the
entire notion of crime and punishment, a barbaric relic of ancient religious
codes asserting that one can be “saved” through repentance.
An article titled “Sophie’s Choice 2012: Death Penalty vs. LWOP” by
Chris Kinder, a leading spokesman for the Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia
Abu-Jamal (LACMAJ), laments: “There’s nothing in the initiative about racism in
the system, or why black death-row convicts outnumber whites way out of
proportion to population.... Nor does it address why cops routinely get away
with murdering people of color in this [sic] streets, or why cops and courts
systematically frame up who they want to get without regard to the truth.” While
Kinder ends by declaring that “the system itself needs to be overturned,” only
someone with an abiding belief in the inherent justice of this system would
expect that the cabal of former jailers and prosecutors who authored the SAFE
Act would ever address the racial and class bias that is at the core of
capitalist justice in this country.
For years, such touching faith in the capitalist state led the
reformist left to demand a new trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal from the very courts
that framed him up and sentenced him to death for his outspoken defiance of
their racist injustice system. The reformists’ purpose was to “broaden the
movement” by appealing to law-and-order liberals like the ACLU and others who
promote “life” in prison without the possibility of parole.
As revolutionary Marxists, we do not seek to advise the bourgeoisie
on the more “humane” or “just” administration of its increasingly decrepit and
depraved rule. Whether it is the death penalty, life in prison without parole or
imprisonment in general, we oppose the entire machinery of violence that is the
capitalist state.
We will vote for Proposition 34. But we understand that ending the
death penalty would not fundamentally change the violently racist and oppressive
nature of capitalist class rule. It would not free the innocent, like Mumia,
languishing in America’s dungeons or spare the victims of racist police
executions on the streets. Nor would it alter the slower death of the growing
ranks of the poor, jobless and homeless, or the agony of the sick who lack
medical care. Our purpose is the fight to forge the nucleus of the revolutionary
workers party that will lead the proletariat in overthrowing this system through
socialist revolution. When those who labor rule, the death penalty will be
abolished for good and the capitalists’ prisons smashed as initial steps in the
emancipation of all the exploited and oppressed.
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