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.